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Single CPU workstation

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Carmel Bonnici

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Hi

I want to build a workstation in order to be able to handle Red code (4k raw) in Premiere pro and Redcine X Pro.
I would like to afford a 15K to 20K Computer but I can't.

I was thinking to buy the following
Intel® Core™ i7-4930K Processor
(12M Cache, up to 3.90 GHz)
Asus P9X79 Pro Motherboard
32Gb or 64db ram
PNY Nvidia Quadro K4000 Kepler Graphics Card

Re storage I will be using
4X7200rpm in raid 0 for data
1XSSd for system
1XSSd for rendering onto

I have some questions though.

Does this make sense at all?
Does the RedCine X Pro make full use of the K4000?
Does getting 64GB over 32 bring enough for the extra investment?

At the moment I am running on Adobe Premiere Pro6. (I think this is not able to make full use of the K4000)
Can anyone conferm that I have to upgrade to Premiere CS?

Thank you!
 
Maybe try posting in the Post-Production Workflow section. There are lots of smart opinionated posters there.

Probably ditch the K4000 for a Titan too.
 
I have a similar build that works well. I definitely agree that you probably want to swap out the K4000 for a TITAN Black Edition. You might even want to plan for 2 of them at some point, especially if you decide to finish in Resolve. Take a look at the Asus Rampage IV Black Edition as well, in case the slot arrangement and 4 additional internal SATA 6Gb/s ports are more amenable to your plans.

What questions do you have? There are some pretty savvy system builders on this forum.
 
I would recommend holding off just a bit, there are new Intel CPUs, including a couple new 8-core i7 desktop CPUs, shipping in just a couple weeks.

The K4000 is a slow dog of a GPU. You would be best served with one of the Titan GPUs. Build the system with plans to upgrade and/ or add additional GPUs into it. Make sure your motherboard can hold all the cards you want plus two GPUs. You'll want 4GB+ of video memory on your GPUs.

64GB over 32GB is recommended.

You will need to upgrade to Premiere CC if you want support for the latest RED color science, Dragon footage, GPU acceleration for R3D's and a number of other new features. CS6 has GPU acceleration for image manipulation and some rendering tasks. Does not support OpenCL (if you go with a non nVidia GPU). Does not support multiple GPUs. CS6 is deprecated and is no longer being worked on or upgraded.
 
All what Jeff said. Hold out a bit longer. Haswell-E desktop CPUs with 8 Cores and the new X99-chipset with support for DDR4 are coming.
I also wouldn't buy a K4000, better think about getting a Titan or GTX780. And keep in mind Nvidia's next highend-gaming chip isn't that far away.
About RAM? Totally get 64GB, or more.

As for your storage solution. I would not recommend to use onboard RAID-controllers and especially not with RAID0-configurations. Better add a real controller and use RAID5 or 6. RAID0 with 4 drives is way too risky...
 
Maik Müller said:
All what Jeff said. Hold out a bit longer. Haswell-E desktop CPUs with 8 Cores and the new X99-chipset with support for DDR4 are coming.
I also wouldn't buy a K4000, better think about getting a Titan or GTX780. And keep in mind Nvidia's next highend-gaming chip isn't that far away.
About RAM? Totally get 64GB, or more.

As for your storage solution. I would not recommend to use onboard RAID-controllers and especially not with RAID0-configurations. Better add a real controller and use RAID5 or 6. RAID0 with 4 drives is way too risky...
Click to expand...

I'm spec'ing a new portable system and thinking Thunderbolt 2 to a decent quality small raid enclosure may be the best route for high performance storage... even for a fixed system it has some benefits (I rarely do DAS anymore) - and you can get SSD levels of throughput from some of them.
 
RAID-0 with 4 drives is just fine and lots of people are working that way for performance reasons. But it is risky. Don't do it unless you have a good backup strategy in place. Onboard controllers are just fine for this purpose, but for all critical data, I would recommend a good dedicated RAID controller and a RAID-5 or RAID-6 setup. With 6+ drives you're going to get really good performance from a dedicated RAID system.
 
I would be going SSD all the way these days if I was rebuilding my system. I built a 4 drive 10k RPM RAID and for $300 I got a single 1TB SSD that's pretty much just as fast. Also 1/4 the chance of it dying, 1/4 the slots in my case and way less than 1/4 the heat. Depending on what you generally work on I would even consider buying 4x 1TB Samsung SSDs. If you want a big high capacity RAID I would put together six 4TB slow drives in a RAID 6.

Ditto Titan vs Quadro. I've easily used up 32GB before, so I wouldn't mind going 64GB.

Lastly Jeff, I thought Haswell-E was still 6 months out.
 
Gavin Greenwalt said:
Lastly Jeff, I thought Haswell-E was still 6 months out.
Click to expand...

Intel says they launch in Q3. So that's anytime starting next week thru August, I guess. There are lots of OEM test CPUs and various motherboards out in the channel now. ;) I guess if he needs the system right now and just can't wait. But I think it's worth holding off a bit longer. Intel is also promising the updated mobile CPU offerings in time for holiday shopping season -- i.e. MacBook Air and other UltraBooks and these low power CPUs and chipsets ship *after* the desktop updates this time around.

We should have the updated E5-V3 / Socket 2011-3 Xeons in about 6 to 8 months.

The upcoming chips to watch for are the i7-5930K and the i7-5960X. The 5930K is a 6-core 3.5GHz chip with 4GHz turbo, 15MB cache and 40 lanes of PCIe v3 along with DDR4-2133MHz RAM support. The 5960X is 8-core 3GHz with 4GHz turbo, 20MB cache, 40 lanes PCIe v3 and DDR4 support. Street prices should be about $625 and $995, respectively. The 5920K and 5930K CPUs should be available right out of the gate. The 5960X is said to be lagging a few weeks behind.
 
David Kuhn said:
I'm spec'ing a new portable system and thinking Thunderbolt 2 to a decent quality small raid enclosure may be the best route for high performance storage... even for a fixed system it has some benefits (I rarely do DAS anymore) - and you can get SSD levels of throughput from some of them.
Click to expand...
Thunderbolt 2 on PC is still not really an option at the moment. Only a few midrange-motherboards (so1150) come with a PCIe-card and one Gigabyte-board has it on-board. That Asus PCIe-card "ThunderboltEX II" should be available separately, but i can't find it anywhere.

I hope it becomes more common with the X99-chipset.

BTW, USB3.1 is coming too.


Jeff Kilgroe said:
RAID-0 with 4 drives is just fine and lots of people are working that way for performance reasons. But it is risky. Don't do it unless you have a good backup strategy in place. Onboard controllers are just fine for this purpose, but for all critical data, I would recommend a good dedicated RAID controller and a RAID-5 or RAID-6 setup. With 6+ drives you're going to get really good performance from a dedicated RAID system.
Click to expand...
Agreed, don't use it without a real backup-solution. And add a APC Smart-UPS or something to compensate for power-failures.

Those software-RAIDs are really sensitive when it comes to power-loss or blue-screens/crashs. Just one little "uncommon" reboot is enough to make my RAID1 going into rebuild-mode, which is really slow and brakes down system-speed for quite a while. My good old 3ware-controller on the other hand just keeps working as if nothing has happened.

I better not want to know what happens to a software-RAID0, especially with 4-drives, when a crash occurs at the wrong moment.

A 4port controller, something like a LSI MegaRAID SAS 9341-4i, doesn't cost alot of money anymore.
 
Maik Müller said:
Thunderbolt 2 on PC is still not really an option at the moment. Only a few midrange-motherboards (so1150) come with a PCIe-card and one Gigabyte-board has it on-board. That Asus PCIe-card "ThunderboltEX II" should be available separately, but i can't find it anywhere.

I hope it becomes more common with the X99-chipset.

BTW, USB3.1 is coming too.



Agreed, don't use it without a real backup-solution. And add a APC Smart-UPS or something to compensate for power-failures.

Those software-RAIDs are really sensitive when it comes to power-loss or blue-screens/crashs. Just one little "uncommon" reboot is enough to make my RAID1 going into rebuild-mode, which is really slow and brakes down system-speed for quite a while. My good old 3ware-controller on the other hand just keeps working as if nothing has happened.

I better not want to know what happens to a software-RAID0, especially with 4-drives, when a crash occurs at the wrong moment.

A 4port controller, something like a LSI MegaRAID SAS 9341-4i, doesn't cost alot of money anymore.
Click to expand...

I've not purchased it yet for any of them... but there's a TB card available for my Z820's, and I THINK that one of the new ZBooks comes with TB now... that's what got me thinking about that route. It appears (to me at least) that the MAC hardware vendors have been thinking more about the need for high capacity FAST storage for media apps. I'm not that familiar with the MAC market... but a quick search found units like the Lacie SSD Little Big disk - which would be perfect if it was maybe 4TB instead of 1... but even 1TB would be useful (and it's crazy portable).

I'm still tempted to just get a MBP... probably if AdobeCC subscriptions were OS Agnostic I'd do it... but they're not and since I'd have to run Windows most of the time I'm a bit concerned about driver issues... and 16GB seems a bit thin on memory too.
 
The Thunderbolt2 card for the Z820 (and it works in the Z420 and Z620) works just fine. It offers a single Thunderbolt2 port and there is a DisplayPort input on the card so you can run video from your GPU into the card and out to a Thunderbolt monitor if you want. I think B&H has the card for $130 or so. The newest ZBook has TB2, I don't know if it's shipping yet, I haven't paid attention to that.

Adobe CC subscriptions *ARE* OS agnostic. I switch between Windows and OSX all the time.

16GB RAM is the only real shortcoming of the Macbook Pro. It's killing me lately. The GPU is weak and there's not enough RAM to do real work. The 2013 (current) model has a much better GPU, but really needs a 32GB RAM option. I'm hoping when the newer ones come later this year they will have 32GB, hopefully even 64GB. I may just wait for Broadwell next year as we'll get more cores in the same power envelope, among other things.
 
HP Z820 has a Thunderbolt 2 option.
 
Thunderbolt 2 is available on Z87 and Z97 boards. The Asus Z97 Thunderbolt 2 board has a card. You can also buy the Thunderbolt 2 cards separately. There are many Laptops with thunderbolt at this point. So Thunderbolt is perfectly feasible on PC. Even though the Desktop and Mobile platform max at Quad Core right now Haswell is still good enough to edit and render with. Thunderbolt 2 still doesn't have the speed of SAS so it's not the ideal solution for workstation storage anyway. SAS would be far better especially with the 12Gbs cards and storage out now. The Thunderbolt chassis units are relatively the same price as SAS units. The only difference is the controller price. The Areca 12 Gbs SAS controller is really not that expensive considering the performance and Multiplexing support.
 
Last edited:
I agree on the storage side... for fixed storage I go with enterprise SAS arrays (EMC). Mobile is a trickier, I don't want to carry an 8 bay enclosure (maybe if it was 2.5" but I've not found a 2.5" only array) so it seems like SSD may be the best bet for high performance in a compact package.
 
Eric - you seeing any performance bumps from 6-8 drive arrays using 12Gbs host cards vs 6 (all other things equal)? Curious if the card alone squeezes more performance out of 6Gbs HDDs.
 
Jeff Kilgroe said:
RAID-0 with 4 drives is just fine and lots of people are working that way for performance reasons. But it is risky. Don't do it unless you have a good backup strategy in place. Onboard controllers are just fine for this purpose, but for all critical data, I would recommend a good dedicated RAID controller and a RAID-5 or RAID-6 setup. With 6+ drives you're going to get really good performance from a dedicated RAID system.
Click to expand...

Would anyone recommend the onboard raid controllers? Or just software raid 0.

I've read different opinions on this issue and was curious what red users thought.

Edit : raid 0
 
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