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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 :)

The Monolith - kick arse Red rendering PC!

Paul Leeming

Paul Leeming

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Location
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Hi all,

just thought I'd share my newly built PC specs with you all, in case you wanted to emulate it for yourselves.

"The Monolith" is a Core i7 PC built around the best the market currently has to offer, at a price that won't break the bank. It has 12GB of extremely fast RAM, 5.5TB of regular hard drive space and 372GB of SSD space, which is used in a 2x2 RAID0 combination of 128GB system drive (using Samsung SLC based SSDs) and 256GB scratch drive (using Patriot Memory MLC SSDs) for maximum throughput.

Note that whilst the price shown reflects buying it all new, in reality a lot of components transferred over from my last PC so for me personally it only cost around half of that. Chances are you already have a monitor, keyboard and mouse etc which can be reused, lowering the cost.

Note that this system is overclocked from standard by 1GHz, resulting in a stable 3.6GHz quad core, 8 thread system designed with one thing in mind - maximum rendering capability for Red footage! I've kept a dual width PCIe x16 slot open in the case to prepare for Red Rocket, since we don't currently have any info on its size requirements.

Just so you all know, I used to own a boutique computer sales and service company building high end machines, so this machine is the result of lots of experience in overclocking, coming initially from the gaming community. If you attempt this yourself, PLEASE know what you are doing or you WILL fry your new machine! If in doubt, get someone else to build it for you.

The only change I may make in the near future would be to add water cooling, in order to push the system a bit higher and make it a touch quieter (though it's quite good now all things considered).

Finally I've included a stress test screenshot to show you the system pushed as hard as possible using the Prime95 program in its maximum heat generation setting! :sifone:

Can't wait for Adobe CS4.1 to come out so I can play with the full RAW development data and get some rendering benchmarks going. May the best PC win!

Oh yes, I'm running the Release Candidate of Windows 7 x64 too and have to say it is by far the most stable RC I've ever encountered. I'm perfectly happy to deploy this in my office as it has been rock solid for me.

Comments and questions welcome, I'm here to help! :thumbsup:

Full specs:

The_Monolith_Specs.jpg


Stress test (click on image to see full size version 1920x1200):



Cheers,

Paul
 
The guts of the system (before I replaced the CPU cooling fan with the Scythe):

IMG_4876s.jpg


12GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3-1600 CAS8 Tri-Channel RAM:

IMG_4890s.jpg


Four SSDs attached to the case with sticky velcro - bless solid state technology:

IMG_4891s.jpg


Front facia showing I/O stuff:

IMG_4895s.jpg


Cheers,

Paul
 
How is Windows 7 treating you? Have you had any compatibility issues with it, or is it all smooth sailing? Are you running the beta or the release candidate?

EDIT: Wow, just looked back at the post. Question is retracted.

Looks like a sick box and a sick OC job.
 
Dude - that is SICK!!! :thumbsup:
 
karapetkov said:
Can you play Tetris on this?

:beer:
Click to expand...
Hehehehe!

This thing is more like SkyNet.... Tetris is likely to play you!! :rofl:

I'm scared to play this thing at Chess lest it becomes self-aware and decides to wipe out humanity....

Cheers,

Paul
 
Oh and thanks to RAID0 SSDs, Photoshop, Premiere etc just OPEN when you ask them, in around 1 second! No disk thrashing, waiting for things to load.

If you haven't tried an OS on an SSD, you're in for a surprise (of the WOW kind)!

Windows 7 RC has been smooth sailing all the way. I noticed that Thunderbird has a strange compatibility bug with Delete All Images being greyed out, but other than that no issues to speak of. If Microsoft released this tomorrow no one would ever know it was a Release Candidate. It really is that solid!

Cheers,

Paul
 
It will be machines like this, PC's with a lot of horsepower, that will hopefully put an end to this offline/online crap that the Mac and Final Cut are built on. Real time HD playback and basic effects on the timeline without the need for constant rendering will hopefully soon be a reality.

Real time for the masses! Keep us posted on its editing performance.
 
Sam Roberts said:
PC's with a lot of horsepower, that will hopefully put an end to this offline/online crap that the Mac and Final Cut are built on. Real time HD playback and basic effects on the timeline without the need for constant rendering will hopefully soon be a reality.
Click to expand...

It already is if you aren't coming from R3D. I dare say even with Paul's awesome CPU and memory he would be struggling to decode to 1080p in real time and apply effects, regardless of the NLE chosen. 720p is a different story, though, as you can kinda get away with 1/4 res decode which is realtime on 8 cores already.
 
Vincent Follézou said:
very nice PC, seem strong and powerfull. Will definitely try to remplace my raptor OS disk by a SSD, or RAID SSD.
Click to expand...
i'm curious why you would want to do this. As far as a user experience goes, there would be an improvement, if you're launching a lot of programs, but for editing, the HD is going to be spinning at nearly all times, and the performance difference becomes negligible, it wouldn't affect render or encode times at all. And when you factor in the expense and low capacity of SSDs HDDs look much much better.
 
I use a raptor for my os and a RAID0 4*500go drive for edit and VFX. I use lot of software in the same time, for exemple AECS4 is so slow to open even with a raptor. Before SSD drive, HD used to be always the thing who slow down your computer.
 
Nice system you have there, Paul.


One suggestion - new Nvidia GTX 275 is currently better bang for the buck and it's only about $40 more than 260. (nitpicking) :-)
 
True, but the GTX260 is coming out of my previous computer so it cost me nothing in terms of the upgrade :)
 
Paul Leeming said:
I'm scared to play this thing at Chess lest it becomes self-aware and decides to wipe out humanity....
Click to expand...

I would like to play global thermonuclear war...
:head_explode:
 
This is totally a Mac Pro, I'm about to build a Mac with the same motherboard.

How are the SSD's working with R3D's?
 
I can play back (in Adobe Premiere CS4.1) at half resolution no problems at 24p. I guess that's the equivalent of Scratch performance etc.

Right now, looking at Red Rocket and my current workflow, I have to say that unless you need real time 4K output or HD-SDI playback to an external deck, Red Rocket is not a necessity with this computer at all. Given that transcoding/rendering to final output format is now the only time I have to render, this can be done before going to bed with the likelihood of a finished project ready to burn to your preferred media by morning.

SSDs just make the system throughput faster. The OS and apps boot almost instantly and my scratch SSDs allow me to do high speed footage ingest and playback as well as maximum bandwidth when writing 4K TIFFs etc.

HTH

Paul
 
Separate SS scratch. Good idea.
 
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