New Workstation Build - i7 X99, Titan X, Overclocking...

[Will Keir]

Is there a Mac Friendly version of the 980 Ti or Titan X? One that uses the EFI for bootcamp?

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Is there a Mac Friendly version of the 980 Ti or Titan X? One that uses the EFI for bootcamp?

Your best bet is to talk with MacVidCards. The 980 TI should be a nice companion to the old Mac towers -- provided you have at least 8 cores in there at 2.6GHz+ and enough RAM to drive the thing. The down-side is the memory and PCIe bandwidth are seriously lacking and outdated in these Mac towers now and each new GPU that comes along becomes less usable by the old hardware in terms of maximizing its abilities.

The GTX 980 works great in a Mac Pro 5,1. If you want EFI support for pre-OS boot options and other such functionality, you'll have to get it flashed by MacVidCards to add that support. For general use in the OS after the drivers are loaded, an off-the-shelf card works fine. The 6GB 980 TI *SHOULD* also work the same way, but I have not seen any real reports of it yet. I no longer have any Mac Pro towers here to play with.

I would not recommend the Titan X -- they require supplemental power and the system really can't exploit them. IMO, the current 980 is really about all you'll be able to drive the system. There comes a point where continuously upgrading the GPU isn't going to help. The RAM and PCIe slots are the bottlenecks, not the CPUs or GPUs.

What GPU are you running in the system now? There comes a point where maybe the money is better spent by putting it into the cookie jar for a new system.

 

[Will Keir]

Jeff,

I'm running the EVGA GTX 680 Mac Editing. I'm hoping this graphics upgrade will give me at least a 20% FPS improvement to make it worth it. Hopefully more like 45% from what I've seen with the online benchmarks.

I'm I limited to PCI 1.0 or can I get 2.0? My Mac is a 4,1. 8 Core 2.9ghz with 48 GB of Ram.

My big question is when driving multiple 4K screens. Is that going to make me want the Titan X with 12 GB of vRAM. Your point is well taken. Already with a RRX Card, is the Titan just going to shutdown my system due to not enough power when the machine is running full speed.

The system you build. What did that run you for the tower alone? I don't want to give up the Mac OS all together but it's a sign of the times...

Your best bet is to talk with MacVidCards. The 980 TI should be a nice companion to the old Mac towers -- provided you have at least 8 cores in there at 2.6GHz+ and enough RAM to drive the thing. The down-side is the memory and PCIe bandwidth are seriously lacking and outdated in these Mac towers now and each new GPU that comes along becomes less usable by the old hardware in terms of maximizing its abilities.

The GTX 980 works great in a Mac Pro 5,1. If you want EFI support for pre-OS boot options and other such functionality, you'll have to get it flashed by MacVidCards to add that support. For general use in the OS after the drivers are loaded, an off-the-shelf card works fine. The 6GB 980 TI *SHOULD* also work the same way, but I have not seen any real reports of it yet. I no longer have any Mac Pro towers here to play with.

I would not recommend the Titan X -- they require supplemental power and the system really can't exploit them. IMO, the current 980 is really about all you'll be able to drive the system. There comes a point where continuously upgrading the GPU isn't going to help. The RAM and PCIe slots are the bottlenecks, not the CPUs or GPUs.

What GPU are you running in the system now? There comes a point where maybe the money is better spent by putting it into the cookie jar for a new system.

 

[JP Castel]

Hey Will,

I think I might have gotten one of the first EFI Flashed GTX 980 TIs from Macvidcards. Mostly cause I live very close to runyon! The card runs great. I'm in an old MP 5.1 that is upgraded to the nines with 3.46 6-Cores and SSD PCI SATA 3. Running great! I am feeling the slowness of older connections, PCI 2.0 and sata 2, as Jeff had mentioned and will soon jump ship to a full pc build but the best part is that I can bring my GTX 980 Ti with me when I do. I run one 4k monitors and a second 1440p monitor from the display ports no problem. Recently I reinstalled bootcamp in an EFI enviorment with 8.1 and have been happily playing Far Cry 4 in 4K! Drivers aren't completely optimized for PC yet but they are coming!

Also I'm pretty sure this is the MP 4,1 https://support.apple.com/kb/SP506?locale=en_US
Looks like it has PCI 2.0 x 16 like me.

 

[Will Keir]

Thx JP. 300watt max power for all PCI-E slots. Damn. I have a RRX Card too!

Hey Will,

I think I might have gotten one of the first EFI Flashed GTX 980 TIs from Macvidcards. Mostly cause I live very close to runyon! The card runs great. I'm in an old MP 5.1 that is upgraded to the nines with 3.46 6-Cores and SSD PCI SATA 3. Running great! I am feeling the slowness of older connections, PCI 2.0 and sata 2, as Jeff had mentioned and will soon jump ship to a full pc build but the best part is that I can bring my GTX 980 Ti with me when I do. I run one 4k monitors and a second 1440p monitor from the display ports no problem. Recently I reinstalled bootcamp in an EFI enviorment with 8.1 and have been happily playing Far Cry 4 in 4K! Drivers aren't completely optimized for PC yet but they are coming!

Also I'm pretty sure this is the MP 4,1 https://support.apple.com/kb/SP506?locale=en_US
Looks like it has PCI 2.0 x 16 like me.

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

If you have an RRX card in the mix, I wouldn't mess with the GPU upgrade. RRX accelerates R3D workflows more than any GPU setup you can install in that Mac tower.

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

I upgraded from a Quadro4000 for Mac to the GeForce GTX 980/4GB in slot #1 (RR-X in slot #2). No TDP issues and I was able to avoid the hassle of installing an aux PSU. I mainly came to the party for 2160P over HDMI to feed UHD displays. Happy to report that transcodes are at least twice as fast, as well as snappier performance in the Adobe suite overall. Since the RR-X is handing the decode, the 980 is free to do the encoding of the ProRes/H.264/etc files, which is nice.

Cheers - #19

 

[Will Keir]

Is this a 4,1 or 5,1 tower Blair? What's the power draw for your 980 4 GB?

I upgraded from a Quadro4000 for Mac to the GeForce GTX 980/4GB in slot #1 (RR-X in slot #2). No TDP issues and I was able to avoid the hassle of installing an aux PSU. I mainly came to the party for 2160P over HDMI to feed UHD displays. Happy to report that transcodes are at least twice as fast, as well as snappier performance in the Adobe suite overall. Since the RR-X is handing the decode, the 980 is free to do the encoding of the ProRes/H.264/etc files, which is nice.

Cheers - #19

 

[Alan Skinner]

Jeff,

OK, Build working. all same components as yours. Case, CPU, Mem, VidCard. I have the Areca card and 3 6 tb seagate SAS. (going to add more later prolly) The drives are now RAID 0 and I can see the volume.

Areca in Slot 1 and Titan X in slot 3/4.

This setup screams!!! (and I haven't even overclocked it yet!)

Question: What stripe size for RAID 0 did you choose? I went with 64 (default) this time around. (My work will be with large point cloud files and RED files so not a million little tiny files)

Question: When I installed the Areca card, i was getting two m-board beeps at boot and one on shutdown until I got drives configured. The two beeps at boot have stopped but the one at shutdown is still occurring. Any ideas on that one?

EDIT: Actually, still getting two beeps at start. Guess I'll have to look it up...

 

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Is this a 4,1 or 5,1 tower Blair? What's the power draw for your 980 4 GB?

I'm running a 5,1 12core with 24GB of RAM. I suspect that more RAM would really maximize the performance, but the RAM sticks would be "sunk" cost immediately in an EOL platform... I have never properly measured power draw for the 980, but based on fan speeds and consistent responsiveness in use, I don't believe it's being throttled - or if it is, it's got to be minimal.

To me, the 980 is a better fit than the Titan-X due to lower TDP and the various bottlenecks of the old towers kneecapping the potential of the Titan-X. I'd put the cost savings aside for investment in whatever comes next - which is almost certain to be faster and cheaper. The exception to that would be if you had near term plans to put the Titan-X into a new system, and only planning to use it in the tower for less than six months. YMMV.

Cheers - #19

 

[Michael Winokur]

Jeff, What do you think of one 12gb Titan X vs. two 6gb 980ti cards vs. a 980ti and some kind of compute card?

Thanks

 

[Troy Smith]

I get beeps whenever turning computer on with the areca 1882ix

Jeff,

OK, Build working. all same components as yours. Case, CPU, Mem, VidCard. I have the Areca card and 3 6 tb seagate SAS. (going to add more later prolly) The drives are now RAID 0 and I can see the volume.

Areca in Slot 1 and Titan X in slot 3/4.

This setup screams!!! (and I haven't even overclocked it yet!)

Question: What stripe size for RAID 0 did you choose? I went with 64 (default) this time around. (My work will be with large point cloud files and RED files so not a million little tiny files)

Question: When I installed the Areca card, i was getting two m-board beeps at boot and one on shutdown until I got drives configured. The two beeps at boot have stopped but the one at shutdown is still occurring. Any ideas on that one?

EDIT: Actually, still getting two beeps at start. Guess I'll have to look it up...

 

[Alan Skinner]

Hi Troy, Thanks for the note. So, maybe it is normal...

Others could chime in please?

Is it the M-Board or is the Areca beeping, I wonder?

 

[Will Keir]

If you have an RRX card in the mix, I wouldn't mess with the GPU upgrade. RRX accelerates R3D workflows more than any GPU setup you can install in that Mac tower.

I'm hoping I can get away with it. Usually, I'm using RedCine - X with the RRX Card. I don't believe the GFX is running hard in RCX, so hopefully I can get away with using one or the other at max and not both.

Same for games, the RRX is sleeping, while the GFX is getting maximized running Windows from bootcamp. I don't play much, but occasionally I get a project for gaming/recording/filming. The GTX 980 Ti might even allow a few sessions of 4k Gaming, worth a look to see where the gaming industry has gone because of what started here, which was inevitable anyway but I do credit RED for pushing us into the 4K frontier.

Where I might max both cards is in Adobe, FCP X or Resolve...

Blair, what programs are you using? You've never noticed the RRX and GFX card overdrawing your PSU? Looks like you have a happy system, which is encouraging.

I'm running a 5,1 12core with 24GB of RAM. I suspect that more RAM would really maximize the performance, but the RAM sticks would be "sunk" cost immediately in an EOL platform... I have never properly measured power draw for the 980, but based on fan speeds and consistent responsiveness in use, I don't believe it's being throttled - or if it is, it's got to be minimal.

To me, the 980 is a better fit than the Titan-X due to lower TDP and the various bottlenecks of the old towers kneecapping the potential of the Titan-X. I'd put the cost savings aside for investment in whatever comes next - which is almost certain to be faster and cheaper. The exception to that would be if you had near term plans to put the Titan-X into a new system, and only planning to use it in the tower for less than six months. YMMV.

Cheers - #19

Thanks Blair, you have been more than helpful.

 

[Jason Osterday]

Troy - You should get a beep upon startup. That is normal for Areca HBA's. The Thunderbolt Chassis do it as well. If you get a long solid deep that's when you should be alarmed (Drive failure). The single short beep is to allow you to audibly confirm that the raid card is firing up with the machine posting.

Jeff, What do you think of one 12gb Titan X vs. two 6gb 980ti cards vs. a 980ti and some kind of compute card?

Michael - That really depends on your software and the tasks at hand. If you're looking for playback, a single Titan-X will likely give the best performance on a machine that can feed it. If you're looking for transcode/render speed the dual 980Ti's will likely edge out the Titan. The GUI card paired with a 980Ti does you no benefit at this point in the game. It did a year or two ago, but now apps no longer rely on a dedicated GUI card and simply recognize any GPU installed as a compute card.

Still, this depends on what apps you're using. If you aren't doing much resolve work (or non at all), I'd stick with the best single GPU you can afford. You won't see major improvements within RCX transcodes and Premiere only uses dual GPU's for render. Also, keep in mind that memory intensive apps won't stack the total GPU memory. Memory is utilized per card, so 12GB on a Titan is more effective than 12GB from a pair of 6GB GTX980's even though the theory would be "add them up for a total amount of effective memory".

 

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Troy - You should get a beep upon startup. That is normal for Areca HBA's. The Thunderbolt Chassis do it as well. If you get a long solid deep that's when you should be alarmed (Drive failure). The single short beep is to allow you to audibly confirm that the raid card is firing up with the machine posting.

Correct. I would be concerned about the beep on shut-down. Should just be the start-up beep to indicate the RAID system is active and normal.

 

[David Moffitt]

So, are you seeing any improvement to the Titan's?

To (finally) respond to this: I did some test grades with some 4k (UHD) Blackmagic ProRes 422 HQ footage over the weekend. Turned the voltage up on the Titans to +68mV and added 395Mhz to the RAM overclock. This thing is an absolute beast and that's with just a 4790K OC'd to 4.6Ghz. I am planning on upgrading to X99 / 5820 or 5930k (the 60X isn't in the budget sadly) soon as I feel more CPU / more nodes in resolve would be a good match.

I took my Mac Pro in to Apple for the THIRD TIME - they've now replaced both GPUs and can't figure out why I get screen corruption and glitches and why it's USELESS running Resolve (and I get the same trying to use tools like Magic Bullet Looks and other things in FCPX). It's a 6-core machine, the D500s should be able to handle Resolve. SHOULD.

Instead this is what I get. So yeah, going to continue to look into using my PC instead, Apple seems to have given up on the Pro market. They're offering to give me a new 12-core D700 machine but it's still going to be a slacker vs the Titans / 6 or 8 core PC...

EDIT: TO BE 100% CLEAR THAT GLITCHING IS MY MAC PRO - the Titans are running brilliantly, no issues.

Edit 2: sorry for the potato quality above, vimeo link (carrot quality? it's still low res, emailed from my phone while at the apple store):

 

[Elizabeth Lowrey]

The last computer I built was in late 2009, and I've been using it ever since. At 23.96 fps, 2:1 5K format, and 8:1 compression, I've never been able to play R3D clips for more than about 8 seconds continuously at greater than 1/8 debayer, and I can't come close to that now, I suppose because of junk building up in the system over time . . . registry, extra processes running that I haven't stopped from auto start, etc. This hasn't been a problem for me before now because the personal passion project I bought the Epic for kept getting pushed back and back and now has changed form entirely from a documentary to a traditional scripted narrative. Filming likely won't begin for at least a year, editing no earlier than 2017, and I don't anticipate doing my own VFX (there will be a few) or color grading. So all I really need for that project is to be able to play R3Ds at 23.96 fps without dropping frames in a 1/4 or preferably a 1/2 debayer. If I could also do full 5K HD format at 29.97 fps, that would be even better for the odd project that I might see in that format over the next few years.

I would be content to wait and upgrade the computer when I actually start filming and reviewing footage in a year or so, but I got sucked into doing a three-camera dance event video shot with 3 HD Panasonic cameras, all recording in AVC format, two capturing at 59.94 1080P and one at 59.94 720P. I will be delivering final edit at the latter spec.

The problem is my system is choking in Sony Vegas trying to playback all three streams of video at once, something I did not experience three years ago when I edited 3 sony EX-1s (mpeg 2 compression) at 59.94 720P. I don't think it's a HDD throughput issue as I am using a 4 disc RAID with dedicated 3ware controller. I think it's either a memory (only 8 GB) or processor issue, or system degradation issue, or some combination thereof. So I'm going through this thread with great interest in terms of building a system now that will easily handle 3 streams of HD AVC at 60 fps but will serve me well for my film project in a couple of years where I'll be dealing with Epic files. But my needs and BUDGET for a new system are modest in comparison to what Jeff and some of the other users in the thread are reporting.

So my question for Jeff or anyone else that might care to respond, I'd like to build a system based on an Asus implementation of the x99 chipset and one of the newer corei7 processors that can deliver at least the performance needs outlined above. A single nVidia Titan X would be great for the GPU, but I'd like to limit my spending to around 3K, including a system SSD (256 to 512 GB) and a modest 4 disc workspace RAID with dedicated controller in the main enclosure. I will likely not be reusing anything from the existing computer, except monitor, keyboard, mouse, and perhaps a bluray drive.

Is my goal doable, and, if so, what is the priority in terms of the following hardware in getting great playback of R3D both in REDCine and either Vegas or Adobe Premiere CC?

CPU cores/threads/speed
Amount of RAM
Type of GPU
HDD bandwidth

Right now I'm toying with the idea of:

Core i7 5920K (at $389, nearly $700 cheaper than the 5960X, 6/12 instead of 8/16 cores/threads and 28 versus 40 PCIe lanes)
Asus X99-PRO/USB 3.1 ($325)
32 GB of DDR 4 RAM

Coupled with a dedicated RAID controller and 4 discs, is that likely to get me 1/2 playback of 24 or 30 fps 5K R3D files? Would the biggest variable in fact be which GPU I used and, if so, would opting for the Titan X put me over the top on my goal?

 

[Eric Bowen]

Unfortunately Vegas 13 Pro will be your biggest limitation on performance with their current GPU acceleration model. Vegas doesn't have near the GPU acceleration performance Adobe does and 13 Pro still has significant stability or performance problems depending on which GPU acceleration you use. Vegas Open CL performs better than their implementation of Cuda but the stability is far worse. Cuda performs ok but the stability is much better. So we still recommend and sell Nvidia cards to Vegas users. However we also recommend they start looking at another editor since Vegas is a shadow of what it was potential wise years ago. Do not get the 5820K. If your going to make the move to X99 atleast get the 5930K. The 5820K is limited PCI-E lanes and the ram compatibility with higher speed DDR4 is far more suspect. 32GB of ram would be a good start as would that Asus board. I would suggest a Nvidia 980GTX or 980TI card for video at this point if budget is available for 1 of those.

 

[Elizabeth Lowrey]

Thanks for the reply, Eric. I've been using Vegas for 12 years but actually don't do much video work (I'm a passion project person, pretty much, and have been in writing mode for years). I bought CS4 in 2009 but I MUCH preferred the intuitive interface, agnosticism to format, and general ease of use of Vegas to Premiere at that time, so I never made the switch. In fact I just updgraded from Vegas Pro 11 to Pro 13 while they had a sale because 11 wouldn't read the MXF files generated from one of the Panasonic P2 cameras used on this project but 13 would. However I had already pretty much resigned myself to the reality that I was going to have to switch to Adobe when I did my film because that's where all the integration is with RED, and that was BEFORE I realized what you were saying about GPU utilization.

That said, I still think Vegas 13 would and should be capable of 3 HD camera playback at 59.94 based on my experience with Vegas Pro 11 and my current computer as it was performing three years ago. I archived some of the old EX-1 footage shot at 720P that I used on that project, and it now relentlessly stutters and drops frames when I have three cameras playing back, indicating my system itself is not nearly as tuned as it was 3 years ago But I don't have time or inclination to retune a computer this old for a project like this when an upgrade is needed anyway just to be able to PLAY R3D files at any kind of decent debayer. So, for the sake of my inquiry, assume I will be moving to Adobe CC for all my RED editing work and that I will be playing back those files in REDCIne or Adobe.

Do you think a system like I outlined above as modified by your suggestions would play back 5K 23.96 fps footage in REDCine at 1/2 debayer without dropping frames?