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  • Hey all, just changed over the backend after 15 years I figured time to give it a bit of an update, its probably gonna be a bit weird for most of you and i am sure there is a few bugs to work out but it should kinda work the same as before... hopefully :)

Building a MacPro to grade R3d files with Resolve Lite

Ron Lagerlof said:
Thanks, Jeff. I'll resend the PM. Looking forward to your advice.
Ron
Click to expand...

Got it. I'll have to think on a few things in there.


Jon MIchael Puntervold said:
I'm not the right person to answer your raid question, but I would consider searching e-bay for a Mac Pro RAID Card (Early 2009). It's very well integrated with the rest of the product (hardware and OS).
Click to expand...

Sorry to disagree, but, OH, gawd, no! The Apple RAID cards are garbage. Besides, they waste a slot only to give you RAID-5 ability in the 4 internal bays, no external connectivity, no mixing SAS/SATA, no working at reasonable speeds while battery is reconditioning,... The battery system and management is a farce, the RAID volume management is a joke.


Antonio, your Areca card is great! Make sure you have the latest firmware and drivers for it and you're good to go. It's also bootable on the Mac as well, if you ever wanted to do that. Make sure you back up before moving it over though, just in case something doesn't go right. Seeing that you're just swapping the interface card from one tower to another, you shouldn't encounter any issues, but always wise to play it extra safe. At least that's my thoughts when my data is involved.

The thermal paste is easy. When you buy a tube of it, it will often come with a small plastic spreader or you can use a razor blade or other small straight-edge tool. I put a little dab on the CPU and then spread up and down one way, then the other. The goal is to get a super-thin (like a paper thin film) and even layer across the CPU surface. It's actually better if you can put the paste on the heat-sink, but sometimes it's hard to tell just where it needs to be. You don't want to get extra on there that can ooze around and touch other things, it is conductive. When you put the heatsink on top of the CPU, gently push and wiggle it a bit to help mingle the paste into both surfaces, then lock the heatsink down.

For cleaning off the old heat paste, a micro-fiber cleaning cloth does work well. A bit of isopropyl alcohol dabbed onto the cloth can also help if you need extra help getting off some of the old paste film. I don't know that you need to get it 100% clean as the new paste and old paste will mingle. I just try to because I'm a perfectionist about things like this. ;)


You can still use the multibridge. However for Resolve you need a Decklink or one of the other supported I/O systems. You don't need the HD Extreme or 4K versions of the card, some of the cheaper Decklink options work and are in the < $300 range. I don't recall which ones work for sure, best to check with BMD on that one. I think it's in the Resolve configuration guide.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Got it. I'll have to think on a few things in there.




Sorry to disagree, but, OH, gawd, no! The Apple RAID cards are garbage. Besides, they waste a slot only to give you RAID-5 ability in the 4 internal bays, no external connectivity, no mixing SAS/SATA, no working at reasonable speeds while battery is reconditioning,... The battery system and management is a farce, the RAID volume management is a joke.


Antonio, your Areca card is great! Make sure you have the latest firmware and drivers for it and you're good to go. It's also bootable on the Mac as well, if you ever wanted to do that. Make sure you back up before moving it over though, just in case something doesn't go right. Seeing that you're just swapping the interface card from one tower to another, you shouldn't encounter any issues, but always wise to play it extra safe. At least that's my thoughts when my data is involved.

The thermal paste is easy. When you buy a tube of it, it will often come with a small plastic spreader or you can use a razor blade or other small straight-edge tool. I put a little dab on the CPU and then spread up and down one way, then the other. The goal is to get a super-thin (like a paper thin film) and even layer across the CPU surface. It's actually better if you can put the paste on the heat-sink, but sometimes it's hard to tell just where it needs to be. You don't want to get extra on there that can ooze around and touch other things, it is conductive. When you put the heatsink on top of the CPU, gently push and wiggle it a bit to help mingle the paste into both surfaces, then lock the heatsink down.

For cleaning off the old heat paste, a micro-fiber cleaning cloth does work well. A bit of isopropyl alcohol dabbed onto the cloth can also help if you need extra help getting off some of the old paste film. I don't know that you need to get it 100% clean as the new paste and old paste will mingle. I just try to because I'm a perfectionist about things like this. ;)


You can still use the multibridge. However for Resolve you need a Decklink or one of the other supported I/O systems. You don't need the HD Extreme or 4K versions of the card, some of the cheaper Decklink options work and are in the < $300 range. I don't recall which ones work for sure, best to check with BMD on that one. I think it's in the Resolve configuration guide.
Click to expand...

Jeff, I'm back!! And on my desk is my spanking used but in very good nick Mac Pro 5,1!

So now comes the cards dance... Which slot for which card? Installed I have two cards. On the slot at the top I have something called pci1095, 3132. It says the type is 'Other Mass Storage Controller', it has no driver installed at it says it occupies 'slot 2'. On the bottom slot is the ATI Radeon HD 5770. Type is 'Display Controller' , driver installed it says 'yes' and is listed as slot 1.

Just above the ATI Radeon, I have a card with two esata ports.

Now I have the following cards to install:

Areca (ARC-1880X)
EVGA GTX 570 2.5GB (arrives tomorrow)

What slots do you guys recommend for this?

Thanks
Antonio
 
Ok, I found out the pci1095, 3132 is the esata connection. But there's something else on top taking over a slot and it is not listed as a PCI card. Excuse me my ignorance here, but this 'card ' that goes all the way from one end to the other seems to actually be part of the mother board. IN wich case, it means we have less one slot than on my previous Mac?
 
Jon MIchael Puntervold said:
Yes!

You'll get a pair of X5680's for 1600 USD, you just need some cooling paste and a 3mm hex key (the longest you can find, as the screws are about 6cm down the heatsink). Btw: Make sure that you get genuine production CPU's, some ebay sellers from Hong Kong sell ES (engineering samples).

But you'll also need new ram, after the new CPU's are installed, the memory speed are boosted to 1333mhz!

Go for either 48GB or 96GB as six sticks will utilise tri-channel and gain you some 5% extra performance...
Click to expand...

Hey Jon,

Grateful if you could also shed some light into this. Cheers A
 
Antonio Ribeiro said:
Ok, I found out the pci1095, 3132 is the esata connection. But there's something else on top taking over a slot and it is not listed as a PCI card. Excuse me my ignorance here, but this 'card ' that goes all the way from one end to the other seems to actually be part of the mother board. IN wich case, it means we have less one slot than on my previous Mac?
Click to expand...

Can you post a pic? That could very well be the Apple RAID card in the top slot.


Anyway, the bottom slot, which is Slot-1 and double wide will go the GTX570. I would leave slot-2 open for now. Your Areca RAID card can go in slot 3 or 4, either of the top two slots, depending on how spacing works out for what you have. You can keep the eSATA card in there in slot 3 or 4 as well if you want. It's handy to have eSATA connectivity, but I'm not sure which card that is. Probably a generic eSATA card of some sort.

If the top slot is indeed the Apple RAID card, you can either leave it or pull it out. Personally I hate their RAID card. ;) Of course, if you leave it in there, you'll have to move either the Areca or eSATA (probably the Areca card) into Slot-2.

Johnny Friday said:
Jeff, there are such big problems when building out a system for FCPX vs. PrPro....GPU's that is....my Quadro 40000 is CRAP when running FCPx...is there a card you recommend that plays well with both PrPro and FCPx ?
thanks....
Click to expand...

Hmmm.... OpenCL support on the Quadro 4000 is pretty lacking. I'm not sure how good it is on the new K5000 or some of the other nVidia cards like the unofficial ones. I really haven't used FCPX much at all. I guess I do here and there, but predominantly on my iMac or MBPr.

There really is no magic-bullet GPU option out there that satisfies all needs. Not in Windows land and most certainly not for the Mac. The Radeon 5870 is probably the best OpenCL / FCPX card. And it's pretty much worthless for Premiere and Resolve... If you're up for spending $$$$, I would give the new Quadro K5000 a try. The Mac edition just started shipping last week and I'm hearing good things. Have not got my hands on one myself, don't know if I'm going to bother. I'll give FCPX a thorough test on my Mac Pro w/ GTX570 and see how it works. I have run it on there, but didn't really stress it, so can't comment for sure yet.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
Can you post a pic? That could very well be the Apple RAID card in the top slot.


Anyway, the bottom slot, which is Slot-1 and double wide will go the GTX570. I would leave slot-2 open for now. Your Areca RAID card can go in slot 3 or 4, either of the top two slots, depending on how spacing works out for what you have. You can keep the eSATA card in there in slot 3 or 4 as well if you want. It's handy to have eSATA connectivity, but I'm not sure which card that is. Probably a generic eSATA card of some sort.

If the top slot is indeed the Apple RAID card, you can either leave it or pull it out. Personally I hate their RAID card. ;) Of course, if you leave it in there, you'll have to move either the Areca or eSATA (probably the Areca card) into Slot-2.



Hmmm.... OpenCL support on the Quadro 4000 is pretty lacking. I'm not sure how good it is on the new K5000 or some of the other nVidia cards like the unofficial ones. I really haven't used FCPX much at all. I guess I do here and there, but predominantly on my iMac or MBPr.

There really is no magic-bullet GPU option out there that satisfies all needs. Not in Windows land and most certainly not for the Mac. The Radeon 5870 is probably the best OpenCL / FCPX card. And it's pretty much worthless for Premiere and Resolve... If you're up for spending $$$$, I would give the new Quadro K5000 a try. The Mac edition just started shipping last week and I'm hearing good things. Have not got my hands on one myself, don't know if I'm going to bother. I'll give FCPX a thorough test on my Mac Pro w/ GTX570 and see how it works. I have run it on there, but didn't really stress it, so can't comment for sure yet.
Click to expand...

Hi Jeff,

Just found out what the card at the top is. It's a Apple Raid controller. Do we need two cards?

So in effect, we have:

Slot 1: ATI radeon HD 5770
Slot 2: Esata x 2 ports
Slot 3: Areca 1880X
Slot 4: Apple RAID controller

Thanks
 
Yep, that is the Apple RAID controller. Its battery is not charged, probably because the system has been sitting unused for a while and that is causing the errors. If you keep it in the system, it just eats up that top slot (it must go in the top slot) and it only allows you to create RAID volumes with the 4 internal drive bays. The only advantage it offers is allowing RAID-5 configurations for those 4 drives and that it has a battery backup for the cache (worthless, IMO, the cache is only 128MB). I recommend running a RAID-0 made of 3 or 4 drives in those onboard trays. You don't need the RAID card for this. That slot is too valuable and you already have a good RAID setup with your Areca.

So you should have, starting at the bottom with slot #1...

1: Radeon 5770 (replace with GTX570)
2: Open (save for something good like RED Rocket or other
3: Areca 1880X
4: eSATA card, if you want it.


When the GTX card arrives, you will need to download the proper drivers from nvidia.com and install them. Then power down to swap out the cards.

I would recommend doing a completely fresh OSX install on this system before you use it. No way to tell what sort of old baggage, drivers, info, etc.. might be on the system. Even if the person you bought it from did this, I recommend doing it again yourself, just to know for sure.

Get the system up and running. Upgrade the RAM, test with Resolve and other apps. Then decide if you want to or need to upgrade the CPUs.
 
Hey Jeff,

That sounds like a good plan. Just spent all night installing, backing up, etc. Just the card left to install tomorrow and will try and do some work in between, hopefully all will go well and I will be up and running by the end of the day.

Thanks for all your help with this.

Best
A
 
Ok, result! The card is installed! Did a re-install of Mountain Lion and the thing klicked in.

What made it mal-function was the CD with the drivers that came with it. Apparently Apple must have taken this into account in the Mountain Lion OS as the card seems to be identified by the system straight away.

Can't wait to start testing its speed. Only have 12GB of RAM at the mo, but will upgrade this shortly.

And that's it, right? Thanks for all your input Jeff. I started off with a s*** computer and I end up with a new, faster and meaner machine. It is great to find guys like you online and if you were round the corner, the next round would be on me!
 
OK, that's good to know you have it running! All should be fine under 10.8.2 -- that's what I'm running on all my Macs. The card should also work on 10.7.5, but there may have been something amiss. Or perhaps some driver conflict there.

If you have any other questions, fire away. :) If you happen to be going to NAB, I'll be there and I'm not too hard to track down.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
OK, that's good to know you have it running! All should be fine under 10.8.2 -- that's what I'm running on all my Macs. The card should also work on 10.7.5, but there may have been something amiss. Or perhaps some driver conflict there.

If you have any other questions, fire away. :) If you happen to be going to NAB, I'll be there and I'm not too hard to track down.
Click to expand...

Hi Jeff,

Another question. When I open Resolve Lite, this message comes up:

"ATTENTION: The Cuda driver is not loaded.
Please quit Resolve and ensure the Cuda driver is installed."

Although the GTX570 shows up in the system profile, there must be something that still needs to be done. Any ideas?
Thanks
Antonio
 
:thumbsup:


:cheers2:
 
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