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  • 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 :)

Magma ExpressBox 3T

gbalaji said:
Sonnet Ech Express supports GPU Nvidia Quadro 4000 for mac
Click to expand...

Hi G.

I am also wondering if you've personally had success with a GPU card in any Thunderbolt enclosure. Sonnet does not list any GPU cards as compatible on their website list.

http://sonnettech.com/support/charts/thunderbolt/index.html

Also, in talks with Magma last week, it was clear that they are looking for some engineering support partnership in an attempt to solve the GPU / thunderbolt driver issue for their ExpressBox 3T. They told me that it's Apple that hasn't allowed the support up to this point, and perhaps they're trying to find a work-around. But a GPU should work fine in Win7 under bootcamp.

I will be in San Diego with Magma doing tests all day this Friday on a variety of cards and applications, so I hope to report from practical experience soon after.
 
Neil W. Smith said:
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
Click to expand...

Hi Neil.

I am curious about your meaning here, "why are you only testing under bootcamp? ... the Q4000 is recognized by Lion now with latest CUDA Drivers from nVIDIA. . ."

I think Tom was going to confirm that the Q4000 works natively in Win7 through a TB enabled expansion box. I've been told this will work too. Are you saying Neil that you've heard that the latest mac drivers for the Q4000 should open up TB support?

Thanks for clarifying.
 
sorry to say, GPU's are impossible to put in these expanders. the cards require 16x slots. the length of the connection point where it goes in the slot on ANY gpu is way too long. magma only has 2x 8x slots and 1x 4x slots. the length corresponds to that. i assume the same would be with the sonnet. no gpu's for now. these ARE pre pro models though, the production models might have a longer slot. i'll know after I send it in for an upgrade, whenever that may be.

on other news got my rocket working as 8x, just had to swap what slot it was in. the magma, for price point and options is one of the best pieces of gear I've gotten in awhile
 
Tom.Wong said:
sorry to say, GPU's are impossible to put in these expanders. the cards require 16x slots. the length of the connection point where it goes in the slot on ANY gpu is way too long. magma only has 2x 8x slots and 1x 4x slots. the length corresponds to that. i assume the same would be with the sonnet. no gpu's for now. these ARE pre pro models though, the production models might have a longer slot. i'll know after I send it in for an upgrade, whenever that may be.

on other news got my rocket working as 8x, just had to swap what slot it was in. the magma, for price point and options is one of the best pieces of gear I've gotten in awhile
Click to expand...

Hey Tom, you just made me remember something Victoria at Magma showed me recently. The PNY rep was sure his Q4000 would not fit in the slot, and I was squinting my eyes waiting for bits of plastic and logic boards to splinter and fly. Take a close look at the end of the x8 slot. Magma should have cut out a channel in the end of the slot to allow x16 slots to slide in, even though you'll see that there are pins behind the physical slot that will plug into nothing. She assured me that the card will still work. Those pins farther back are additional lanes for x16 speeds, but not required to allow all necessary data I/O to flow. Does that make sense? I will be testing this myself at Magma on Friday, but Victoria said they had already done it and showed that the cards were working in Win7. This was 1.5 to 2 months ago. Please don't force anything, and take very special care to notice if the slot has been notched out and looks different at the end than a normal PCIe slot in a Mac tower, for instance. It could possibly be that your pre-production model is not notched, and just the demo on the floor that I saw was notched.
 
thanks for the info, and good to know. the production models they might just make it fit right. since i still have a upgrade to put it through i'm not gonna bother doing any of that. i honestly have no need/want at the moment to throw in a gpu. for on set dailies i really prefer a tower even though it's more space and more to set up. the horse power I get, multi tasking ability, and amount of ram/fast raid space I can cram in really makes my day a lot easier. plus I really don't want to suck up all the bandwidth with a gpu when I need to move large file sizes around at the same time.

right now I got the magma for sas to esata fanout, now that I can hook up so many esata drives it really removes a bottle neck. i/o card, and rocket. maybe when I pick up a retina 15 inch I'll explore the gpu possibility again since I can have a dedicated TB port just for gpu. can't really justify it right now since i only got my 17 inch mbp last year :)
 
Tom.Wong said:
thanks for the info, and good to know. the production models they might just make it fit right. since i still have a upgrade to put it through i'm not gonna bother doing any of that. i honestly have no need/want at the moment to throw in a gpu. for on set dailies i really prefer a tower even though it's more space and more to set up. the horse power I get, multi tasking ability, and amount of ram/fast raid space I can cram in really makes my day a lot easier. plus I really don't want to suck up all the bandwidth with a gpu when I need to move large file sizes around at the same time.

right now I got the magma for sas to esata fanout, now that I can hook up so many esata drives it really removes a bottle neck. i/o card, and rocket. maybe when I pick up a retina 15 inch I'll explore the gpu possibility again since I can have a dedicated TB port just for gpu. can't really justify it right now since i only got my 17 inch mbp last year :)
Click to expand...

Tom, you should be fine with your current 17" from last year. The new retina display MBPs with two thunderbolt ports won't give you any more speed, as from all research that I've done, including talking to Apple about it, they share the same controller and bandwidth. Two ports just gives you some additional connectivity flexibility, like hooking up two devices that don't have loop-through capability. You can still only connect 7 devices total. I don't know this from experience, as I haven't bought one, but oh how I'd love one. :) Just the best research I could muster in 20 minutes. I think I'll be buying a late 2011 17" refurb on Apple's site now that I know that.
 
Yes, Sonnet's Chaise will fit a x16 card, but operate at x4. Thunderbolt is limited to x4 at the current time. Magma isn't representing their case well by putting x8 on their site. It fits x8, but will still only run at x4. There will be no performance enhancement over Sonnet's. Plus, you'll be losing one of the 3 slots to your fans for the Magma, and be unable to fit x16 cards.
 
Ryland Jones said:
Yes, Sonnet's Chaise will fit a x16 card, but operate at x4. Thunderbolt is limited to x4 at the current time. Magma isn't representing their case well by putting x8 on their site. It fits x8, but will still only run at x4. There will be no performance enhancement over Sonnet's. Plus, you'll be losing one of the 3 slots to your fans for the Magma, and be unable to fit x16 cards.
Click to expand...

The EB3T uses an internal pci switch capable of 24 lanes. Slot 4 is x8 and populated by the TB card. Slot 3 is x8, Slot 2 is x8 and Slot 1 is x4 and when used requires Slot 2 to dumb down to x4. If future TB specs open up more than x4 of bandwidth, the ExpressBox3T will handle that added speed. Might call it future proof. But yes, to be clear, the limiting factor is ThunderBolt, which is quite slow considering the usual needs of multiple x8 and x16 cards.

And I'm not sure about a fan getting in the way of a x16 length card. Doesn't look that way to me. The fan is all the way in the front, and there's actually extra space between the fan and the end of x16 cards in the two open x8 slots. This pic doesn't even show the front of the chassis where the fan is - it's pretty long. That fan in the package is an option to use in Slot 1 (the x4 slot) for additional cooling for very hot pci cards.

IMG1020-M.jpg
 
Benjamin Hopkins said:
Hi G.

I am also wondering if you've personally had success with a GPU card in any Thunderbolt enclosure. Sonnet does not list any GPU cards as compatible on their website list.

http://sonnettech.com/support/charts/thunderbolt/index.html

Also, in talks with Magma last week, it was clear that they are looking for some engineering support partnership in an attempt to solve the GPU / thunderbolt driver issue for their ExpressBox 3T. They told me that it's Apple that hasn't allowed the support up to this point, and perhaps they're trying to find a work-around. But a GPU should work fine in Win7 under bootcamp.

I will be in San Diego with Magma doing tests all day this Friday on a variety of cards and applications, so I hope to report from practical experience soon after.
Click to expand...
Not yet tried Nvidia Quadro FX 4000 for Mac yet but Red Rocket running under x4 seems to render more than realtime for 1080p offline dailies @ full debayer for 5k epic footage.
 
Hi. interesting thread...

Does anyone have contact at Magma they could pass to me (either in open forum or PM)..

Both my assistant and I have tried to contact them and nothing!

It looks like the most promising box but if customer service is as bad as their pre sales service?

Even a good dealer recommend (uk)

Thank you

Michael L
 
Michael Lindsay said:
Hi. interesting thread...

Does anyone have contact at Magma they could pass to me (either in open forum or PM)..

Both my assistant and I have tried to contact them and nothing!

It looks like the most promising box but if customer service is as bad as their pre sales service?

Even a good dealer recommend (uk)

Thank you

Michael L
Click to expand...

Michael, PM me.
 
Well, i emailed Magma about 5 days ago asking some additional details about their product and got a very nice auto-responder telling me how they answer all emails within 24 hours....Let's see, it's now 5 day x 24 hours----kind of poor service response. And i think this is a normal thing to see now....see a responder that gives this info and you have to call or email again and again.....Sonnet on the other hand emailed me within a few hours....
 
Nick, What are you using as a drive array and how is it connected ? thanks, Dave
 
Benjamin Hopkins said:
Tom, you should be fine with your current 17" from last year. The new retina display MBPs with two thunderbolt ports won't give you any more speed, as from all research that I've done, including talking to Apple about it, they share the same controller and bandwidth. Two ports just gives you some additional connectivity flexibility, like hooking up two devices that don't have loop-through capability. You can still only connect 7 devices total. I don't know this from experience, as I haven't bought one, but oh how I'd love one. :) Just the best research I could muster in 20 minutes. I think I'll be buying a late 2011 17" refurb on Apple's site now that I know that.
Click to expand...

Okay, I have a big correction to make. The truth is, the new retina display MacBook Pros should be double the bandwidth of previous thunderbolt ports. I'm not easily convinced that just because a laptop comes out with 2 ports, they don't share the same bandwidth of a single port. We've seen this with USB-2 in the past. After my previous post on the issue in this forum, I did further research, and got the opposite answers with different genius bar guys at Apple. Take a poll, and you'll find that everyone has their opinion, but no one I've found has positive experience, because who yet has tried to chain more than 7 TB devices on a new MBP and accurately monitored throughput? That's a big deal test to do these days. But for those of us in our industry, the need for dual-redundant bandwidth on TB ports is obvious. Apple thinks thunderbolt is fast, but at the speed of one x4 card? It's not fast.

So I offer this latest bit of research. In iFixit's teardown, they identify the Thunderbolt chipset as being the Intel DSL3510L. This is the newest Cactus Ridge chip. Upon further deep page Google research I finally found this post:

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/thunderbolt-performance-z77a-gd80,3205-3.html

Notice how this chip is 4 channel capable. Apple is also using this chip in the one-port 1212 Air and non-retina display MBP. So I think it is safe to assume that Apple's dual port retina display MBP is actually utilizing 2 channels of 10Gbps speed for each port.

Still, a real test is all that matters when it comes to real-world performance and end-user efficiency. I'd love to hear from anyone who certifiably getting x8 results, aggregated from the two ports.
 
I'm contemplating either getting this or the Sonnet. My question is: when or where can I order a Magma? I can easily get the Sonnet but B&H doesn't have them and Magma's site doesn't have it for sale...
 
if you need it sooner than later get the sonnet. magma is taking their grand old time making sure their product works a certain way and qualifying a lot of drivers for a lot of cards. i pre ordered mine way last year as soon as you were able to after they announced 2011 NAB, so it got me in the list for a pre production model. absolutely no clue when they'll start rolling out in numbers. could be a manufacturing issue too who knows.
 
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