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Mac Pro Tower 12 Core //Question//

Tim Morris

Tim Morris

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Guys,

I recently received a 12 Core Mac Pro Tower that I just purchased so that I can edit 6k footage and color in Davinci Resolve 12 and Premier. I am coming from a 6 Core Mac Pro Trashcan that had D700 GPUS that was not powerful enough considering that I only had 6 cores.

In the tower, I currently have a GTX 980 TI, GT 120 (boot card) and I am waiting on a GT 640 4GB DP/DV/HDMI. My goal is to use the GT 640 4GB DP/DV/HDMI to drive my ASUS 4k monitor and let the GTX 980 ti handle Resolve. I would like to get your feedback regarding the said specs. My goal is to get realtime playback.

Attached are the specs for the tower and monitor.
4k Asus Monitor
12 Core
GT 120 (boot card)
GTX 980 TI
On the way-----GT 640 4GB DP/DV/HDMI.
64 GB RAM
2 - 4TB hardrives
1- SSD Raid TB
1 slot will be available after the GT 640 arrives.




 
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What cpu are you using? X5690? You will need dual titans and an external sas raid in order to get close to realtime in resolve. I would suggest using the cache feature in resolve after you have conformed your online. I have dual titans and a 16 drive sas enclosure managed by an areca 6g card and i get realtime at 5k. 6k will not be possible without more gpu's and resolve has limited the amount to 2. I have not tested the titan x cards which we will be getting soon.
 
OK, this is probably not what you want to see, but the GTX640 is not going to help you. You can run everything off the GTX980TI card. Monitor output or using your compute GPU also as your GUI GPU in Resolve is not a big deal. It's really about a 7% impact to performance. And the 980 will properly drive your 4K monitor the 640 will not drive it at > 30Hz, unless you have some newer incarnation of the 640 I'm not aware of. The GT120 is worthless these days, get rid of it.

As Shiblon already said, you should probably look for a proper monitoring and capture I/O card to drive an output monitor from Resolve.

GPU power is also a consideration. You currently have both PCIe power leads going to the GTX980TI card and that's all the system can handle. If you add in the 640 card, you will need to pull additional power for that card from the optical bays or a supplemental power supply. If you're going to go through that sort of effort for another GPU card, then make it a good one and put in a second 980TI.

You must not have any additional PCIe cards to consider here. a 980TI card and a GTX640 are both double-width cards. Having one of each in there will leave you with only one free PCIe slot.

IMO, mixing a legacy 640 with a current 980TI is not a great idea anyway. And the GT120 makes little sense at all. It was serviceable as a GUI card in the past, but not so great now with what the current 980TI can do.

Also going back to what Ben said above. You're going to need a fast RAID and two of those 980TI cards to really get this system cranking in Resolve. As popular as these older towers are, they're still limited by memory and PCIe bandwidth.
 
what suggestions do you have regarding proper monitoring.....capture I/O card and raid?? if you have links with suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it.
Im all ears.



Tim
 
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For resolve you need to use a bm card. They are pretty decent and do the job without too much drama. Which monitor you need really depends on your client and colour grade needs. For some clients grading on a calibrated consumer hdmi monitor is sufficient where as others will need a calibrated 10 bit sdi monitor. We have both and use them for different client needs. I would say get a fsi as they are quite good for sdi 10 bit monitors and Panasonic is great for plasma displays. For raids areca or atto raid cards and a 6 or 12g sas raid. Do you have a machine room or would your enclosure be in your suite? I have always been happy with Maxx digital although their enclosures are loud. I currently use estore which is super quiet and sold out of Taiwan. I think it is the same enclosure here under a different brand. http://www.netstor.com.tw/_03/03_02.php?OTI=
 
Wow. 2 Titans and no 6K!

How fast is your SAS RAID? MB/s? R/W?

Ben Graham said:
What cpu are you using? X5690? You will need dual titans and an external sas raid in order to get close to realtime in resolve. I would suggest using the cache feature in resolve after you have conformed your online. I have dual titans and a 16 drive sas enclosure managed by an areca 6g card and i get realtime at 5k. 6k will not be possible without more gpu's and resolve has limited the amount to 2. I have not tested the titan x cards which we will be getting soon.
Click to expand...
 
How do you fit all these PCIe cards in a Mac Pro tower? You have 5 slots to use....

1st Graphics Card 2 slots. 2nd Graphic Card 1 or 2 slots. RAID Card 1 slot. USB 3.0 Allegro Pro 1 slot.

Where is he going to put the Blackmagic or Aja card?

What about a RED Rocket X Card?

I would install 1 SSD 1TB. Buy the Samsung Evo or the Pro. 5 or 10 year warranty. That gives you 500 MB/s R/W on your apps drive and faster boots than spinning media.

You are going to need some external fast storage. At least 500 MB/s to not have drive speed bottle necking you. To see how this works. Plug in a drive to your computer that slow. 100 MB/s. Then plug a faster 500 MB/s+ Drive. Use both for projects in RCX, Resolve, Ppro, FCPX, etc... Judge what speed you need.

If you need a few drives to play with, I can let you borrow mine.

I'm in LA.

Shiblon Wixom said:
The GTX 980 TI should be sufficient to handle the video output and processing in Resolve, or even handle 4k output to a second monitor in Premiere, if anything you should use an output video card like Blackmagic or Aja to get a color accurate signal to an external monitor in Resolve. The three major bottlenecks you will encounter are the older Mac tower single system bus, the Raid0 configuration with only two spinning media drives, and the single system SSD drive over SATA 3G (you may consider installing a Raid0 SSD system boot with two 120 GB SSD drives).
Click to expand...
 
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Jeff is right. You don't need the GTX640. It's a slower card that takes up a valuable PCIe slot and you want the dependability of 4K screens.

Jeff Kilgroe said:
OK, this is probably not what you want to see, but the GTX640 is not going to help you. You can run everything off the GTX980TI card. Monitor output or using your compute GPU also as your GUI GPU in Resolve is not a big deal. It's really about a 7% impact to performance. And the 980 will properly drive your 4K monitor the 640 will not drive it at > 30Hz, unless you have some newer incarnation of the 640 I'm not aware of. The GT120 is worthless these days, get rid of it.
Click to expand...
 
Only needed if you want CC worthy color? You can get close for offline work without a PCIe grading card, yeah?

Jeff Kilgroe said:
As Shiblon already said, you should probably look for a proper monitoring and capture I/O card to drive an output monitor from Resolve.
Click to expand...
 
GTX 980 Tis run hot. I have one. It with the RRX card on top makes the metal hot to the touch.

I have no idea how hot a Titan X runs. Probably as hot, if not more.

Jeff Kilgroe said:
Also going back to what Ben said above. You're going to need a fast RAID and two of those 980TI cards to really get this system cranking in Resolve. As popular as these older towers are, they're still limited by memory and PCIe bandwidth.
Click to expand...
 
Tim.

The RAID is something I just built. I purchased a MaxxDigital 12 Bay RAID used from Brook Willard. He has another unit for sale. For the RAID card get an Areca 1883x for about 800 USD. Skip ATTO. There card has funky build errors due to heat issues. It doesn't have a fan. The Areca does. I had both. Returned the Atto. Areca working right now.

You can come see this system if your in LA.

There is talk of this 15TB SSD from Samsung. Something crazy like that. It's out there but what if you could build a little 4 unit small raid with 60 TB....

Tim Morris said:
what suggestions do you have regarding proper monitoring.....capture I/O card and raid?? if you have links with suggestions, I would greatly appreciate it.
Im all ears.



Tim
Click to expand...
 
Hy Guys,

I know this is a bitt different than the questions before, but I tough this topic is the closest to my interest.
I'm have a drone company, and we shoot a bunch of times with RED. Because of this I have a lot of raw footage, and I would like to start to learn grading. (We have shot scenes for Tyrant, Marco Polo, X-Company, and soon to be released The Last Kingdom)
For now I have a maxed out rMBP 15", but it's quite weak for this kind of use. :-(
I would like to buy a Mac Pro, but not sure which one is the best for me.
I would only use 1 video at a time, so no multiple camera editing, mostly I want to grade and edit.

What Mac pro would you recommend? Do I need the D700 cards or the D300 enough? Do I need 12 cores or 4 is enough?

Thanks for your help!

Adam
 
@ Adam.....Depends on what you are shooting with. Scarlet, Epic or Dragon. I started out with the Scarlet and worked my way up to the Dragon. I have learned a lot through trial and error and I am still learning to this day. Im not a computer geek....but the more cores you have the better...get 12 if you can afford it and also get the D700s if you are editing dragon footage with the cylinder. I bought a cylinder Mac Pro last year and it only had 6 cores with the d500s...I had to upgrade. It was fine with the scarlet but the dragon was a no go.
 
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