Sandy Bridge E processors out today...

[Jon Thomasberg]

Patrick, check the Vertex 3 SSDs specs in comparison to the Agility. The sustained writes on the Vertex are favorable.

Are you going to OC this? If so, I would recommend getting some G.Skill mem that has tested to clock higher at like 1866 or 2000. For my build I did Corsair Vengence 1866 CL10 (4x8) kit paired with the P9X79 Deluxe and the 3930k and it works very well. Stable OC to 4.9 GHz, on H100 closed-loop CPU cooler.

[Jon Thomasberg]

Can anyone who has built a Core i7-3930K system comment on how the system performs?

Smokin' fast! But then again I overclocked my 3930k stable 24/7 to 4.9GHz. See my build details here: http://www.reduser.net/forum/showthr...hmark-Rankings

[Jon Thomasberg]

@Jeff K,

I'm really interested to see how your build benches in comparison to my 3930k system. Your data disk i/o will clearly be better with the hybrid drives in RAID 0 and the Areca controller. But I'm interested. If you get time, please share.

[Patrick OMara]

jon, ya sustains are important but this ssd should be able to handle about 7 streams of scarlet footage at a time, that's max of what I'd need for sure. Especially if the ssd is not being hit by anything else.

[Jeff Kilgroe]

I've done a little benchmarking, but I'm going to save most of that for when I get the thing properly water-cooled and overclocked. After I get through all this holiday madness... So far, even at stock speeds, it's very fast. I had it OC'd to 3.9/4.6turbo (I think that's what it was), but temps would climb on me so I throttled it back. I believe I was at +1.4V and it could've handled more speed just fine.

Drives I'm using are not the hybrid ones. I would actually prefer the WD 2TB RE4 drives, but with current pricing I went with the Seagates. I paid $244 each, the RE4's would've been $350 each at the time I ordered. Drive prices are creeping back down finally though. Can buy 1TB 7200rpm drives for under $100 again now if you look around. NewEgg has the Samsung F3 for $99 today after instant coupon code.

The new system is sitting next to my '09 Mac Pro in my home office and it's much snappier overall when running the same things -- Premiere, RC-X Pro 8, Photoshop, Lightwave, Modo, Maya... The last 3 just scream on this new system and a lot of that has to do with the GTX580s. I have Quadro 4000's in the Mac Pro... This Mac Pro is a 2.93GHz Nehalem 8-core (dual quad-core Xeon), 24GB, 1TB WD Black-X system / apps drive, 4 x 2TB RE4 in software RAID-0. Will be interesting to compare. All I know is I have way too much money in this Mac Pro system and I'm planning to move my Resolve operations to the new PC and ditch the Cubix box and second quadro card. It's been a good solution, but not cost effective now that Resolve for Windows is in public beta form.

App load times are obviously faster on the PC where they load from SSD. But still way snappier once loaded and running.

jon, ya sustains are important but this ssd should be able to handle about 7 streams of scarlet footage at a time, that's max of what I'd need for sure. Especially if the ssd is not being hit by anything else.

Just a warning on SSD transfer rates. These Sandforce based SSDs use on-the-fly compression to pass more data across their interconnects. When moving large files that are already highly compressed (R3D, H264, etc..) you won't get the advertised speeds. Don't get me wrong, they're still blazing fast, but the compression makes an impact -- typically the biggest impact is on their marketing numbers. [/COLOR]

[Philipe Ratton]

Jeff, thanks a lot for the info.
The system is cs5/resolve only I don't want to deal with any instability at all.
Maybe my past experience with PCs is just bad.
The memory modules would be 4x triple channel 3x4Gb, 48GB total.
But after reading your posts and some others, I decided for the 3930k.

[Patrick OMara]

Just a warning on SSD transfer rates. These Sandforce based SSDs use on-the-fly compression to pass more data across their interconnects. When moving large files that are already highly compressed (R3D, H264, etc..) you won't get the advertised speeds. Don't get me wrong, they're still blazing fast, but the compression makes an impact -- typically the biggest impact is on their marketing numbers.

Yeah, I currently have 3 SSDs rated at 275MB/s but I get a solid 200MB/s from them. I'd expect on 525MB/s that you'd get maybe a solid 375MB/s. 7 x 55MB/s . Just a rough estimate. Should be good. :)


+1 never believe the marketing numbers.

[Nick Pasquariello]

[FONT=Times]

Yeah, I currently have 3 SSDs rated at 275MB/s but I get a solid 200MB/s from them. I'd expect on 525MB/s that you'd get maybe a solid 375MB/s. 7 x 55MB/s . Just a rough estimate. Should be good. :)


+1 never believe the marketing numbers.

NEVER. But, the Vertex 3 has been independently benchmarked at around 500mb/s from multiple sources. I was looking into SSDs for work this week for one of our graphic artists.

Granted, I doubt, as Kilgroe points out, that it was benchmarked using compressed footage files. But the fact remains: the independent benchmarks don't place it too far below the advertised 525MB/s speeds.

[Les Dittert]

Good to see more SB-e computers being set up for r3d processing.
So once you start looking at actually using some r3d's you will no doubt see that your v8 is firing on 3 cylinders. While the computer will indeed be faster than the old rig, it is still a disappointment in what it could be doing.
We need to ask Red to please multithread the SDK better!

I can light up all the cores on my system to do RCX derived r3d -> other codecs, but it's not easy to do and a clumbersome non GUI workflow.
To put it another way, my old i7 system would easily outperform my new SB-e system, if the SDK was optimized!

[Mike P.]

The incompressible data issue that Jeff mentioned has been fixed in the latest Sandforce chipsets (Adata and OCZ are the two major manufacturers that use Sandforce chipsets), but you really should look into a specific drives performance in this area before you buy. It is definitely worth getting a drive that doesn't suffer from the problem; when it's large amounts of incompressible data the speeds can clamp down quite a bit (half). Video production definitely falls victim to large amount of compressed data, so it's probably worth the extra $$$ for a drive that doesn't have the issue.

@Les: Are you just running three or four instances of RCX to transcode on all cores? Also, if you use Adobe Media Encoder to transcode instead of RCX, is it any faster (since Media Encoder should be better at using more CPU cores) or is that also limited by the SDK? Theoretically (I know, I know), if it takes 4xRT to transcode out of RCX, but it's only using 1 CPU/Core, then it should be possible to run/transcode in realtime if you could get it to use 4+ cores. Similarly, if there was a way to put a transcode going on each core, you could essentially render 4x/6x/8x faster (depending on how many cores) and it'd probably be way easier to do with a simple GUI or option in RCX (the 'amount of simultaneous exports' option is useless if all exports are only running off one core).

I also read somewhere that CS5 doesn't take advantage of more than 4cores (not even the additional threads of HT), which would make even hexacore a waste, but Jeff said it's actually efficient up to like 12-16 threads now. With that in mind, Hexacore (+HT) seems to be the route to take for price/performance, and that's exactly what SandyBridge-E is.

I was kind of hoping that some whiz's would come up with a way for r3d acceleration on GPUs as opposed to having dedicated hardware like an RR... I know it would shoot RR sales in the foot, but it'd be so much cheaper.