Magma ExpressBox 3T

[Nick Shaw]

I have recently received a pre-production unit of the Magma ExpressBox 3T Thunderbolt PCIe expansion chassis. Unlike some laptop PCIe Expansion systems, this is able to run 8x PCIe cards like the RED Rocket at full 8x speed. This means I am getting desktop type transcode speeds (4k at 28.5fps and 5k at 23.5 fps) on my MacBook Pro, which I am very pleased about. It's better than my ageing Mac Pro can manage!

 

[Matthew Riggieri]

Nick

Isn't thunderbolt only 4x anyways?

Matt

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

Each Thunderbolt channel is a bi-directional PCI-e x4 lane (Aprox. 800MB/s in both I/O directions), the lower end Macs like the MacBook air have 2 channels and the top end MacBook Pro 17" have four thundebolt channels. Some thunderbolt cases only run two channels (PCI-e x4/x4), and some like the magma run four channels (PCI-e x4/x4/x4/x4, or effectively x8/x8) but can scale down to only two lanes if that's all there is.

Also note the current TB cable from apple has a control channel and two pairs of lanes, x5 total.

On my pre-production Magma 3T case with my MBP17 (2011 i7), i can transfer around 450MB/s aggregate between all TB / expresscard connected drives or raid towers, and still get full use of my internal system drive for other work such as color grading or transcoding. I get about the same transcoding rates as Nick, around 30 fps with 4kHD and 24 fps with 5kHD material when using a Red Rocket.

 

[Grant Limberg]

Just out of curiosity, which MacBook Pro are you running this on?

 

[Michael Lindsay]

Hi Nick

Have you put anyting else in the expansion box? Or is it in there on its own (no Atto card or BM card for example)

AND is there any clue to when one may buy it??

thanks

Michael

 

[Nick Shaw]

Just out of curiosity, which MacBook Pro are you running this on?

MacBook Pro 8,3 – Late 2011 17" 2.5GHz i7 with 16GB of RAM
The last of the 17 inch MacBook Pros

Have you put anyting else in the expansion box? Or is it in there on its own (no Atto card or BM card for example

Not yet. I only opened the box today! I'm wondering about trying my Decklink in it, but since I already have an UltraStudio 3D, which is basically the Decklink Extreme 3D in an external Thunderbolt box, I'd probably rather keep things modular. I certainly intend to put an ATTO card in there.

AND is there any clue to when one may buy it??l

I don't know I'm afraid, but contact Magma and ask them.

 

[Michael Lindsay]

thanks for the info...

 

[Bob Gundu]

Any updates on testing the ExpressBox 3T?

 

[Tom.Wong]

I have one myself and love the sucker. few quirks but can be worked around. it's a pre production model so will be going back in for production upgrades eventually.

rocket shows up only as in a 4x slot in rcx, however, i'm really seeing little to no speed difference in transcodes. quad hd footage is faster than real time, full 5k footage is slight slower, average 20-22 fps. all at a 23.98 framebase.

in conjunction i have a atto h680 in there mounting hard drives swimmingly. I've hd 3 g raids hooked up without a hiccup.

plus a decklink card that works all in conjunction.


daisy chain works well too. only hiccup I'm finding is that a reboot or forced shut down prevents the system from recognizing the unit. you have to shut down the laptop, and do a full power cycle on the chassis and boot everything back up together to get it to recognize again. full power cycle meaning fully unplugging the power and letting all the residual power drain out before plugging it back in. might be fixed in the production models, who knows. either way I'm loving it and really when it comes purely downloading large files, a laptop station has very little compromises now.

i'd still prefer a tower for pure horsepower and larger raids, and multi cam but the laptop certainly isn't be very underrated these days.

 

[Neil W. Smith]

GPUs ...

GPUs ...

I have one myself and love the sucker. few quirks but can be worked around. it's a pre production model so will be going back in for production upgrades eventually.

rocket shows up only as in a 4x slot in rcx, however, i'm really seeing little to no speed difference in transcodes. quad hd footage is faster than real time, full 5k footage is slight slower, average 20-22 fps. all at a 23.98 framebase.

in conjunction i have a atto h680 in there mounting hard drives swimmingly. I've hd 3 g raids hooked up without a hiccup.

plus a decklink card that works all in conjunction.


daisy chain works well too. only hiccup I'm finding is that a reboot or forced shut down prevents the system from recognizing the unit. you have to shut down the laptop, and do a full power cycle on the chassis and boot everything back up together to get it to recognize again. full power cycle meaning fully unplugging the power and letting all the residual power drain out before plugging it back in. might be fixed in the production models, who knows. either way I'm loving it and really when it comes purely downloading large files, a laptop station has very little compromises now.

i'd still prefer a tower for pure horsepower and larger raids, and multi cam but the laptop certainly isn't be very underrated these days.

Tom,

Have you tried any nVidia GPUs in the Magma 3T with Resolve? ... i know that GPUs are x 16 lanes but was wondering if you get any rendering performance enhancement in Resolve if you have a 480 or 580 or even a Q4000 in the Magma?

I'm specifically thinking of the Retina Display MBP ... we're doing some beta testing at the moment and the performance with the built in nVidia 650M is quite impressive but would love to be able to attach a PCIe Expansion box through Tbolt with a couple of GTX 580s in it ... OK, maybe we start with a single Q4000.

Have also noted the need for total reboot of the system with a long daisy chain of Tbolt devices ... cable management with Tbolt is going to become an issue ... we deseparately need some Tbolt Hub of some kind.

Cheers,
Neil

 

[Tom.Wong]

Tom,

Have you tried any nVidia GPUs in the Magma 3T with Resolve? ... i know that GPUs are x 16 lanes but was wondering if you get any rendering performance enhancement in Resolve if you have a 480 or 580 or even a Q4000 in the Magma?

I'm specifically thinking of the Retina Display MBP ... we're doing some beta testing at the moment and the performance with the built in nVidia 650M is quite impressive but would love to be able to attach a PCIe Expansion box through Tbolt with a couple of GTX 580s in it ... OK, maybe we start with a single Q4000.

Have also noted the need for total reboot of the system with a long daisy chain of Tbolt devices ... cable management with Tbolt is going to become an issue ... we deseparately need some Tbolt Hub of some kind.

Cheers,
Neil

i haven't tried but i really doubt it would work. magma hasn't advertised at all gpu's can go in there, neither has sonnet with the expansion chassis. I don't think the gpu will recognize at all without it being in a 16x slot, plus the sheer fact that the power supply of the magma wouldn't even be able to sustained a beefy video card. it's a nice idea, and maybe one day a chassis will come out that harness 2 tb ports for 16x worth of lines so u can toss a gpu in there, but as of now I'm positive it won't work. but even without that, just being able to have a sas card, i/o card, and than a third card like rocket or usb 3, 10g ethernet, or whatever else offers a lot of freedom. a single unit to really simplify things, and keeps someone like myself who's invested heavily in my tower setup from buying all this redundant stuff just for the sake of giving a laptop more options. i can just take the cards i already have out of my tower or any extra components i have laying around and toss it in the sucker.


as for tbolt cable managment. i think really the worst part is that the apple tbolt cables are incredibly long, which is nice, but it just makes it a spaghetti mess, and the material of the rubber isn't the easiest to wrap up. I'm looking forward to custom length cables some day.

 

[Shiblon Wixom]

External GPU support should work ok in win7 bootcamp, it's the Mac OS that won't support external GPU cards, not a limitation of sonnet or magma.

 

[Nick Shaw]

rocket shows up only as in a 4x slot in rcx

Odd, it shows up as 8x on mine.

 

[Tom.Wong]

Odd, it shows up as 8x on mine.

might be a variation in the pre pro models. or i have to try a different slot. either way whatever "lanes" it shows up as, it doesn't effect performance.

 

[Tom.Wong]

External GPU support should work ok in win7 bootcamp, it's the Mac OS that won't support external GPU cards, not a limitation of sonnet or magma.

either way if it does work, the only card you can put in there is a quadro 4000 or below. the gtx cards draw way too much power, you'd need external power to get it going. the power supply on the magma is only 250w.

next time i rip out my quadro 4000 from my tower I'll see if it work with bootcamp on my laptop.

 

[Neil W. Smith]

either way if it does work, the only card you can put in there is a quadro 4000 or below. the gtx cards draw way too much power, you'd need external power to get it going. the power supply on the magma is only 250w.

next time i rip out my quadro 4000 from my tower I'll see if it work with bootcamp on my laptop.

Keep us posted, Tom ... I suspect that you will see some kind of performance improvement when using Resolve .... could you benchmark render speeds before and after adding the Q4000?

Just out of curiosity, which MBP do you have and why are you only testing under Bootcamp? ... the Q4000 is recognized by Lion now with latest CUDA Drivers from nVIDIA ... you can always download Resolve Lite if you want to test under OSX.

Neil

 

[rick youck]

I'll chime in to say that I'm also loving the pre-release magma box - its working great

First gen 17" Macbook Pro 2.3i7 with 16 gig of ram, 10.7.4

- Red rocket transcoding 23.98 4khd, and 5k 2:1 slightly faster then real time (25-28 FPS) - this is going to and from LACE 2TB Thunderbolt drive (surprised me as they are both on the same bus)
- Atto H680 working with LTO5, and a sata fanout cable (still need to find some time to test speeds, and saturation of the bus)

I was hoping to use my Matrox compress HD card in the magma as well, but it's drivers are not thunderbolt enabled. Lets hope Matrox gets that happening soon......

The Rocket is showing up as and 8x slot in RCX (even though the thunderbolt bus, as i understand it is not that fast)

Overall impression - this is what I spend the last year waiting for! A much more portable data station. Very happy

 

[Bob Gundu]

I really hope they can release this soon. Have they given any indication of release date?

 

[gbalaji]

Sonnet Ech Express supports GPU Nvidia Quadro 4000 for mac

 

[Neil W. Smith]

Q4000 and PCIe Expansion ...

Q4000 and PCIe Expansion ...

Sonnet Ech Express supports GPU Nvidia Quadro 4000 for mac

Thanks G ... have you actually tested it personally? ... seen any measurable improvements when running Resolve on a MBP?

Neil