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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 :)

Rocket-X was working now it Stopped & vanished from PCI list

M

Michael Gregory

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I received my Rocket-X today and it installed without a hitch and was running great. Was is the problem, now out of nowhere my playback has ground to a snail's pace and when I look at the about Mac section the card does not appear. It did originally. I have not installed any software or changed any hardware settings. It is literally like it just disappeared. I have reinstalled the Driver, over and over, deleted the preferences files in the Library but still nothing.

Any ideas would be greatly appreciated.

Michael
 
Hi Michael, Did you reinstall the "package" for Red Cine X , that is on Red's site as the download accompaniment to the driver, as well and cold boot the computer and chassis, if the card is in one?

If you are in the factory testing program and have the alpha firmware and Cine X one off pieces, be sure that you are running the correct one off version of Cine X, for the alpha firmware. If you roll back, it is necessary to match the firmware to the Cine X version in the accompanying installer package.


thank you very much

Fury
 
Last edited:
Fury,

I didn't reinstall Red Cine X. I have done several cold boots, the card is in PCIe slot 2 of a 2010 Mac Pro 5,1. It did work just fine then it stopped that is the funny part???? I will try reinstalling RCPX.

Michael
 
I reinstalled Red Cine X as well as removed the card, restarted the machine, shut down, reinstalled card and software following the manual again step by step and the machine doesn't see the card. I wonder if it just went bad????

Michael
 
Well, if the firmware and the CineX versions are the same ones that are on the Red.com site and you boot that Cine X version (with the driver) in your application folder, odd. Ticket time, AFAIK. Let us know, what the fix is, when you get there. One other thought. Did you actually get to reinstall the RRX firmware, or did you get messages that at least some of the pieces were already installed.

thank you very much
Fury
 
It doesn't see the card so the firmware installer says no card present. I really appreciate your help and will post the fix when I get one.... may be it is just a bad card???
 
I would but I don't have another mac pro 5,1 unfortunately. Again, it worked fine, actually great, then it somehow went offline???
 
OTOH,

My RRX has worked flawlessly, in old Mac Pro and external chassis to Retine and other Mac Pros. Hopefully a one off issue.

Thank you very much

Fury
 
Michael: please contact support so we can work with you to resolve this
 
Rob, I contacted my Bomb Squad guy Grant who set up tech support. It is on its way back to you now. Thanks for the support.
 
I just received my replacement Rocket-X and it is functioning well. I have it in Sonnet TB2 enclosure right now. RCP-X isn't happy about the fact that despite the fact that Sonnet advertises a 16x mechanical connection and an 8x electrical, RCP-X is saying the real connection is 4x. This is probably due to the 4 lane nature of TB. I have both the new 12 core Mac Pro and the old 12 Core with true PCI slots so I will test in each and let you guys know how it performs.

MWG
 
Hi Michael,

I just put my RRX in The Sonnet Tb2 chassis, as well. I would be interested in your results, as I just finished testing a 4.1GB clip of 6K 2:1, exported to Prores 422HQ 1920, QT XML, from at to SSD on late 2013 MBPR 16 gb. The Beta builds of RRX and Cine X showed just shy of 6 X faster than the non RRX transcode.

Thank you very much

Fury
 
Nick,

Is RCPX giving you a message that Rocket-X requires a 16 lane PCIe slot and is only functioning at 4x in the Sonnet TB2 box? I have the same box and got this message when I tried it.

Michael
 
Yes
 
Red Rocket-X Update and Info

Red Rocket-X Update and Info

First Grant and Chris from Red replaced my card and now it works flawlessly. However I do have some insights. The RRX is much more powerful than a standard Rocket. It is built for 16 lane PCIe bus. ALL Thunderbolt (1 and 2) enclosures are limited to 4 PCIe lanes. At this time I am not sure how much of the PCIe bandwidth that RRX is using but according to post it is only use 1 of 3 cores that built into the card. I have read report here that they have the card running at more than 60fps in FF6k. I had a new 12 core mac pro with D700s and 64Gb ram literally going to be shipped this last week.... after a two month delay. I cancelled it the day before it shipped. I ordered a used 2012 mac pro, upgraded it with Twelve 3.46 Ghz Westemere processors, 128 Gb of ram, an internal 3 Tb SSD eSATA Areca Raid all for about the same amount as the new mac pro. However this didn't solve my GPU issue. I wanted something faster than the 2013 MacPro (Dual FirePro D700s), so I added a Cubix PCI expander. This is the real deal, no flimsy Thunderbolt cable, this connects to the PCIe host controller via 4 cables that look like they could power your house. I then put Nvidia K5000 Mac Quadro in the the double wide PCIe slot (slot number 1) then used the Slot 2 (the only remaining 16 lane slot in a MacPro) to connect the Cubix box. In the Cubix box I mounted the RRX in the first slot, and then put THREE (3) Radeon R9 280x GPUs. Now for the best part, not only is each card running at the full 16 lane speed, I know have 4 GPUs, each of which is more powerful than the GPUs in the new MacPro.

The result. According to Barefeats.com, the new MacPro Runs the the LuxMark OpenCL bench mark at 3483 (Ksamples/sec). My machine runs the same bench mark at 8634!!!!

So what does this mean. It means I can now render FF6k faster than real time, since FCPX doesn't have a frame counter per se, it will render an out an hour of video at FF6k in about 40 minutes.... The only downside is the room where all this happening gets pretty warm and I have had to add additional airflow to keep it below sauna temperatures.

I have spent a ton of time on this and would be happy to share the things I have learned with anyone who is interested.

BTW, the reason that I used the K5000 Mac Quadro is I couldn't get any other card to drive a 4k monitor in OS 10.9.2. The machine would be faster with all R9 280x. Also the R9 290x uses a different architecture and while it will function as a GPU you can not use it for the GUI or as your boot card.

Peace
 
Michael Gregory said:
First Grant and Chris from Red replaced my card and now it works flawlessly. However I do have some insights. The RRX is much more powerful than a standard Rocket. It is built for 16 lane PCIe bus. ALL Thunderbolt (1 and 2) enclosures are limited to 4 PCIe lanes. At this time I am not sure how much of the PCIe bandwidth that RRX is using but according to post it is only use 1 of 3 cores that built into the card. I have read report here that they have the card running at more than 60fps in FF6k. I had a new 12 core mac pro with D700s and 64Gb ram literally going to be shipped this last week.... after a two month delay. I cancelled it the day before it shipped. I ordered a used 2012 mac pro, upgraded it with Twelve 3.46 Ghz Westemere processors, 128 Gb of ram, an internal 3 Tb SSD eSATA Areca Raid all for about the same amount as the new mac pro. However this didn't solve my GPU issue. I wanted something faster than the 2013 MacPro (Dual FirePro D700s), so I added a Cubix PCI expander. This is the real deal, no flimsy Thunderbolt cable, this connects to the PCIe host controller via 4 cables that look like they could power your house. I then put Nvidia K5000 Mac Quadro in the the double wide PCIe slot (slot number 1) then used the Slot 2 (the only remaining 16 lane slot in a MacPro) to connect the Cubix box. In the Cubix box I mounted the RRX in the first slot, and then put THREE (3) Radeon R9 280x GPUs. Now for the best part, not only is each card running at the full 16 lane speed, I know have 4 GPUs, each of which is more powerful than the GPUs in the new MacPro.

The result. According to Barefeats.com, the new MacPro Runs the the LuxMark OpenCL bench mark at 3483 (Ksamples/sec). My machine runs the same bench mark at 8634!!!!

So what does this mean. It means I can now render FF6k faster than real time, since FCPX doesn't have a frame counter per se, it will render an out an hour of video at FF6k in about 40 minutes.... The only downside is the room where all this happening gets pretty warm and I have had to add additional airflow to keep it below sauna temperatures.

I have spent a ton of time on this and would be happy to share the things I have learned with anyone who is interested.

BTW, the reason that I used the K5000 Mac Quadro is I couldn't get any other card to drive a 4k monitor in OS 10.9.2. The machine would be faster with all R9 280x. Also the R9 290x uses a different architecture and while it will function as a GPU you can not use it for the GUI or as your boot card.

Peace
Click to expand...

Seems like people are starting to realize that for less than the cost of a nMP that is specced out the way we'd need it, and the added expense of external TBolt chassis, you can get an old MP and soup it up with PCIe cards and internal RAID, and in a few ways it'll actually be more powerful than a nMP. Not to mention the fact that GPU cards don't work in TBolt expansion chassis...or that an RR-X card is going to function better in x16 slot than in a TBolt chassis...

Of course once the software we use gets optimized to work with the nMP, that could all change.
 
I got my RRX today and the standard "4x PCI only, you need 16X for RRX to work properly" message. I couldn't get video out to my Flanders, and transcodes with the RRX and without were the same speed (nMP 12 core, AMD 700s) I really have no idea if the RRX is even working or if it's use sitting there looking at my machine and thinking "I wish I could help". I'm wondering if I need this thing at all, it's pretty expensive, will there be solutions in the future to make it valuable to me? With out the RRX (and with it) 6K transcodes to 4K ProRes files is about 10 frames a sec. It's not unbearable, much of the time I can deal with 10 frames a sec. and playback in RCX is pretty fast with a few seconds of buffering. Help me here, what have I done? what should I do?

EDIT: I'm getting the feeling that RRX and thunderbolt expansion is a no go.
 
Hi Mark,

I'll have some grime a bit later, but the video out from RRX is not enabled, unless you revecied a special firmware, which I am not aware of, at this point. The video display port is supposed to be enabled-hopefully shortly.

Thank you very much

Fury
 
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