Welcome to our community

Be a part of something great, join today!

Log in
  • 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 :)

HP 820 Tower - RED EDITION

The following is a little off-topic since my HP Z820 wont arrive until Friday.

With all of the talk of Thunderbolt for this and that and with the recent mention of my favorite topic the ioFX, here is a little teaser.
mLogic_Thunderbolt.JPG


This is an 11" MacBook Air playing back 2K uncompressed 10bit DPX files from the ioFX in the mLogic Thunderbolt enclosure. (unenclosed for testing purposes)
The MacBook Air is running Windows 7 since OSX will flag unapproved devices to keep them from operating.

You can only expect an average of about 700+MB/s out of a Thunderbolt peripheral.
The ioFX can deliver 2X that when on the PCIe2 bus or better.


Best
Mark
 
AS-SSD vs Crystal vs HD TUNE

AS-SSD vs Crystal vs HD TUNE

Mark Noland said:
Here are some HD Tune Pro benchmarks for the ioFX vs. the OCZ RevoDrive3 X2, run on my "old" Z800:

ioFX_HD_TunePro.jpg
OCZ RevoDrive3 X2 _HD_TunePro.jpg
Click to expand...

Those are pretty awesome benches.

I tried with my inexpensive Highpoint Raid and 2x Vertex 3's in Raid 0.

I get abysmal scores of ~350MB/s.
But I do get 900MB/s sequential for reads with CrystalDiskMark, and AS-SSD.

Strange.
 
Richard Tran said:
Those are pretty awesome benches.

I tried with my inexpensive Highpoint Raid and 2x Vertex 3's in Raid 0.

I get abysmal scores of ~350MB/s.
But I do get 900MB/s sequential for reads with CrystalDiskMark, and AS-SSD.

Strange.
Click to expand...

Hey Richard, if you are using HD Tune Pro for benchmarking it's optimal to leave the drive unformatted.
This will allow the benchmark to measure the performance of the drive without interference from the topology of any data contained.

I found that a lot of other benchmarks will base their performance off of the peak io of the drives.
If you're editing 4K or 5K you don't need to know the peak performance as much as the average performance.

SSD's can still suffer from some of the same pitfalls as disk based media because they typically use SAS hard drive controllers and RAID controllers designed to manage spinning disks.
If you are mainly doing sequential reads then an SSD can be a great solution.


Best
Mark
 
Hello Mark,
do you think that buying a io fx would make sense for my macbook pro 17 i7 late 2011?
And wich is the workflow wich those king of cards?Would the app files have to be installed on the ioFX card?
Sorry i am a newbie with advanced computer workflow.

Mark Noland said:
The following is a little off-topic since my HP Z820 wont arrive until Friday.

With all of the talk of Thunderbolt for this and that and with the recent mention of my favorite topic the ioFX, here is a little teaser.
mLogic_Thunderbolt.JPG


This is an 11" MacBook Air playing back 2K uncompressed 10bit DPX files from the ioFX in the mLogic Thunderbolt enclosure. (unenclosed for testing purposes)
The MacBook Air is running Windows 7 since OSX will flag unapproved devices to keep them from operating.

You can only expect an average of about 700+MB/s out of a Thunderbolt peripheral.
The ioFX can deliver 2X that when on the PCIe2 bus or better.


Best
Mark
Click to expand...
 
Getting back on topic, the v1.12 BIOS for the HP Z820 seems to be running fine. I was out of town all last week, but giving it a good run-through this morning....
 
The guys at HP were kind enough to have me over yesterday. I spent most of the day there, touring their lab facilities, letting them demo products, sharing feedback and suggestions. They really want to understand this segment of the market and what makes all of us crazy digital media types tick. I kindly asked them to please hurry up and make a 4K DreamColor display at about 32" size for the desktop. I'd take two of them yesterday and probably two more next week. Of course, many of us digital media types who walk through their doors are requesting the same thing.... They know.

Other than that, some things I can comment on, other things probably not. I will say that the two stand-outs of everything they showed, for me at least in terms of things I don't already own or have not seen, was the Z1 workstation and the DreamColor display on the EliteBook workstations. I admittedly have paid little attention to the Dreamcolor displays on laptops in the past year or so. Their initial showing was pretty lacking, but all I can say is the current implementation is amazing. Can handle about 92% or so of P3 space on a frickin' laptop. Very nice.

A big thanks goes out to Dan Bennett at HP! Hopefully he will join us here at Reduser.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
I kindly asked them to please hurry up and make a 4K DreamColor display at about 32" size for the desktop.
Click to expand...

Great Jeff.. glad you did that it will help us all. They chose wisely....
 
Anyone know how to source this from Canada? My local HP reseller says they can only bring in factory configs and this is quite the mod.
 
Got a hold of two finished Z820 RED Editions for REDucation UK - thanks to Tekserve for helping us out. We will also be bringing them to IBC.

Jeremy, PM me and I will connect you with the Tekserve guys.
 
Jeremy Torrie said:
Anyone know how to source this from Canada? My local HP reseller says they can only bring in factory configs and this is quite the mod.
Click to expand...

I just went through the same useless exercise. If HP USA is trying to learn the post production market, specifically Red workflow, then HP Canada could seem to care less. The reseller in Toronto was just forwarding my email to HP and vice versa. HP in response had limited options and would not sell the GTX cards, warning that any non-HP approved cards (the entire GTX line falls under non-approved cards) that I MAY be voiding the warranty.

I was surprised to see that the Z820's motherboard only had single spaced x16 slots, meaning that when building a Resolve workstation that you'd only be able to get a Quadro 4000 as GUI and a single GTX 570/580/680/690 in there (the GTX card would cover the 3rd x16 slot) as a render card. If they had a suggestion box I'd like to drop the request of double spaced x16 slots into it to get additional render cards for Resolve.
 
Slot spacing / arrangement on the Z820 does leave something to be desired. However, you can install two GPUs without covering an X16 slot. And, while spacing is very tight, the lowest PCIe slot is technically double width as you're covering the legacy PCI slot below it. IMO, I think HP pushed the Z820 design a bit fast and they literally shoe-horned it into the same Z8xx series tower enclosure. I don't know what they could really do to space out slots better though. To make the system taller wouldn't really help as we'd lose the ability to rack-mount if they did. Dell has slightly better slot spacing on their T7500, but the system is wider/fatter. You get a few more internal drive bays, but overall I think HP still has the nicer system between the two.

As for supported GPUs, HP takes the GPU thing very seriously. It's about their own internal testing and reliability. I appreciate what they do in this regard, but I do wish they would offer some more mid-range options and hopefully one of the GTX line. In retrospect, the cards they do offer are the best fit for the majority of their customers. GTX series cards can be fast, but they're usually pretty crappy. Especially if left up to the end user to supply them, the quality control is all over the map and vendors are numerous. HP likes the Quadro cards because they can lock in with PNY as their sole provider and can even provide cards with firmware tweaked just to their workstations.

With Resolve 9 now only requiring one GPU, I've settled in with the Quadro 6000 in my Z820 and it screams. It's the most stable combination I've tested and come up with. HP has their own custom firmware on the Quadro 6000 card they use. Performance is great. In OpenGL, it smokes the GTX690. For single-precision calcs in CUDA, it's nearly identical in performance or just a bit better than using one of the two GPUs on the GTX690. For double-precision, it eats the GTX690 for breakfast.

I plan to add a compute card to this workstation in the coming months. Really looking forward to the Xeon Phi (Knight's Corner). The guys at HP are watching it too, but it didn't seem like they had definitive plans with the Intel MIC architecture just yet, or at least nothing they were willing to share when I was visiting with them last month.
 
Do you think HP will build a RED laptop/workstation for mobile use?
 
In my study I have a new Mac pro and a new Maingear shift adobe workstation. The Maingear is only for film editing, composting, color grading. No Internet. Just RED all the way. Mac Pro is for everything else and that's a lot including web page design, safer Internet downloading, etc. that's the way it is for now.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top