Help with machine spec?

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

I've been cruising along with my old Mac Pro at the core of my setup for a long time now. It's going flaky and is on its last legs. I haven't been keeping up with recent tests and developments, so I'm going to be cheeky and lazy enough to ask someone to save me a bunch of reading and help me spec a new machine. Requirements:

1. There will be no RRX; no budget for it with all the other stuff I need.

2. It must have enough CPU & GFX to handle 5K footage without RRX.

3. It should be open to the possibility of being used as a Hackintosh.

4. Unless someone can make a compelling case, nMP is off the table.

Any suggestions? Kit of parts specs, or specific prebuilt machines that are known to have the performance to cope with 5K R3D playback. I'm an old hacker, I can build anything, but I need to know what specs people have found to actually *work*!

Thanks

Mike

 

[Jason Osterday]

Mike, Id hit up that Google URL Bar...
"site:reduser.net X99"

Eric, Jeff and others have posted plethoras of info that pop up readily and will likely outline a lot more info for you. Eric even has benchmarks on half a dozen machines:
http://reduser.net/forum/showthread...eir-completed-on-different-systems&highlight=

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Don't buy a GPU until we get all the details on the new Titan X in the next week or so.

If I were building a system today I would go with the same configuration I put together a few months ago:

ASUS X99-E WS motherboard
i7 5960X 8-core CPU with plans to overclock to 4.3+GHz
64GB G.Skill RAM, I'm running their 3000MHz rated modules at 3000MHz.
Dual Titan Black 6GB GPUs ** A new Titan X, or even two of them, would certainly be better **

This is going to give you the best performance for the money. Use as a Hackintosh is possible. It does work, I have an OS X boot partition on mine, but it really doesn't work that great due to incomplete support for some of the hardware. IMO, building a top of the line system for a Hackintosh will pretty much negate any advantages it may have over the Mac Pro because of hardware compatibility restrictions.

If you want to go bigger than the above system, your next step up will be a Xeon CPU with 12 or 14 cores. Your clock speeds will be dropping, but overall throughput will increase, not to mention the additional cores for apps like Resolve that can use them. And if you want to go more powerful than that, then you'll be switching to a dual Xeon configuration and doubling up on CPUs.

While the X99 boards can run Xeon CPUs, I would recommend going with a proper Xeon motherboard if you go that route, even for single-CPU, because you will most of the time gain more memory slots. This is probably a moot point in the coming few months when larger and faster DDR4 modules hit the market. 16GB 2133MHz DIMMs are starting to trickle into the channel. They're actually quite plentiful in RDIMM format for the Xeon platform, not so much when targeting the desktop. 64GB on an 8-core is fine for most uses, but can run a bit short at times. If you go to 12~14 cores, you will definitely want more RAM.

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Thanks Jeff & Jason. I was aware of Titan X; that's why I've decided now's the time to build; it should be in the channel and available very soon indeed I believe. If I make it to NAB (still working on schedule!) I may make it a shopping trip too.

From what I've read, cores seem to be the key: 12 cores, decent RAM, and a Titan X should give me guaranteed real-time 6K, it appears - assuming the RAID can feed it! Do you think the overclocked 8 core you propose for the bottom-end system could really do it?

Mike

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

My 8-core i7 running at about 4.4GHz with dual Titan Black cards will play back 6K Dragon clips to a 4K monitor via RC-X. It will also do the same in Premiere CC and works a bit smoother through the DeckLink 4K. But when it comes to actual work and editing, I'm still working in 1/8th most of the time. By comparison, the new Mac Pro cylinder w/ 8-cores and D700 GPUs can almost play back the 6K to a 4K display via RC-X. Just fine on smaller clips if they spool up for a second, but it's just not quite there for the full quality playback. My Mac Pro I upgrade to a 3GHz 10-core CPU has the extra oomph to do it just fine and has the edge over the i7 PC for some things, but fall short in others. My primary Resolve system is a dual Xeon for 20 cores (40 threads) with a heap of RAM and 3X GTX780TI GPUs. My plan is to upgrade this system to dual Titan X and ride it out for another year or two before replacing it -- probably once Skylake platform Xeons make an appearance and we see another big shift in the GPU market. This system is no better than the lesser systems for most tasks. Actually it's slower than the i7 build for most things that can't leverage 12 or more threads. It shines in Resolve and render and transcode tasks, is barely better in Adobe CC, and pretty much slower in everything else.

More cores help with certain tasks. Fast clock speed helps with other tasks. In an ideal world we would be able to have both, but with current CPUs we have to pick a balance that best fits most of the work to be done with the system. There are options for 18 core chips, but their clock speed is very low when all the cores are running -- it becomes too slow to maintain adequate bandwidth and transaction response to feed the latest GPUs. If you end up going to a Xeon CPU, aim for the highest number of cores you can budget, but make sure the base clock speed of the CPU you choose is at least 2.6GHz. This is also where the i7 really pulls through since it overclocks well to 4.3~4.6 GHz and we can stack it up with much faster RAM than we see on the Xeon systems. It may have fewer cores, but we're gaining a 60% boost in clock speed across the board. That is often huge, often trumping an extra 2 or even 4 cores. So if you're up for a bit of tweaking and overclocking, then this is a great way to go. If you don't mind spending the money for the Xeon, then you won't be overclocking, but I recommend going for the E5-2697 V3 CPU, which is the 2.6GHz 14-core chip. It's hardly any more expensive than the 12-core E5-2690V3, which is the fastest 12-core variant and is also based at 2.6GHz. With the 2697, you gain two more cores and better scaling of turbo speeds across those cores. The 16 and 18 core chips run at 2.3GHz and that's where we start to fall into being too slow to feed the GPUs. These are much better for server use.

Going below 12-cores puts us into 8 and 10 core territory. These are great for dual CPU configurations, but for single CPU it makes more sense to go with the i7 8-core and ramp that clock speed up.

 

[Eric Bowen]

BTW the Asus X99 WS board now handles DDR4 Reg Dimms so you can run 128GB of ram with the X99 WS and a single Xeon. The Dual Xeon board also has 8 slots for ram so the amount of ram supported is the same between the boards. Just a single CPU board versus a Dual and cheaper overall pricing. I would suggest that if you decide on the Xeon route.

 

[Troy Smith]

Where do you all buy your parts from, Newegg doesn't even have the 3000mhz ddr4 ram, and the ews asus board is out of stock.

Thanks
Troy

 

[Jason Osterday]

Newegg, Frys, Amazon, Microcenter, Provantage. Provantage has the Asus boards in stock. Make sure you ask for the lower purchase price of $480, their site and sales team has juggled pricing back and forth this past week. GSkill is really only carried by Newegg, who seems to have the best selection of DDR4 around. If you watch carefully, you'll find Newegg restocks DDR4 quickly. They have 2800mhz as well in CL15 which gives you nice savings over 3000mhz and can overclock.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Where do you all buy your parts from, Newegg doesn't even have the 3000mhz ddr4 ram, and the ews asus board is out of stock.

I actually bought my 64GB of G.Skill 3000MHz DDR4 from NewEgg. Paid almost $1200 for it, looks like it's not there now or out of stock, they have the 2800MHz G.Skill modules and those would be fine too, if you have good airflow, you should be able to run them at 3000~3200 anyway. Who knows what G.Skill is offering at the moment too. Initially they offered 3200MHz as well and those seem to have completely disappeared from the market. I think the reliable yield of 3GHz RAM is pretty low. The ASUS X99E-WS motherboard is out of stock all the time, I think production volumes are somewhat limited and it's in demand. Try Provantage.com, they usually have better prices on the motherboards -- NewEgg tends to mark up prices on popular items like the hot new motherboards and GPUs. Oh, I see Jason just pointed out that Provantage has the E-WS motherboard in stock. NewEgg will price match other sites though if both they and the other site have the item in stock. So that's often helpful and saves from ordering lots of different places.

 

[Troy Smith]

Sweet, thanks alot Jeff and Jason

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Quickie followup, urgent expert advice welcomed as I'm about to buy.

OK, I got my Titan X. Now a system to put it in.

More cores = better.

Faster cores = better.

But, the more cores per chip, the slower they can be run. Power/temperature constraints.

Is there any reason NOT to prefer a dual CPU board with, say, 2 x 3Ghz 8 core CPUs, over a single CPU board with, say, a single 2.6Ghz 14 core CPU? Dual is the way I'm inclined to go - also gives more options for upgrading in future.

Thanks

Mike

 

[Dunkan Wolf]

Quickie followup, urgent expert advice welcomed as I'm about to buy.

OK, I got my Titan X. Now a system to put it in.

More cores = better.

Faster cores = better.

But, the more cores per chip, the slower they can be run. Power/temperature constraints.

Is there any reason NOT to prefer a dual CPU board with, say, 2 x 3Ghz 8 core CPUs, over a single CPU board with, say, a single 2.6Ghz 14 core CPU? Dual is the way I'm inclined to go - also gives more options for upgrading in future.

Thanks

Mike

You will need dual CPUs to make full use of the GPU anyway. I would wait for Skylake to get released.

 

[Eric Bowen]

A 5960X clocked to 4GHz+ can push the Titan X card well enough provided you have 64GB of ram. GPU acceleration uses both cores and clock speed. You need the ideal amount of cores/threads for decoding/encoding and then GHz to get the data down the pipeline faster. A dual Xeon system will give you a far greater realtime playback load than a single. But the slower clock speed will mean slower render times. If render times are far less important than realtime playback capability then the Dual Xeon is the way to go if budget is not a consideration. If it is then a single Xeon on the X99 board is the way to go provided you select the 2690V3 or higher. Otherwise just get the 8 core i7 and clock it higher. If you want thunderbolt then the X99 single chip board is the only way to go right now. BTW Skylake is still a long way off so I would not wait on that.

 

[Hal Long]

How and what model old is your MP? I did a processor tray upgrade on one of mine last year and it's kept it relevant a bit longer for only about $800. Went from an 8-core 2.26 to a 12-core 2.66. Put in any decent GPU (980, Titan, even a 570) and something like that should play back 5K no problem. Even though I usually edit @ 1/8 res to keep things running smoothly.

 

[Christopher*Seguine]

Quickie followup, urgent expert advice welcomed as I'm about to buy.

Is there any reason NOT to prefer a dual CPU board with, say, 2 x 3Ghz 8 core CPUs, over a single CPU board with, say, a single 2.6Ghz 14 core CPU? Dual is the way I'm inclined to go - also gives more options for upgrading in future.

Mike the most important question is what application will you use the most?

If its Resolve, 2 cpu board - no question at all. Resolve is very good at multi-threading, and at multi-gpu. More cores is better than less cores with a higher speed.

Keep in mind, if you buy a 2 cpu board, and only install 1 cpu, thinking you will upgrade and install a 2nd cpu later - PCIe slots are tied to each cpu, so if you install 1 cpu, you loose half your pcie slots.

Also, besides a few 3d application, no current applications really support the added benefits of V3 xeons - AVX2 and FMA3. Eventually they will, and there should be a benefit, maybe. DDR4 provides no real world incrase in performance outside of obscure crypto and database applications. Today, if your trying to save money - a previous gen V2 xeon vs V3 Xeon - you will see no increase in performance, except obviously from increased core count V2 2697 is 12 cores, V3 is 14 cores. Z9PED8-Ws for previous gen, Z10PED8-WS or Supermicro X10DRG-Q is cool because it has 4x double wide 16x slots.

Except for a few 3d apps, applications are still compiled against the old windows cpu management scheme, this limits them to a maximum of 64 threads. So no point in going crazy with 2x 18core cpus, the extra threads will never be used - max usable is 2x 16cores. Some day apps will be rewritten to support processor group architecture, but this requires every DLL to support processor groups or performances goes to hell, so when you relying on something like quicktime inputs or outputs it will never happen unless you bypass the quicktime dll with your own reader, a ton of work.



If however you use Adobe primarily, it is the complete opposite - very poor core usage, and only uses a 2nd gpu for output rendering, and even then not very well.

For Adobe, Faster Cores is better than more cores, your better off with a single cpu board, fast processor, with a single titan-x, 2 if money is no object but minimal gain.

Ideally use an E5-1680 V3, it is I think the only unlocked v3 xeon, so you can overclock it just like an 5960x. In theory it has better bins so will overclock better, but more importantly you are not limited to the 64gb of ram of consumer cpus, adobe likes to eat up ram, 128gb would be best.

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Thanks all. Initially I will be Adobe and RCX oriented. My budget won't stretch to more than 64Gb of seriously fast RAM so that's moot! I would like Thunderbolt, I recall seeing a ?Supermicro? Dual Xeon board which had an add-on TB module available.

Based on feedback so far I'm inclined to make it a screamer of an over clocked single CPU and use saved money to max out the RAM.

Mike

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Oh and I'm more sensitive to realtime playback than render...

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

You will need dual CPUs to make full use of the GPU anyway. I would wait for Skylake to get released.

Yes and no. Dual CPUs is going to be better if he has the budget to do it right. If budget is restricting his hardware choices, it's real easy to accidentally spend more money on a system that will be outperformed by a cheaper single CPU X99 system.

Wait for Skylake? Could still be a good while to wait... The low to mid end desktop Skylake chips with up to 4 cores will ship in Q3 this year. For the high end desktop replacement with up to 8 cores (and possibly 10 now in an i7 with Skylake) we're looking at Q1 2016, possibly Q2. So it could be a year out. As for the dual CPU options, The next Xeon iteration is not arriving until Q1 2016 at the earliest, but since it seems Broadwell Xeon (like high-end Broadwell desktop) is kaput, it will most likely be Q3 2016 ~ Q1 2017 for Skylake Xeon. This could change and hopefully will in terms of Xeon timing, but Intel is not sampling Skylake or Broadwell Xeons with board makers yet. And it's a minimum of 6 months out once that process starts.

As for the question of dual CPU systems... This is where it gets really tricky. The current X99 platform is doing so well and these i7 chips overclock like crazy. I'm running a 5960X at 4.3GHz on air without stressing it at all. If we go to a Xeon setup, then we're looking at minimal overclocking ability. With the locked multipliers, the best we can do is hope for a 5~6% bump of our base clock. As Mike has already noticed, the trade off for adding more cores is a loss of speed. Turbo boost helps in that it allows the CPU to ramp up speed when needed and when fewer cores are being used, but this really doesn't offer as much performance gain as taking an 8-core i7 and cranking up the clock ourselves.

Systems with lots of cores can struggle at base clock rates to feed newer GPUs, especially if there are multiple GPUs like the Titan X in the system. Dropping to 2.6GHz as a base, or lower, is detrimental to a lot of media-centric workflows. I personally would not recommend or buy any CPU with a base clock lower than 2.6GHz. IMO, for single-CPU systems the best two CPU choices are 1> the i7-5960X 8-core chip that overclocks like a beast. 2> Xeon E5-2697v3 which is 14-cores at 2.6GHz and turbo up to 4GHz. It's probably Intel's most efficient Xeon this round, it will run 12 cores faster than the 12-core Xeon chip and 10 cores faster than the 10-core chip. But here's the crux of it, when running 8 cores, that i7 is still faster, especially so if overclocked. Not only that, but we can use faster RAM on the i7 build and drastically increase memory throughput.

For a dual CPU build at this time, I would only recommend if you do a lot of rendering or other tasks that can definitely take advantage of a lot of cores -- 16 or more. At that point, your best options are dual 8-core, 10-core or 14-core. I don't recommend the 12-core in light of how they perform next to the 14's and they're also the same price. For most everything though, that 8-core i7 build is going to be where it's at. The only truly limiting factor is the 64GB of RAM we can install right now. We can get to 128GB RAM by going with RDIMMs on a motherboard that supports them - ASUS X99WS-E - but that also locks us into a slower RAM speed of 2133MHz.

All that said, I'm very happy with how my X99 build is performing. My 20-core Xeon "Resolve system" is faster for Resolve and some other things, but it was also a good bit more expensive and it's a slow dog compared to the X99 for a lot of things too. In a perfect world, we would be able to put dual 12-core Xeons operating at 5GHz and be done with it. I'd love to try another X99 build with a 14-core Xeon and 128GB of RAM. It would probably be the better system for Resolve and rendering in Maya, Modo, etc.., not as good as the 8-core for just about anything else...

 

[Mike 'Fireman' Ross]

Jeff, thanks for the very detailed reply. I think I'll heed your words and go the I7 screamer route. ASUS X99-E WS board and 64Gb of fast RAM. It does make things simpler. I'd already identified that 14 core Xeon as the 'sweet spot' CPU if I did go that way, but then you're getting into a much more expensive system; ~$2700 for just the CPU.

Mike