Red Rocket vs Nvidia Maximus

[Scott Brown]

Jeff

Your IT knowledge rules supreme on Red User! Thanks for your detailed response and helpful look to the future. I used memory from Crucial in this system so I'll order up another 4 x 2GB Dimms and add them asap.

Any thoughts of what graphics card to buy to help with CS6 performance?

Thanks again.

Best wishes

Scott

[Michael Millichamp]

I propose someone start a "Ask Jeff Kilgroe Anything" thread...

+1 On that.

[Nick Timmons]

I run 32 GB, and it's great for buffering longer playback in Red Cine-X.

[Steve Sherrick]

Running Mac Pro (3.1) with 24GB RAM, GT 120, GTX285, RR , OS 10.7.3 on an OWC SSD drive and seeing some very good performance with CS 6, especially considering the age of the computer. Going to be doing some After Effects testing tomorrow to try the new caching in AE. Still in preliminary stages here with this CS 6 version but got to say, so far it's living up to the buildup. A bigger, faster, stronger machine will probably see huge gains over what I can do.

[Scott Brown]

Been looking at graphics card options for our CS6 setup and it looks like things are very limited on Mac - Quadro 4000 or GTX285 looks like the only viable cards.

Depressing when you see all the fantastic cards available for PC! What's the limiting factor here, is it a lack of Mac drivers for Nvidia cards?

Scott

[Frank Cueto]

Right now I am 100% totally confused. In the PC world i am TORN between the new 690 ($1,000) or a similarly priced quadro card. the issue is that the quadro card seems woefully underpowered when compared to the 690. What to do? Wait for new quadro cards? Buy a 690 (what is the downside in my Lightwave/maya/cs6 application?)

Thanks for the insight

-Frank Cueto

[Clay Glendenning]

Been looking at graphics card options for our CS6 setup and it looks like things are very limited on Mac - Quadro 4000 or GTX285 looks like the only viable cards.

Depressing when you see all the fantastic cards available for PC! What's the limiting factor here, is it a lack of Mac drivers for Nvidia cards?

Scott

You can use most cards. They are not officially listed by Adobe as supported, but they work if:
(a) they are on the list of cuda/opengl cards supported by Adobe in CS6 (even if it says PC only)
(b) the card is supported natively in OSX (as of February the newest OSX lion build added a ton of support)
(c) you add the name of the card to Adobe's text file for supported cards in your CS6 install.

I did this for a GTX 570 with 2.5gb VRAM. Works splendidly. I would not be surprised if it worked without having to modify the text file in the official release.

[Bob Gruen]

Scott: Buy the Quadro, or wait till the next gen Quadro comes out. The Quadros do 10 bit signals, which helps when you start doing color grading (I like my NEC PA Series monitor BTW).

[Subhadip Sen]

Scott: Buy the Quadro, or wait till the next gen Quadro comes out. The Quadros do 10 bit signals, which helps when you start doing color grading (I like my NEC PA Series monitor BTW).

OS X GDI is limited to 8-bit. 10-bit with Quadro will work only on Windows with supported apps.

[Will Keir]

Thanks Jeff.

That RAM pairing for 2009 "Nehalem" is slots 1-6 correct? Leave 7, 8 empty?

If I fill all 8, what's the speed decrease I am looking at? All ram goes down RAM 1066 to 800?

For the '08 Mac Pro, 16GB would be a good amount for everything to just work. 32GB would be even better... By the time you're running anything that could max out the 32GB, it's going to be straining the system in other ways. '08 Mac Pro, or that generation of the Xeon platform, has a dual-channel memory controller. It performs best with all slots populated with the same type and capacity of modules. So, 8x2GB is ideal, 8x4GB is even better.

The Mc Pro 4,1 (2009) model is the same, but faster. The memory operates at 1066MHz up from 800MHz on the '08 tower. The '09 "Nehalem" Xeons also brought with them a triple-channel memory controller. So even though their are 8 DIMM slots in a dual processor '09 and '10 Mac Pro, you actually get the best performance when you run 3 pairs of memory modules or 6 total. You can populate all the sockets, but then the RAM actually drops back to dual-channel mode and your performance decreases. For the '09 "Nehalem" and '10 "Westmere", I would recommend 24GB as a good amount, but 48GB is much better and ideal. Given the 6 module sweet spot, the next jump would be to the OSX maximum of 96GB, but it is indeed overkill in most situations. Although, I would probably do the 96GB if I had a 2010 12-core Mac Pro and will be doing heavy R3D work.

As a frame of reference, I have one of my new 16-core (32 thread) E5 systems up and running and currently have 64GB installed in it. It's not enough for this system!!! To maximize all 32 threads for heavy rendering tasks in Modo / Maya, etc.. or to load up R3D footage and scrub back and forth, within the capabilities of this system, 64GB is cramped. I actually have more RAM on back-order for it -- total of 128GB for this system and that will help a lot. My inbound HP Z820 workstation will arrive with 64GB. I should've ordered it with the 128GB. Once the 16GB and 32GB modules arrive and drop in price I'm going straight to 256GB or even the 512GB maximum!!! It's amazing what you can do with a lot of RAM when the system and software are powerful enough to thrash through it...

In my 2009 Mac Pro here, I had 24GB installed in it, then pulled that and put 16GB in it to sell it... A couple sales fell through and everyone was wanting more RAM. So now I've upped it to 48GB as of late last night. Still for sale, but I also wouldn't mind keeping it. Great system overall... :)