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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 :)

mother .... board!

hey guys, just a quick question here. i have a Dell XPS 710 system that is already washed up. i was wondering if i could simply drop a new motherboard into that tower with a new Core i7 chip? what all is involved in doing that?
 
We are using 5 workstations with core i7 since months, iirc the first units arrived here in october.

MSI Eclipse and the Gigabyte GA-X58-DS4. Vista 64.

They are working excellent.

We are using, since years, mainly onboard raid controllers, mostly Adaptec and Intel.
The typcical X58 onboard intel ICH10R raid controller allow matrix raids, mixed raid 5 and raid 0.

Typical transferspeed on the onboard ICH10R is 500-600 Megabyte/sec on RAID 0 read and write. 200-250 write/300-400 read on RAID 5.

We are using the MSI for the dual PCI-E 2.0 x16.

Lets see how well the dual i7 xeon scale. Few applications in red-land so far are able to fully use the hyperthreaded 8 cores of an core i7.

yorick von krogh
 
Anyone using 3 Way SLI and is there any benefit to that in RED workflow? I doubt that it would be useful for anything but CGI/Games but just checking. Also, with a 3 WAY SLI, can you do two large screens for computer desktop and 1 hdtv display for editing output?
 
Tom, you could recycle the tower and hard drives, the video card, all provided you have enough slots for them, but I think you'll need DDR3... not sure cause I haven't been looking for a long time now but chances are there aren't DDR2 MoBos with the socket for the i7 out there.

I did a little reading and found several i7 920's clocked up to 3.7GHz, on air cooling and stable. You will need a MoBo that allows you to override the voltage cap, however you'll only need a tinie more voltage, not much at all. And temperatures are ridiculously low.

For RAM I bumped into the OCZ Reaper 2GB sticks, apparently excellent overclockable DDR3 with low timings: $130 for a pair AMR http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227293

I better stop looking till I can build a new one.
 
BTW, I am still waiting for one of you guys to explain the whole excitement behind the on-board SAS... are you planning to edit R3D from a MoBo based RAID-5 or RAID-0?
 
I am thinking the best buy might be the ASUS P6T Deluxe...but I have barely looked around so far. It has the X58 northbridge and the ICH10R south bridge. I am sure I'd get rocking numbers our of two RAID-0s for the OS and target drive to render to and use an external RAID-5 for the footage. Also there are tons of kids blazing through Crysis with their 920 i7's over 4GHz with water cooling and hordes of them running 3.8GHz on air. It is all about the memory you get.

Then again by the time I have to build I might be so lucky as to be able to use two 920's on one board... I could only hope and try to get myself to that point.

I wonder if anyone has ran Mac OS on these yet? Or how Premiere would run in XP-32 or 64...

anyone have a pile of cash lying around that they don't need? Or two?
 
USlatin said:
BTW, I am still waiting for one of you guys to explain the whole excitement behind the on-board SAS... are you planning to edit R3D from a MoBo based RAID-5 or RAID-0?
Click to expand...

We are editing a lot from the Intel Mobo Controllers on several systems.
R3D datarates are pretty low compared to uncompressed HD or 2K.

Onboard we use sata, sas we have dedicated controllers - but that should not be necessary for r3d-editing which is only ~40-45 Mbyte / sec.
 
Richard Andrewski said:
Anyone using 3 Way SLI and is there any benefit to that in RED workflow?
Click to expand...
SLI and multi-gpus are EXTREMLY powerful.
Most desktop-class softwares as adobe, speedgrade, scratch, combustion, redcine etc dont use it yet, so for red the software manufacturers have to catch up.

Richard Andrewski said:
I doubt that it would be useful for anything but CGI/Games but just checking. Also, with a 3 WAY SLI, can you do two large screens for computer desktop and 1 hdtv display for editing output?
Click to expand...
We are using it for exatcly this. 5 and 6 screen rocks.
I am typing this on a 24 24 24 42 quadmonitorsystem.
 
laguun, show us some pics of your setup!
 
Like others have said, onboard controllers are not great for performance RAIDs in most cases. But they are still useful. It's nice to see new boards offering SAS connectivity. Dual 15Krpm SAS drives in a RAID-0 for the primary OS volume is a wonderful thing and is very convenient and cost-effective with the onboard SAS. Not all onboard RAID is crap, it typically is for SATA, but in the good ol' Pentium II/III days, Tyan and SuperMicro and others would incorporate some rather nice Adaptec SCSI controllers with the option of RAID / cache daughtercard add-ons. We used these for pumping multiple streams of uncompressed SD through the Video Toaster NT and other uncompressed solutions. ...Did this back in '99~'00. Onboard SAS has other uses too, most of which don't fit into the BOXXlabs workstation paradigm, or at least not to my knowledge, but many of us out here find useful. It also remains to be tested to see if the onboard SAS is actually worth a crap or not. Most late model boards have pretty decent RAID 1 capability with their SATA interfaces. Which is quite useful when building low-cost, mission critical processor nodes for clusters or render farms. Some of us are happy to see integrated SAS in these lower cost, more mainstream boards. Some of us don't see the value and are not excited over it... Honestly, I'm not so excited over single CPU boards, I personally won't build me a new workstation until I can put together dual Nehalem Xeons. Same with render nodes... It's all about power per watt and single processor boards just don't cut it.

Back on the subject of graphics cards, I obviously shouldn't have said that no cards support PCIe gen2. But we're still waiting for full support for it, especially when it comes to using multiple cards. I'm in agreement with laguun on the multi-card issue. Unfortunatly, the pro graphics world is very slow at adopting this tech, but it seems to finally be changing with CUDA and nVidia now pushing their own workstation with multiple cards. As for multiple cards and monitors now, I have two workstations running 3 displays, one system has dual 30" DELL LCDs and a 50" Panasonic 1080p plasma (connected via DVI to HDMI cable) and the other system has a 30" LCD plus two 24" LCDs.
 
laguun said:
We are editing a lot from the Intel Mobo Controllers on several systems.
R3D datarates are pretty low compared to uncompressed HD or 2K.

Onboard we use sata, sas we have dedicated controllers - but that should not be necessary for r3d-editing which is only ~40-45 Mbyte / sec.
Click to expand...

I guess this goes to show how ignorant I am about the Red work flow... :watsup:

When I say R3d I thought I meant the full Red RAW... I thought R3D files were the Red Code 36 files... am I horribly wrong about that?

I am hoping to be able to edit single camera features shot on Scarlet, hopefully S35, or Red One. All I need is my two 24" and one production monitor, hopefully a 1080p, for color grading. I won't be doing any fancy render farms, one computer is all I'll get. I am thinking about Premiere or FC... I am hoping there will be a way to edit in Windows... I guess it would be Premiere with a Quadro card? I am definitely only thinking of Blu-Ray as my final... but I want to be able to do it right... and for me that would mean being able to have real time 4:4:4 1080... 2k would be sweet too of course, and anything above that is, by far, overkill for me. I don't know if that is even possible with only one computer but it doesn't sound that far off... I've been reading as much as I can hereon Reduser but obviously not everything sticks yet... so I don't mean to be a little third-grader pulling on you pants asking to have you guys explain quantum physics in terms I will grasp but... well I am. Help, pls. :watsup:

BTW, I am also seriously going to consider recording FF1080 or FF2k to use in a 1080 timeline if that is possible.
 
IMO raid-5 is false safety. ALL raid-5 I have seen that have faild, have also corrupted data in some way that was totally fubar, so in the end, it was just to re-do lost work.

Best performance vs price vs safety is just a raid-0 that is rsynced to an another raid-0. It just copies the difference, so the more often rsync is run, the faster it goes.

And another good info, is avoid use normal desktop drives in raids. Some desktop drives get stuck in internal error correction and stop responding, and falls out of raid sets. After a reboot all is fine, but if you have bad hair day, maybe 2 or 3 drives of 10 hang, and then your raid-5 may be toast.
 
laguun said:
SLI and multi-gpus are EXTREMLY powerful.
Most desktop-class softwares as adobe, speedgrade, scratch, combustion, redcine etc dont use it yet, so for red the software manufacturers have to catch up.
Click to expand...

Are you sure? I stumbled across this during my research for a new system I want to setup (like what you've got).

http://www.nvidia.com/object/builtforadobepros.html

Says, faster work and optimized for Adobe CS4. Of course, the catch is that we have to buy a Quadro CX which is in the $1700 range each. 3 of those needed I think to do the 3 way SLI correctly. Or, could you use just one of them and a lesser card for the other two and still get the same processing?

laguun said:
We are using it for exatcly this. 5 and 6 screen rocks.
I am typing this on a 24 24 24 42 quadmonitorsystem.
Click to expand...

Yes, we'd love to see pictures of a 5 monitor setup! The Gigabyte seems to be the best motherboard right now as you can do 3 way SLI with it. Haven't seen another i7 motherboard that can do that, plus its got two x16 and one x8 PCI Express slots

http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products...rd&ProductID=2957&ProductName=GA-EX58-EXTREME
.
 
The Gigabyte board looks nice. Seems that there are some complaints about 3-way SLI with it though and front panel connector positions relative to the x8 slot.

These motherboard manufacturers are designing these boards to offer SLI, but are not adding extra space between the x16 and x8 slots to accommodate wider video cards or additional cooling.
 
SLi support is not needed for a motherboard to handle multiple GPUs/multiple screens.

When people reference the term "SLi" they typically are referring to a mode of operation where multiple GPU's work together to provide maximum 3D frame rates single to a single monitor for their games.

If you just want 3 or 4 (or 5 or 6) monitors, you don't need SLi support. But you probably want to have at least an 8X PCIe slot for each GPU.
 
That's true. I forgot you don't need to tie the boards together for more monitor support. So if you chose the Quadro CX, would there be a benefit to having two of them to get even more processing power for CS4?
 
BOXXLabs said:
SLi support is not needed for a motherboard to handle multiple GPUs/multiple screens.
Click to expand...
Thats correct.
SLI adds the possibility to foucs several the power of several GPUs to one of the multiple screens, which non-SLI setups can´t.

Also, the newer flagships of ATI and Nvidia are SLI on one board.
Examples would be the Nvidia 9800GX2 or the ATI 3870 X2.

These cards have two processors SLId on one card. So, if 2 of those cards are SLId, 4 processors works on 2 cards.

BOXXLabs said:
When people reference the term "SLi" they typically are referring to a mode of operation where multiple GPU's work together to provide maximum 3D frame rates single to a single monitor for their games.
Click to expand...
Games are using SLI best so far, but SLI supports most decent programmed OpenGL / DirectX - intense Application and strongly improves the available memory bandwidth GPU-GPUram.



BOXXLabs said:
If you just want 3 or 4 (or 5 or 6) monitors, you don't need SLi support. But you probably want to have at least an 8X PCIe slot for each GPU.
Click to expand...
8x PCIe 2.0 or better 16x PCIe 2.0 per card is necessary, SLI is additional, not necessary, correct.

The price/performance sweetspot right now is a combination of:
Intel core i7 920 (~250€)
Motherboard X58 based (tested and good here are MSI and Gigabyte) (~200-250€)
12 GB Ram (~250-300€)
Nvidia GTX260 (~250€)
This is ~1000-1100€ total.

Add 6 or 8 Samsung Spinpoint F1 (~80€ per 1 TBb) or Seagates Barracudas (~120€ per 1.5 Tb) for 6-12 Tbytes of Storage for 400-960€. Regarding the Seagates, make sure to get the correct firmware, the elder firmwares had glitches.

Add a decent 8-12 bay case (80-400€) and a very good powersupply (80-100), Vista 64 and for 1500-2500€ you got a system which is outperforms most octas on dual xeon base for many applications.

OSX support on the X58 chipsets (and the ICH10R) isnt perfect yet.
 
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