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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 System For REDCine. Need advice

Jay A. Kelley

Jay A. Kelley

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After a lot of thought, I have decided to start with a PC based system for my REDCine output.

I am putting the following togehter, please review and give me any advice you have.. My goal is to build something that will have some decent render times.

Here it is:

SUPER MICRO Extended ATX Tower Case - Power Provided: 645 Watt. - Black

Super Micro Computer X7DA8+ Motherboard

Processor, Xeon QC E5345 2.33GHz, 8MB L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB, LGA771, Tray

Processor, Xeon QC E5345 2.33GHz, 8MB L2 Cache, 1333MHz FSB, LGA771, Tray

NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600 768MB PCIe (NOTE: This card runs about $1,500.00... Ouch.. I would love advice on the right card to get. Is there a point of diminshing returns here? At what point will the GPU just not offer much else to things?)

Crucial Technology Ct2kit25672af667 Memory -4gb [2 X 2gb]

Windows XP pro
DVD-R drive
 
A little more help these are the graphics cards I am looking at, which ones would be the best choice for my REDCine Develope system:

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 256MB PCIe Professional Video Edition — Win $499.99

NVIDIA Quadro FX 1700 512MB PCIe — Win $489.99

NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450 256MB PCIe — Win $784.99

NVIDIA Quadro FX 3500 256MB PCIe — Win $809.99

NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 X2 512MB PCIe — Win $3124.99

NVIDIA Quadro FX 4600 768MB PCIe - Win $1550.99
 
Jay,

Do you have any software that will specifically use the Quadro features? I'm seriously doubting that you do, unless you want to also leverage a Quadro with SDI output or something, but most of those models you're listing don't offer that feature anyway.

And to top it all off, all of those Quadro cards you have listed are OLD!

Seriously, get a GeForce 8800GTS, possibly two of them in SLI mode. You'll have a much, much faster GPU capability and at a whole lot less than that dual FX4500 setup. Where are you finding these prices? I haven't checked FX4500 prices lately, but MSRP was $1699 over a year ago, last time I bought one, and I paid $1350 for it then.
 
Hello, maybe my memory is bad
but it seems Rob Lohman advised to use ATI cards but maybe that was only for Mac ??
Have a nice end of year anyway !
 
Nvidia graphic card for RedCine on PC is the correct choice. GeForce 8600 GTS & 8800 GTS are the best bang for the buck currently.
 
I've already bought so it's too late for me... but do you get the feeling that it might be prudent to wait until the very last moment to spring? Jim just keeps hinting at new things to come, and I for one wish I were in sleep mode until he reveals all.

FWITW, I'm right about 50% of the time and wrong about 60%. (I give 110%):biggrin:
 
You can pick up a quadro 4500 on ebay for a lot less, and there's absolutely no benefit from running two cards unless you have software that specifically uses both cards, or you have a crapload of monitors.

I bought an fx5500 oem out of a dell system for under $1k... and it works perfectly.

Whatever you do, DO NOT BUY an 8 series geforce. The overlays are completely disabled in that series. Best bet would be a 79xx of some sort, but the drawback with all geForce cards is crippled openGL.

Since Assimilate software relies on openGL gpu performance any geforce is going to be compromised in that area. I don't know if RedCine relies as heavily on openGL as Scratch does, for one thing it deals with a lot less simultaneous operations on the image... perhaps Lucas can enlighten us?

cheers,

jt
 
This is all great advice, but I am very confused as to the Graphics Card Issue now.. Do I use the 8800 as advised? Some are saying yes and others "no"

Help

Jay
 
I will be perfectly honest guys, the way I designed this system was to download Assimilate's Brochure on their new RED product, they gave me the system specs of the computer they are using to drive it. It gave me a nice basis for building a system that Scratch (and more importantly REDCine I hope) would like. They are using the
nVidia PNY Quadro FX 5500 SDI PCIe for their system, but that baby is $6,000so I just went with a lesser model in the same family. Perhaps that was a stupid choice.

I feel pretty good about the rest of the system, but as we all know, the graphics card make a HUGE difference in this setup. So please keep talking and whenever possible share any REAL world experience you may have with the cards you are using.

If some of you study the system they have, you will see I picked a different motherboard.. It's not really, I just needed a system with SCSI and the one I chose comes with it.

This system will most likely do double duty for a while, both develop and edit footage.. Eventually, it will just render files and PERHAPS I will move to Final Cut for the editing.

For the record, I hate the fact that I cannot output AVIs. It may be simple to some people, but it's a pain the in the ass to me.

One of you asked which monitor I will use.. I keep hearing nice things about Dell's 30" monitor

Jay
 
For a SCRATCH system we have quoted it included a Quadro FX 5500 SDI card. On the other end of the price spectrum, I have been testing with a GeForce 8600 GTS. There is a massive difference in the price of these two cards so how to best allocate the financial resources is a serious consideration. Besides the graphics card, I would recommend that you look very seriously at the storage bandwidth as this seems to be the other aspect of the solution that will make a big difference in performance. Its all a matter of how much budget you have and where to best spend it. Frankly, I would do some serious bench mark testing before going for an ultra high end graphics card solution. It might be a better use of resources to have multiple machines on the job than one, very expensive one.

Still testing here, so other than giving you some ideas, I can't offer any definitive advice yet.

Kevin Halverson
 
Kevin I am grateful for your help.. I have some RAID arrays that I am happy with at this time, so that part is covered (And another reason why I am going with PC right now).

I will NOT be getting the 5500 graphics card, but the question is, what's the best solution for me at this time..

I am fully confident you will all be very helpful, and I have a few weeks yet

Jay
 
Jay,

Buy the 8800GTS video card. Seriously. Get the EVGA brand one, great support and warranty. It's going to give you the best performance you can get right now, next to that Quadro 5500. All the other lower Quadro models are based on older GPUs. The FX4500 is two GPU generations behind the Quadro FX 5500 and the GeForce 8800. The FX4500 is nearly 3 years old.

Video cards are always something that can be upgraded rather easily too.

Like Kevin says, storage bandwidth is a huge consideration. And don't skimp on the RAM either. What OS are you planning to run? If you're going to run WinXP 32bit, then 3.5~4GB in the system is fine -- the system can't address more than that under that OS. If you're going with XP64 or Vista64, then 8GB minumum, I recommend 12-16GB. But that also depends on what all you want to run on this system. If it's REDCINE only, then 8GB will do you just fine on a 64bit OS since REDCINE is a 32bit application anyway.
 
Jeff,

What about JT's comments that the overlays are no good and the GL is faulty? Is this going to be a consideration when running something like Premiere CS3?

I have found the card you speak of.. They go up to 768mb of RAM for about $675.. Is this the one you are suggesting? Or is 640mb enough? Please be specific as to the model you are suggesting.

(EDIT) Just looked again.. Would this one work? It's not THE fastest, but it's up there:
e-GeForce 8800GTX 768MB Superclocked
768MB DDR3 Memory
PCI-E 16X
621Mhz GPU Clock Speed
2000Mhz Memory Clock Speed
nVIDIA® SLI™ ready
DirectX® 10/OpenGL® 2.0


Thanks SO MUCH for all the help

Jay
 
Buy a used Quadro, it'll be cheaper.

Also about the CPUs... There is no point in buying the 5300 cpus when the 5400 cpus are out. they are 45nm, run cooler, and have SSE4.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819117149

Get FB Dimms at 800mhz

and the best motherboard to buy is the Intel Skulltrail.

http://firingsquad.com/hardware/intel_skulltrail_preview/

The skulltrail board is not exactly out yet, but if you just can wait a month or so, Intel will release it.

As of right now, you're building a PC based on year old parts, and be paying the same price for computer parts just recently released.
 
here's a little system i've built myself,

thermaltake lanbox, modded.

asus p5k-vm
the onboard gigE supports jumbo frames up to 8088bytes
i regularly hammer the adsl and get 1350MB/s, the limit is 1500MB/s averaging a pull of about 130Kb/s continuous over 18 hours, oh yeah

q6400 - overclocked to 3GHz, with stock intel fan

Kingston X OC'ed to 1066Mhz, 4Gb

Win Svr 2003 x86 (it has PAE, so it uses all of 4Gb), lean and stipped of most of the MS bloatware. system tweaked, registry hacked.

HD #1 Raptor 150Gb, OS/apps
HD #2 Raptor 150Gb, capture/data

adaptec FW400/800

external Lacie triple USB/FW400/800 2TB, benchmarked ubCore pro drivers give max out FW800 performance of about ~85Mb/s

PS is HP650W

graphics for now is Nvidia 7300, solid and average workhorse, until i read more reviews but leaning towards 8800GT, i will probably go with something close to whatever the Mac guys put in their high end FCP rigs.

there are hacks around to change the bios on some GeF's to convert to Quadro's. if you want to do lots of pixel number crunching, rendering, etc.,(openGL) quadro is the way to go, no doubt. if you want blistering HD viewing/gaming in the extreme and real time, you can't be the G's.

no internal CD/DVD. the three or four times a year you install stuff isn't worth the weight and power, so i rigged external SATA and power. especially with 8/16Gb usb sticks.

it is small enough to be portable and cost less than $1500. of course, i had an old HP ML 150G3 i pillaged some parts off.

for monitors, current is old viewsonic, but considering building a 15.4" 1080P, a true hi-def monitor that isn't going to break my balls if i want to take it to studio or location.
 
Jay A. Kelley said:
Jeff,

What about JT's comments that the overlays are no good and the GL is faulty? Is this going to be a consideration when running something like Premiere CS3?
Click to expand...

With the GeForce series, you get one hardware-based overlay plane, with the Quadro cards you get more. Quadro also offers a few other features that specific software may use. Referring back to my earlier post in this thread, I asked if you had any software that will use the Quadro's features. To clarify, most software out there will not take advantage of the extra features a Quadro card offers. If you're not running 3D software like XSI, Maya, SolidWorks, ProEngineer, etc.. Or if you don't need the SDI outputs or the genlock port for synchronizing external video devices (3D shutter glasses, TBC's etc..), then you don't need the Quadro.

The overlays that JT is referring to is something different, but potentially a major issue. With GeForce 8 (and later) series GPUs there is no longer support for full-screen video overlay on multiple monitors. This is a consumer function and an old way of doing things. Unfortunately, software has not caught up with the "new way" that nVidia and Microsoft want it done. And that is using the new DirectX media surfaces rather than crippling output to the old video overlay surface via the GDI module. All GeForce 8 series cards and all cards from here on out will not support the old video overlay function. Same with new cards from ATI and other manufacturers, this functionality has to be dropped in order to gain DirectX 10 certification. So buying an older card may make your system more friendly and compatible with DVD player software for the time being, but you're not gaining anything.

I'm not sure what JT is talking about when he says the OpenGL on the GeForce series is crippled. It's only crippled by the couple high-end features not supported via hardware (still implemented via software in the drivers). Vector and point calculations on a Quadro card *can* be done with higher levels of precision than on GeForce, but once again that is something you usually only see in software like Pro/E, Solidworks, etc..

None of these issues are going to amount to a hill of beans for REDCINE or any of the Adobe software.

Picking up a used Quadro 5500 or 5600 off eBay would be a good option if you find one. ...If using a Quadro helps you sleep better. But I would not buy any older or lower model Quadro. You're just wasting your time. The 4500 is old. I've got two of them, one in a Mac G5 Quad, the other in a quad-core Opteron PC. The card is nothing special... Had to buy one for the Mac (off eBay) because at the time it was the only way to run dual 30" displays on a Mac, but for everything except Maya, it's no faster than the GeForce 7800GT card it replaced. I put one in the PC because at the time it was the best card available for XSI, a software that does use the overlay planes, 3D accelerated point drawing, and hardware stencil buffers provided by the Quadro. And the only reason I spent the money there is because I needed an XSI workstation that would be used solely for that application 60+ hours/week at the time. ...For running REDCINE and any other software, my newer quad-core 2.66GHz Xeon system w/8800GTS (640MB 621MHz superclocked - paied $550 at the time) smokes the system with the FX4500. XSI is a bit clunky on that 8800GTS card vs. the Quadro 4500 for a few things, but faster overall since the 8800GTS can throw around a lot more geometry.

I have found the card you speak of.. They go up to 768mb of RAM for about $675.. Is this the one you are suggesting? Or is 640mb enough? Please be specific as to the model you are suggesting.
Click to expand...

They have lots of different models. I see they have a few new ones since the last time I looked. The GTX models are a bit faster and have a few more bells and whistles. IMO, you don't need to spend that much if you're not going to be gaming or using the system for GPU-intensive software (3D animation, etc..). REDCINE uses the GPU, but I wouldn't consider it GPU-intensive. Most of the memory on your video card is going to be for storing texture images and geometry data. If you're not going to be gaming or doing serious 3D design work with this system, then 512MB is plenty. More memory will help you more with 3D-oriented applications and games and will help re-sale value a bit.

(EDIT) Just looked again.. Would this one work? It's not THE fastest, but it's up there:
e-GeForce 8800GTX 768MB Superclocked
768MB DDR3 Memory
PCI-E 16X
621Mhz GPU Clock Speed
2000Mhz Memory Clock Speed
nVIDIA® SLI™ ready
DirectX® 10/OpenGL® 2.0
Click to expand...

Yes, it would work just fine.

Right now, the bottleneck with REDCINE is going to be your storage system and CPU. The GPU does help take some of the load, but it's not something that's going to make a huge difference. My Macbook Pro with 2.33GHz C2D mobile CPU and ATI X1600 (crappy slow mobile GPU) renders out of REDCINE about the same speed as a dual-core 2.4GHz AMD system with 7800GTX Ultra 512MB video (the GeForce version of that Quadro FX4500) -- when I have it connected to an external RAID where the drives are no longer the bottleneck for the systems. It's an issue of CPU efficiency.
 
Since the goal of this is pretty application specific, there is no arguing the importance of testing.

I have an episodic project coming up and our needs our pretty damn specific. Namely, we need to get about an hour or more worth of .r3d's through the pipe line daily (starting just after wrap) to editorial overnight, 5 days a week, for as long as the show runs. I am really seriously considering that there is no single machine that will accomplish this fast enough. I am considering putting several (perhaps up to 4) machines on the task. These can be handled by one of the "over night" guys as it won't require much baby sitting. It just has to be done well before everyone arrives the following morning.

Right now, I am testing on the following platform:

3.0 GHz core duo
2 GB RAM
GeForce 8600 GTS (will be going up to the 8800 GTS soon)

The testing criteria is a 4k .r3d output to 1080p DNxHD, process is 'standard' (pulling from the 2k wavelet) minimal color changes. This can process a frame in about 910 ms (.91 second). I am still testing other outputs, but this seems to be a minimum in quality terms for our needs.

One of these machines would take nearly 22 hours to process the shots daily. With 4 on the task, they would finish in about 5 1/2 hours. This seems reasonable considering a 8 1/2 hour shift. All machines will be writing to the same file server/raid stack.

I am still weighing the idea of a smaller number of faster machines versus a larger number of lesser ones. I like the idea that the loss of any one machine would have a smaller impact on the output, so I am leaning toward using a higher number of machines.

I really think that what would be wonderful is to establish a test criteria for several different outputs that would allow everyone to input their results for specific machines. I have been trying to do all my benchmarks on a single machine so that when I change a piece of hardware, I can determine the impact that the changes has without any additional variability.

Would love to learn if anyone else has a similar need and what solutions they are considering.

Kevin Halverson
 
Here is the base of the system I want to put together....

SuperMicro X7DWA-N (averaging just below 500.00 USD at various online sites). It supports the new 5400 series Xeons ...Harpertown..45nm.
16gigs DDR 667 FBDIMM (It's seems impossible to find DDR 800 FBDIMM above 1 gig per chip).
ATI FireGL 7600 or 2 of the new ATI 3K series boards. I'm leaning toward the new ATI 3K boards, since I can get 2 for under 500 USD and they support OpenGL 2 and DX10.1.
2 QuadCore Intel Xeon E5440 Harpertown @ 2.83GHz (742.00 apiece via NewEgg).
Mobo includes 2 PCIe 2.0 at 16x, several PCIx slots and 2 GigEthernet connections.
Plus slot fo the SuperMicro Universal Interface cards (Fiber, 10g....).
Windows Vista Ultimate 64.

The above for starters.
 
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