Mac -> PC transition... ?

[Christopher Barrett]

Ok, now that I'm thoroughly disappointed with the lack of Heavy Lifting Macs, I've just had a ProMax PC priced out and am fairly settled on this unit but wanted to see if you guys had any additional input.

I looked at the ProMax, Boxx, MainGear, HP Z820 and the new Demon. The deciding factors were the number of PCI slots and internal drive bays.

The ProMax One + has 7 PCI slots and the double wides don't cover up any single wides (unlike the other manufacturers). Also the box has room for 8 3.5" drives, 4 2.5" drives and I think 2 Optical bays. Pricing was comparable across the market, no biggie.

Here's my initial build: (utilizing many of my existing cards)
[2x] 8 Core Intel Xeon E5-2687w v2 @ 3.4GHz
64 GB RAM
[2x] GTX 780 GPUs
RedRocket Card
OWC Mercury Accelsior_E2 PCI SSD 480GB Boot Drive
Decklink 3d Extreme HD I/O
Areca ARC-1882ix RAID card
[8x] 4TB Hard Drives
1500 w PSU

Is there anything that I've missed or should reconsider? This is my first Windows box and I'm a bit nervous. I actually just installed Windows on my MP today so I could start getting used to it... Resolve seems pretty happy.

Thanks!
CB

 

[Matt Gottshalk]

Thats a damn nice system.

I rolled my own when I transitioned back to PC.

Last NAB I went to I checked out the ProMax systems.

I was impressed.

 

[Marc Wielage]

Ok, now that I'm thoroughly disappointed with the lack of Heavy Lifting Macs, I've just had a ProMax PC priced out and am fairly settled on this unit but wanted to see if you guys had any additional input.

I was just talking with a friend of mine about NAB -- I just got back, he's still there -- and we both agreed that we had never seen more Macs on display at a major convention than this NAB. I must have seen at least 175-200 new Mac Pros, if you count up all four or five halls and hundreds of booths.

As far as building PCs (or Linux boxes), a lot depends on what you intend to use it for. For what I need -- sound and picture editing, color correction, and mixing -- the nMP is fine. Mac OSX has a lot of advantages over Windows, and the "fit and finish" of the products is second to none.

I don't dispute that if I needed industrial strength performance at a 24/7 facility, then I'd buy massive Linux boxes with 8 GPUs and have a phalanx of them plus petabytes of servers. But that's not what I need for a fast, sleek system on my desktop.

 

[Christopher Barrett]

Marc, just so I make sure I have every angle covered, what are the advantages you see in the Mac platform? Personally, I've been strictly Mac for the last 20 years so I'm not sure what shortcomings I might run into in a Windows world. I thought the playing field had pretty well leveled out.

 

[Paul J Steinberg]

I'm agnostic when it comes to the tools of our trade. I don't think you'll have any problem with Windows 7/8. Resolve is very stable on a PC.

Others with greater experience building boxes will chime in but you will just want to double check that you'll have access to all the slots you need. SuperMicro make motherboards with double wide x16 slots so you can stack 4x double width cards in there without blocking any other slots (see http://www.supermicro.com/products/system/4U/7046/SYS-7046GT-TRF.cfm) . Keep in mind the new Rocket-X will need a x16 slot now too.

The systems are built like tanks and my system is running over 10-15 nodes (no NR) in Resolve using 5K R3D's and staying in real time, rendering faster than realtime. Lots of room for drives and a ton of fans to keep everything cool...the catch with my system is that it is pretty loud. I'm told their current systems are quieter but mine is loud enough that I drilled a hole in the floor and moved it to the basement.

 

[Jon MIchael Puntervold]

Marc, just so I make sure I have every angle covered, what are the advantages you see in the Mac platform?

- Elegance of the OS
- Apple being able to push future technologies by market force, i.e. OpenCL, instead of CUDA
- Heavy push of parallelisation and GPU acceleration by including dual OpenCL calculators in every machine
- Simplified hardware, less custom accelerators (licence keys)
- UNIX based OS
- Integrated hardware and software

 

[Tim Morten]

If you find the Apple OS elegant, that is your subjective call to make.

Can't put a Titan of any flavor in the new Mac trash can...

Sorry, but parallelization of non-competitive GPU's is unimpressive.

UNIX as an advantage: debatable. Different, not automatically better. The MSFT kernel is an impressive piece of work.

Integrated hardware and software as an advantage: debatable. If you like the decisions Apple makes for you, that's your call.

Really, it's more a style choice than anything.

 

[Zeb B]

Paging Dr Kilgroe

 

[Mike Halper]

From a production to post workflow outlook, I've never had to work with or deliver camera original media and dailies to a post house running Windows or requested on NTFS or FAT32 drives. They all seem to be running Mac, which requires 2 things... hard drives formatted with Mac OS Extended (Journaled) and dailies in some flavor of ProRes. So you'd need amazing support for the Mac file system in Windows (meaning it needs to be as fast and as good overall performance reading/writing to the Mac file system) and licensed ProRes support (all types) in Resolve, Adobe, and Avid. Scratch has it now and Resolve on Linux, so hopefully everything else will get it soon. Without that, I think Windows is a no go personally, unless your workflow and system is closed to yourself and other Windows users. But as soon as you go outside of that to a normal post house you might run into those issues.

However, you could go Hackintosh and get the best of both... PC hardware with the specs, features, and capabilities you want/need and Mac OS. Hackintosh isn't perfect though and certainly isn't for everyone.

 

[Solanke Olayinka]

I would. Suggest minimum getting the titan, if u can afford then get dual k6000 reslove 10.1.4 heavly utilize the gpu memory and the k6000 blows past the titan black espically in dual gpu setup where the first card is also acting as the UI card.

 

[Paul Russell]

Moving to PC is a great choice. Christopher. Your system is similar to the one that I built for myself and have been expanding ever since. If you wanted to, you could add a Cubix Expander box which will allow you to pile another 4 GPUs into the unit. You might need it if you go RR-X because that requires a 16x slot. If I was you I'd stick some more RAM in. You don't need expensive and slow ECC RAM, so chipping up to 96GB or 128GB would not cost much more. Don't forget to add a big UPS to smooth out the power.

Your major bottleneck will be your disk R/W, so build your external RAID as a RAID 0 (striped) and use Seagate Enterprise drives to attain >400Mbps performance.

Mine is loud, too. It sits in an air-conditioned, sound insulated box so that I don't feel that I'm working on the deck of an aircraft carrier.

 

[Christopher Barrett]

Thanks for all the good pointers.

Mike: I produce almost all of my work in house, closed loop and work from raws. If I was working with HD ProRes then my 12 Core Mac would still rip through them without a hiccup.

Solanke: I'll have to add bigger GPUs after my wallet recovers!

Paul: Yeah, I've decided to go 128 GB RAM. My 8 bay RAID 5 box gives me usually around 800 MB/s so I should be cool there. I currently have a Cyclone 2707 and I was just gonna sell that off, but maybe I should hold onto it for future GPU expansion.

as for ProRes, maybe I'll just have to burn those off my laptop when I need them.

CB

 

[Hans von Sonntag]

What you plan sounds like a major investment.

5 years ago I invested into a z800 with the fastest CPU available, a Nvidia Quadro-5800 with SDI option etc... The box was worth 12k+. A year later Autodesk launched Smoke on Mac and I suddenly found my self back in front of my old MacPro.

Seriously, I find it much better, faster and more economical to have 2 or 3 medium workstations that work collaboratively together than one super high-end machine that will be out dated in just about a year or so and won't never be as productive as 2 seats no matter how much money I invest. Currently I run two Smoke seats. Both with Resolve and CS, both work still on 10.8.6 (very stable) on old MsP that I upgraded with the latest Nvidia GPUs. The interesting part is that not only upgrading the hardware makes things faster but also upgrading the software can enhance performance tremendously. The next gen. ADSK Smoke 2015 build is easily 2-3 times faster than the builds before thanks to new GPU engines etc...

There is a reason why Apple is still the workhorse in our industry. The OS is very convenient, hardly gets infected by viruses and the machines are almost the closest to a turn-key systems you can get off-the-shelf. I recall well how much hassle we had with the Windows Box, WinXP64, Viusta WIn7, countless driver issues, viruses you name it. But if your are IT savvy and owing a monster box is part of your entertainment nothing beats a brand new Windows box with the latest tech - the z800 was a beast in her time.

Often times a job can be done quicker with 2 seats that cost the same or less then one hero machine. You may rethink your entire workflow. It might be bring you more cost-effective to where you want.

Hans

 

[Marcos Montenegro]

Christopher:

My recommendations-

* Get an external RAID system. If you ever need to swap HDDs it's a breeze. I got the ATTO ExpressSAS R680 x8 PCIe Mini-SAS RAID Controller with a pair of 12TB G-Speed Es Pro's and I've been very happy with the throughput and quality of the G-Tech line.
* I have my setup in another room so its quiet, plugged into 2 Furman power conditioners (highly recommended) and 2 UPSs.
* For ProRes, buy the new Miraizon plug in ($50).

Depending if you get the Rocket-X or not, a Titan might be a viable option.

All in all you'll have a beast at the end of it. I don't believe for a second that in 1 year this box will be obsolete. Please. I think in this business you need to upgrade/refresh every 3 years, not yearly.

Good luck!

 

[Marc Wielage]

Often times a job can be done quicker with 2 seats that cost the same or less then one hero machine. You may rethink your entire workflow. It might be bring you more cost-effective to where you want.

I think this is very wise advice. Trying to do everything in one box ties up the station, gets crippled by i/o limitations, plus you have nowhere to go if and when the machine goes down.

 

[Andy White]

I think this is very wise advice. Trying to do everything in one box ties up the station, gets crippled by i/o limitations, plus you have nowhere to go if and when the machine goes down.

Exactly - all eggs in one basket. I learned this when I spec'ed up an expansion of a small CG house into a large studio (about 10 years back). It gradually evolved to be more complex in each build, but having duplicate machines to hop onto is way better that a single power house system.

I applied that logic when building my current set up (for a CGI animation project). The most important element is the storage and your network. Add a second NAS to your main NAS/Raid system and have that behind a UPS. Work on the network and use local storage only when needed. Image your workstations to your server/NAS if you have a bad habit of working locally

Then, plug in decent workstation(s) and enjoy the benefits of multiple machines for multiple tasks. I run two maxed out Z1's (soon to be 3) for CGI work and often sim or test render on one whilst still working on the other... loading files is a breeze, as everything is network/server stored, I'll simply save a version on one machine, spin my chair around and load it up on another. I then have a small nest of laptops that I use as a simple render farm and also a control node for the mocap software I use. All very neat and easily expandable.

So good for problem solving too... I went multiple Z1's as I like the ease of access, the monitor is great and I prefer being able to work on matched machines. I run USB3 to them if I edit R3D's, but it really depends what type of 'crunch' you're after.

Ultimately, it depends on your needs... but I'd certainly look at options if you're going to spend a lot on one system.

 

[Marc Wielage]

I applied that logic when building my current set up (for a CGI animation project). The most important element is the storage and your network. Add a second NAS to your main NAS/Raid system and have that behind a UPS. Work on the network and use local storage only when needed. Image your workstations to your server/NAS if you have a bad habit of working locally...

Although... if this were a company that was just preparing dailies, editing offline, color-correcting, and editing online, I would argue that a Mac would be a more ideal low-cost solution.

I agree that above a certain price point, going Linux is the way to go. But in the case of something like Resolve, that adds another $30,000 to the equation, which I think is more than small facilities can afford. And in truth, a 12-core 8 GPU Linux system is going to be far, far more costly than the biggest Mac out there.

 

[Andy White]

Although... if this were a company that was just preparing dailies, editing offline, color-correcting, and editing online, I would argue that a Mac would be a more ideal low-cost solution.

I agree that above a certain price point, going Linux is the way to go. But in the case of something like Resolve, that adds another $30,000 to the equation, which I think is more than small facilities can afford. And in truth, a 12-core 8 GPU Linux system is going to be far, far more costly than the biggest Mac out there.

Agreed... it really depends what (and how) Christopher uses his set up. My point is a good central NAS (I prefer this method - saves the issues of a standalone server) and a secondary slaved backup unit - plus a decent network, is a nice base to start from. It eases the issues if a machine goes down... and gives some latency and protection to your data (machines can be rebuilt - data often can't

Maybe a few Macs doing multiple tasks with distributed rendering... or a primary workstation 'central' machine and a couple of satellite terminals that do rendering/proxies etc could be the way to go. Can be Mac or PC. The central machine can have a separate Raid for editing (tat still ends up being network backed up for safety)... options are endless (almost - LOL)

Chasing the super power machine (IMHO), is often an expensive option... and one that only partially keeps you ahead of the game. Again, depending on the OP's usage, all this might not work for him. But, worth taking as step back and thinking through options - maybe 3 smaller machines will chew through the work he needs one big machine to do... and probably end up cheaper.

 

[David Kuhn]

Sounds like you guys could use a virtualization solution (which probably doesn't exist yet). I've recently been commisioning a Dell server I bought at the end of last year... dual 10 core xeon, 256 gig ram, 2 kepler based Grid K2 cards (4 GPUs/16GB gddr5)... in a 2u box. It's running esxi in my VSphere infrastructure and Horizon View... delivering PCoIP workstations with 1-4 gpus. On the plus side... if you want to run multiple workstations you can spin up 4 vm's with 1gpu and 64gb each... or if you have a project needing a hero system you can spin up 1 vm with everything. On the downside I'm finding the h264 encoded pcoip link too slow for video work at high resolutions (I've been using 2550... doesn't even support 4k yet). The K2's have hardware h264 encoding that would probably solve the responsiveness problem... but it's not yet being leveraged by VMWare. Maybe in another year this would be a viable option... a 'hero' machine that can be dynamically configured to deliver what you need to multiple thin clients.

 

[jake blackstone]

I just installed Windows 7 under the Bootcamp on my upgraded 5.1 12C MacPro. What can I say, the computer just screams. It seems, that Resolve actually runs smoother under Windows, than under Mac. I just fired up Nucoda and it too runs like a demon. So, what's not to like? Within 10 minutes of firing Windows and downloading Firefox browser from seemingly legit site, computer was immediately infected by various browser malwear and a few of viruses. So, the next three hours I spent installing virus protection and cleaning it. So now I'm trying to clone the drive and two days later, still no luck. Bottom line, while using Windows always wear protection and things on a Mac side are so much easier...