RedRocket - X - Quick Warning...

[Ryland Jones]

Hey guys, quick thing I wanted to note from the new RedRocket X here at NAB. It requires auxiliary power in addition to the PCI slot in a thunderbolt expansion chassie.

So as it stands now, the new rocket will not work in mLink's RED chassie, or Sonnet's early Echo Express Pro before they added that support in 2/13.

Just be aware. Looking into an external power option cable to save people from having to upgrade their PCI boxes. Will keep you updated.


BUT I was told that the normal rocket will definitely still handle Dragon footage, it will just be much slower than the new card. So the current card will still be viable, just not if you are in a hurry.

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

So the Magma TB case is the only one with a built in power supply and cable.

 

[Ryland Jones]

Sonnet's currently comes with it. If you bought one now it would have it. mLink, I don't think so.

 

[Rodrigo Prata]

Does an external chassie makes sense with the RED Rocket -X ? Is the Data rate enough to make it up for the roket`s processing power?

 

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Does an external chassie makes sense with the RED Rocket -X ? Is the Data rate enough to make it up for the roket`s processing power?

Thunderbolt is 10Gbits/s while PCIe 3 tops at 8Gbits/s per lane if I recall my numbers correctly. Thunderbolt shouldn't create a bottleneck unless you're daisy chaining it to other devices like a hard drive or displayport monitor. A displayport device on Thunderbolt, I might need to look into this, drops the speed immediately to 5Gbit/s

 

[Ryland Jones]

I read somewhere that since the r3d decoding happens on the card it's self, its less dependent on the thunderbolt speed per say than the new processor on the card. All the speed increase happens on the card.

 

[Kaku Ito]

Be aware with Sonnet's Echo Express, though, I had two Red Rockets burnt in that box in half a year.

 

[Johnny Friday]

Doesn't red ship it with a splitter that takes care of this power issue? So you just take power from your single source in your computer yes? Or is there more to this? You actually NEED another power source?

 

[Dustin Cross]

Thunderbolt is 10Gbits/s while PCIe 3 tops at 8Gbits/s per lane if I recall my numbers correctly. Thunderbolt shouldn't create a bottleneck unless you're daisy chaining it to other devices like a hard drive or displayport monitor. A displayport device on Thunderbolt, I might need to look into this, drops the speed immediately to 5Gbit/s

PCIe cards can use up to 16 lanes. A 16 lane PCIe v3 slot is 126Gbits/sec. Way faster than Thunderbolt, so Thunderbolt can easily be a bottle neck to even a single PCIe card.


Dusty

 

[Christopher Barrett]

Are there 16x lane boxes? I was told by a Red rep at NAB that the new card needs 16x.

 

[Mark L. Pederson]

Sonnet's currently comes with it. If you bought one now it would have it. mLink, I don't think so.

mLink won't even fit the card in its current state. But they are working on a cool solution / upgrade - and their board already supports aux power.

 

[kylebainter]

Is there a "top dog" TB enclosure for the RedRocket X? I've also seen people complaining about certain cards "dying" in TB enclosures. Is this due to heat? What are your thoughts on the best TB enclosure for the X?

 

[Johnny Friday]

Is there a "top dog" TB enclosure for the RedRocket X? I've also seen people complaining about certain cards "dying" in TB enclosures. Is this due to heat? What are your thoughts on the best TB enclosure for the X?

Well, from what i know...had Sonnet and Magma only....but Magma is my choice...nice large space in the three lane enclosure so you can hook up a fan. And don't forget Magma is in the business of making enclosures....always have been. So just going on that i think they have the advantage to date.

 

[kylebainter]

Well, from what i know...had Sonnet and Magma only....but Magma is my choice...nice large space in the three lane enclosure so you can hook up a fan. And don't forget Magma is in the business of making enclosures....always have been. So just going on that i think they have the advantage to date.

Thanks!

 

[Nick Timmons]

PCI-E 3.0 x16 lanes give you more than 15GB (that's gigaBYTES, not gigaBITS) max. theoretical bandwidth vs. current gen Thunderbolt at 10Gb (BITS).
It's quite a lot faster...

Thunderbolt is 10Gbits/s while PCIe 3 tops at 8Gbits/s per lane if I recall my numbers correctly. Thunderbolt shouldn't create a bottleneck unless you're daisy chaining it to other devices like a hard drive or displayport monitor. A displayport device on Thunderbolt, I might need to look into this, drops the speed immediately to 5Gbit/s

 

[Justin Quinn]

PCIe cards can use up to 16 lanes. A 16 lane PCIe v3 slot is 126Gbits/sec. Way faster than Thunderbolt, so Thunderbolt can easily be a bottle neck to even a single PCIe card.


Dusty

PCIe v3 slot can do 1GB per lane, per direction. Thus, a PCI3 v3 x16 lane can do 16GB per direction, for a total bandwidth of 32GBs.

Yes, PCIe is way faster than Thunderbolt.

I don't think Red has officially released the data processing throughput of the new RRX yet. However, if RRX truly is 5x faster than the current RR (as Red stated at NAB), then a PCIe 2.0 expansion chassis (such as the Sonnet or Magma) should bottleneck when processing 6k media via RRX... the actual bottleneck will be from the TB, not the PCIe.