CS6/Resolve Edit System

[Alex Rawet]

We're in need of a new edit system as the older iMac we currently use just isn't cutting it anymore.
I'd ideally like to wait for the Haswell Xeons, but can't really afford to wait that long.
Thoughts were to go with the Sandy-bridge Extreme as a stop gap, then replace the motherboard 'stack' (Board, CPU, memory etc.) with a dual Haswell Xeon setup when it is out and the budget becomes available. A single 2687W costs more than the whole of the Extreme motherboard 'stack' by itself.
I've built systems before, but never one this powerful or demanding so any help would be appreciated.

System would be:

Intel i7 3930K
Asrock X79 Extreme9
Corsair X79 Vengeance Low Profile Blue DDR3 32GB (4GB modules, 2133 MHz CAS 11)
Nvidia GTX Titan
OCZ Revo Drive 3 x2 960GB SSD
Samsung 512GB 840 Pro Series

The Samsung drive would be OS and programs, with the OCZ for Scratch tracks and render files.

Footage would be primarily stored and operated on from the 24TB model from the link below in a RAID 6 setup, with further backups on other external drives (LTO is out of budget range I think at this point).
The description of Desktop Drives from the link makes me think they'll be Deskstars, but not sure.

http://www.rentaraid.co.uk/configured_packages.php

The other option would be do DIY the above, but with an Areca ARC-1882x and 8x Hitachi 4TB Deskstars instead.
I'd like to go with UltraStars, but they add nearly £100 to each drive and are only 3TB per drive, so not sure they are worth it for us at this point.
The DIY option costs a little more but delivers an extra 6TB of usable space over the pre-configured one.

In addition to any other feedback/advice:

• Is the Titan just going to be bottlenecked by the rest of the system, so worth saving the money currently to upgrade the GPU later when the Xeons are put it (GTX680 instead maybe)?
• Anyone have any experience of the OCZ SSD for this type of use as it's IOPS and read/write speeds are pretty quick?
• If the specs on the RAID are accurate and deliver around 800Mb/s I presume we would be able to edit R3D files from it without trouble?

Thanks in advance guys!

 

[Derek Morrison]

May i ask what the specs are of your current iMac?

 

[Chad Cooper]

3930k is a beast--i have it in an asus rampage iv formula and it works beautifully. when building, i originally had an extreme7 but it died after about 2 hours of use and tainted my original 3930k which immediately went back to newegg. a close friend has an asrock that died in the first 6 months, and their non-english technical support doesn't make me like them anymore. I'd try to get an Asus or a gigabyte, other than that you have a great build.

haven't gotten to play with a titan yet, but i'm running a gtx 680 superclocked and gtx 580 classy ultra and it's already ridiculously fast... without rocket, 1/2 premium debayer up to 11-12 nodes in realtime.

 

[Alex Rawet]

The current iMac is a 2009 Core 2 Duo w/4Gb Ram. Smaller projects it can cope with anything larger and it just falls over.

Thanks Chad, I was wondering about one of the equivalent Asus boards, the Asrock was a bit of personal bias as I've got a Z77 series in my personal machine currently.

 

[Alex Rawet]

We're likely to be starting to build this system in the next couple of weeks if anyone has any additional feedback in the mean time

 

[Will Keir]

Absolutely. 300 MB/S seems like the magic number. Stay above this and you should not have a bottleneck with the Hard Drives. With Dragon footage that number might go up?

• If the specs on the RAID are accurate and deliver around 800Mb/s I presume we would be able to edit R3D files from it without trouble?

Thanks in advance guys!

 

[Alex Rawet]

Cheers Will! All our drives run above that so should be good!

 

[Will Keir]

Hopefully the Dragon won't rise that number too much higher, but 6k is what, 40% more info?

Cheers Will! All our drives run above that so should be good!