Building a new "Ultimate PC" for Adobe 5K editing! (circa Oct 2011)

[Tom.Wong]

sacrifice the extra ram, and get the rocket. the rocket is more important for all around playback, and when you export. you won't regret a moment of it. if you have 2 gb of ram per core you have, you'll be solid. 96 gb won't be completely utilized unless you are doing some insane after effects stuff too. that's more ram hungry than premiere. premiere uses ram on export, but relies a on cuda, processor, and drive speed for general playback and effects. combo with RR, cutting in 4k should be a breeze.

 

[James Drake]

I agree with Tom Wong, Red Rocket will save you time!!! Either way, that's a flocking fast system. I'd also recommend a quadro card over GTX, ESPECIALLY if you'll be working on this system for years to come. In a nutshell, Quadro are specifically built and designed for video rendering, so they'll last longer, be more reliable, etc etc. Check out this great article on GPUS... http://blogs.adobe.com/genesisproje...gpus-and-what-they-mean-for-premiere-pro.html

 

[Tim Sutherland]

When Resolve for PC was announced I went to new egg and priced out a 12 core system for about $4000 with 24 gb ram, blu ray burner, 3 cud a video cards, and 8 tb of internal raided storage in a rack mounted case. Didn't pull the trigger due to purchasing a house with that system you could add a decklink and a rocket and lose one video card and have more power than I currently have in my Mac pro that does 4k debayer in real time in resolve.

I would look at building yourself, the key is The motherboard. I priced it out with this one, has 2 pcie 16 lane slots, the one in the build you posted above only has x8 slots and is a discontinued board.

I also priced a build with only one CPU, doing a 6 core build for about $3200 with 7 x16 slots (although you could only use 3double width cards).

 

[Subhadip Sen]

Once again, I strongly recommend thinking twice before investing in RED Rocket. It was a great investment back in the Core 2 and non-native workflow days, but I am not sure today. One Rocket simply isn't sufficient for 5K EPIC playback so you would want to default back to CPU/GPU and 1/2 res, leaving the Rocket sitting idle. Two Rockets will drive 5K playback real time but think about this - for the same price you can upgrade to a top Xeon E7 20-core system which not only does 5K R3D debayering in real time, like the 2 Rockets, but also handle millions of other workloads.

That is, until a Rocket II comes along designed for EPIC workloads.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Here's my $5 worth of advice...

You don't want the X8DAi motherboard! Get the Supermicro MBD-X8DAH+F-O that Daniel Macleod recommended above. It's probably the best dual Xeon board going right now. It has a dual south-bridge configuration with more PCIe slots and supports more RAM at higher speed. The X8DAi has a few shortcomings -- namely, your RAM is throttled back when you install more than 48GB on it (read fine print) and it has old PCI slots on there -- WTF? There is no PCI card out there deserving of being connected to this system. Some people see this as a problem if they're still trying to drag along legacy hardware with them -- some do it. Personally, I haven't needed a standard PCI 133MHz slot since 2005. Going with the MBD-X8DAH+-F-O motherboard let's you have your RAM and your Rocket.

Daniel also made the point of going with the 3.06GHz CPUs. Yes, they are slower, but also significantly cheaper for not much speed reduction. Depending on budget, you may want to give that some serious consideration.

I disagree with Daniel's SSD recommendation, not in terms of the brand, but capacity and his take on speed/ reliability. First off, the Mushkin SSD's are using the same Sandforce-2281 controller that the OCZ Vertex-3 is using. Performance is roughly the same between the two, I've tested both. I would still recommend the Mushkin, first off they're HQ is located a short 12 minute commute from me and I have to give props to my local boys. They also have much better support if the product does fail. Personally, I think the best Sandforce-based SSD out there at the moment is the OWC 6Gbps / SATA III ones. But once again, they're using the same chipset. Using two of them in a RAID can make for some very fast performance, especially for read times. Like I said, the biggest point I disagree on is the capacity. 120GB isn't enough. It's enough for the OS and some scratch space, but you'll run out of room fast if you put a decent compliment of apps on the system -- I also don't recommend you run the SSDs more than 65% full as it will help maximize performance. I would recommend dual 240GB in a RAID. The 240GB Mushkin's are about $420 each.

Other than that, most everything looks pretty good. I would go for Corsair, Mushkin or G.Skill RAM as opposed to the Kingston ValueCRAP.

I prefer the EVGA GTX580 cards over all the others. Personal preference, but their OC version is killer and they have a single-wide water-cooled version too.

I'm kinda confused on the USB2.0 card readers and why you guys are spec-ing them... But that's OK, if you want to wait around for USB2.0 speed downloads of CF cards or whatnot... I guess it's about the best option at the moment for SDHC/SDXC cards. I just don't think of them, I only have two DSLRs that use them and my Dell monitors have readers built in anyway. Like Daniel says, you can get the all in one reader free, so hey, why not...

Also agree with Daniel on these points too...
Go for Win7 Pro 64bit. Save a bit of money. The only extra stuff in the Ultimate edition is fluff and bloat you don't need or want. ...Unless you want to use it for a home entertainment PC/Console system too.

A good UPS is a great thing to have. Make sure you get one big enough to supply your system / PSU at PEAK output for at least 5 minutes or long enough to comfortably shut everything down.

The WD 2TB RE4 hard drives are hard to beat. They're currently my preferred drives for just about everything. The 3TB units from Hitachi and WD haven't been out long enough to really prove themselves and not that it means a whole lot, but I haven't lost a 2TB RE4 drive yet. I have had one Hitachi 3TB go bad on me, but it was suspect from the start (sounded different the others I bought), so I threw it in a single-drive enclosure for general use -- it lasted all of about 40 hours of run time before it seized up. Hitachi replaced it and that new one has seen at least 200 hours now in the same enclosure and all seems well. You have spec'd the Ultrastars, which are preferred for RAID use and have the full 5 year warranty. I was using the Deskstar series... Mechanically they're the same, but the firmware on the Ultrastars is different -- firmware is tuned for faster time-outs and cache response that better fits with more intense usage for databases, RAIDs, etc..

Make sure you have a good backup system in place. Sometimes that "RAID-5 fault tolerance" isn't all that it's cracked up to be. In fact, if you're running 4 drives or less, I would recommend RAID-0 for the capacity and speed and leave the fault tolerance to a good backup strategy.

Seen a couple offers in this thread already from people willing to build the system for you. No disrespect meant to any of those, but beware the ones who will build and deliver it in a day. It typically takes 24 to 48 hours to properly burn-in and test a system like this. If I built it, I do at least 48 hours of intense burn-in and testing before I put it to work on anything real.

I'd offer to build, but I'm swamped the next several weeks and honestly don't know when I could do it. I will be building a couple workstations like this after the first of the year, when the new multi-proc capable SandyBridge Xeon CPUs are shipping. I would definitely build a few extra of those at that time, if anyone is interested.

Once again, I strongly recommend thinking twice before investing in RED Rocket. It was a great investment back in the Core 2 and non-native workflow days, but I am not sure today. One Rocket simply isn't sufficient for 5K EPIC playback so you would want to default back to CPU/GPU and 1/2 res, leaving the Rocket sitting idle. Two Rockets will drive 5K playback real time but think about this - for the same price you can upgrade to a top Xeon E7 20-core system which not only does 5K R3D debayering in real time, like the 2 Rockets, but also handle millions of other workloads.

Why do you say the Rocket is insufficient for 5K EPIC playback? It does choke on HDRx where it has to handle two 5K streams simultaneously. However, it handles a single stream of 5KFF at 5:1 just fine, up to 25fps. I can get 30fps just fine out of it too for shorter periods -- RED needs to open up the cache a bit, IMO. They have RC-X's cache loading built as if we're all running on systems with 8GB of RAM or less. Dual Rockets solves that, but even buying the Battle-Tested ones (if available) it's a $6K purchase. Ouch.

That is, until a Rocket II comes along designed for EPIC workloads.

As of 30 days ago, no Rocket II was in the works... But I think you're right in that the Rocket days are numbered. Within the next 18 months, most new performance workstations should be able to handle 5K playback at half rez or better just fine without a Rocket.

Currently the Rocket is still the only way to work with R3D footage in some applications -- take After Effects as an example. It is, IMO, unusable for 4K / 5K R3D workflow without the Rocket. Same with Nuke. I want to be able to have decently fast response while working at high resolution on composites and AE doesn't have the multiprocessor support at this time to plow through R3D frames like Premiere does. On the other hand, Premiere doesn't really benefit from the Rocket while editing. It actually becomes a bottleneck. CS5.5 is better at dealing with that issue, so you don't have to disable your Rocket as you did in CS5. But the Rocket picks up the slack when rendering out... But like you say, building a fast E7 20-core or similar system can process those frames just as fast for rendering too. So yeah, comes down to what you need in a workflow. If AE and Nuke were multithreaded for frame generation right in the GUI and timeline and gave better performance without the Rocket, I would probably sell my two Rockets. I may do just that once I find out more about what CS6 will bring and depending on the systems I build here in another 3 to 4 months.

I would like to see a price adjustment on the current Rocket... I think the days of $4750 new / $3K "battle-tested" are about done. RED has sold a ton of these cards and the better part of their lifespan has already passed.

We'll have to see what November 3rd brings, but I think if Scarlet is still 3K, there should be no reason to buy a Rocket for Scarlet footage.

 

[Daniel Macleod]

Here's my $5 worth of advice...

You don't want the X8DAi motherboard! Get the Supermicro MBD-X8DAH+F-O that Daniel Macleod recommended above. It's probably the best dual Xeon board going right now. It has a dual south-bridge configuration with more PCIe slots and supports more RAM at higher speed. The X8DAi has a few shortcomings -- namely, your RAM is throttled back when you install more than 48GB on it (read fine print) and it has old PCI slots on there -- WTF? There is no PCI card out there deserving of being connected to this system. Some people see this as a problem if they're still trying to drag along legacy hardware with them -- some do it. Personally, I haven't needed a standard PCI 133MHz slot since 2005. Going with the MBD-X8DAH+-F-O motherboard let's you have your RAM and your Rocket.

Daniel also made the point of going with the 3.06GHz CPUs. Yes, they are slower, but also significantly cheaper for not much speed reduction. Depending on budget, you may want to give that some serious consideration.

I disagree with Daniel's SSD recommendation, not in terms of the brand, but capacity and his take on speed/ reliability. First off, the Mushkin SSD's are using the same Sandforce-2281 controller that the OCZ Vertex-3 is using. Performance is roughly the same between the two, I've tested both. I would still recommend the Mushkin, first off they're HQ is located a short 12 minute commute from me and I have to give props to my local boys. They also have much better support if the product does fail. Personally, I think the best Sandforce-based SSD out there at the moment is the OWC 6Gbps / SATA III ones. But once again, they're using the same chipset. Using two of them in a RAID can make for some very fast performance, especially for read times. Like I said, the biggest point I disagree on is the capacity. 120GB isn't enough. It's enough for the OS and some scratch space, but you'll run out of room fast if you put a decent compliment of apps on the system -- I also don't recommend you run the SSDs more than 65% full as it will help maximize performance. I would recommend dual 240GB in a RAID. The 240GB Mushkin's are about $420 each.

Other than that, most everything looks pretty good. I would go for Corsair, Mushkin or G.Skill RAM as opposed to the Kingston ValueCRAP.

I prefer the EVGA GTX580 cards over all the others. Personal preference, but their OC version is killer and they have a single-wide water-cooled version too.

I'm kinda confused on the USB2.0 card readers and why you guys are spec-ing them... But that's OK, if you want to wait around for USB2.0 speed downloads of CF cards or whatnot... I guess it's about the best option at the moment for SDHC/SDXC cards. I just don't think of them, I only have two DSLRs that use them and my Dell monitors have readers built in anyway. Like Daniel says, you can get the all in one reader free, so hey, why not...

Also agree with Daniel on these points too...
Go for Win7 Pro 64bit. Save a bit of money. The only extra stuff in the Ultimate edition is fluff and bloat you don't need or want. ...Unless you want to use it for a home entertainment PC/Console system too.

A good UPS is a great thing to have. Make sure you get one big enough to supply your system / PSU at PEAK output for at least 5 minutes or long enough to comfortably shut everything down.

The WD 2TB RE4 hard drives are hard to beat. They're currently my preferred drives for just about everything. The 3TB units from Hitachi and WD haven't been out long enough to really prove themselves and not that it means a whole lot, but I haven't lost a 2TB RE4 drive yet. I have had one Hitachi 3TB go bad on me, but it was suspect from the start (sounded different the others I bought), so I threw it in a single-drive enclosure for general use -- it lasted all of about 40 hours of run time before it seized up. Hitachi replaced it and that new one has seen at least 200 hours now in the same enclosure and all seems well. You have spec'd the Ultrastars, which are preferred for RAID use and have the full 5 year warranty. I was using the Deskstar series... Mechanically they're the same, but the firmware on the Ultrastars is different -- firmware is tuned for faster time-outs and cache response that better fits with more intense usage for databases, RAIDs, etc..

Make sure you have a good backup system in place. Sometimes that "RAID-5 fault tolerance" isn't all that it's cracked up to be. In fact, if you're running 4 drives or less, I would recommend RAID-0 for the capacity and speed and leave the fault tolerance to a good backup strategy.

Seen a couple offers in this thread already from people willing to build the system for you. No disrespect meant to any of those, but beware the ones who will build and deliver it in a day. It typically takes 24 to 48 hours to properly burn-in and test a system like this. If I built it, I do at least 48 hours of intense burn-in and testing before I put it to work on anything real.

I'd offer to build, but I'm swamped the next several weeks and honestly don't know when I could do it. I will be building a couple workstations like this after the first of the year, when the new multi-proc capable SandyBridge Xeon CPUs are shipping. I would definitely build a few extra of those at that time, if anyone is interested.



Why do you say the Rocket is insufficient for 5K EPIC playback? It does choke on HDRx where it has to handle two 5K streams simultaneously. However, it handles a single stream of 5KFF at 5:1 just fine, up to 25fps. I can get 30fps just fine out of it too for shorter periods -- RED needs to open up the cache a bit, IMO. They have RC-X's cache loading built as if we're all running on systems with 8GB of RAM or less. Dual Rockets solves that, but even buying the Battle-Tested ones (if available) it's a $6K purchase. Ouch.



As of 30 days ago, no Rocket II was in the works... But I think you're right in that the Rocket days are numbered. Within the next 18 months, most new performance workstations should be able to handle 5K playback at half rez or better just fine without a Rocket.

Currently the Rocket is still the only way to work with R3D footage in some applications -- take After Effects as an example. It is, IMO, unusable for 4K / 5K R3D workflow without the Rocket. Same with Nuke. I want to be able to have decently fast response while working at high resolution on composites and AE doesn't have the multiprocessor support at this time to plow through R3D frames like Premiere does. On the other hand, Premiere doesn't really benefit from the Rocket while editing. It actually becomes a bottleneck. CS5.5 is better at dealing with that issue, so you don't have to disable your Rocket as you did in CS5. But the Rocket picks up the slack when rendering out... But like you say, building a fast E7 20-core or similar system can process those frames just as fast for rendering too. So yeah, comes down to what you need in a workflow. If AE and Nuke were multithreaded for frame generation right in the GUI and timeline and gave better performance without the Rocket, I would probably sell my two Rockets. I may do just that once I find out more about what CS6 will bring and depending on the systems I build here in another 3 to 4 months.

I would like to see a price adjustment on the current Rocket... I think the days of $4750 new / $3K "battle-tested" are about done. RED has sold a ton of these cards and the better part of their lifespan has already passed.

We'll have to see what November 3rd brings, but I think if Scarlet is still 3K, there should be no reason to buy a Rocket for Scarlet footage.

+1! I would really suggesting reading what Jeff has to say sending in your order to AVA!

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

I agree about the burn in period. A new system is a great number of new pieces of equipment, so you need to make sure you don't have any lemons and that they play nice. All you need to do is to make each part work at full speed for a few days, torture testing. These are simple things to do, though time consuming if you are not into building stuff.