Video rendering machine

[swancake]

Hey people, want to put together a video rendering rig for premiere pro cs5.5, wondering if there are any experts here that can make the decisions a little easier, or clearer

Any advice would be very much appreciated, 3 days of research and I'm still not sure I'm making the right choices (I am limited in knowledge)

cpu: i7 3930K
mobo: rampage iv extreme or asrock extreme 11
dimm: g.skill tridentx 32gb or g.skill ripjawsz 32gb
gpu: mercury playback important, but also want to use 3 screens so...
gtx 590 (already own), gtx 680 classified, gtx 690
Can use hack on duel gpu so premiere pro can harness the CUDA cores.

power: corsair ax1200 gold
case: cosmos 2 or similar large case
cooling: h100i, yes there are better cooling solutions out there, but I'm not sure I'm ready for that kind of techness, or more accurately, if a h100i can do a sufficient job, I'm happy and lazy.

storage: going for a ssd face melter, revodrive3 x2 480gb, have a couple of ocz vertex already, open to suggestions on this. All I know is that I will run a ssd system with ssd scratch drives, and a huge amount of storage on standard hdd, maybe 10tb considering the size of all this time lapse stuff I'm doing. NAS?


Thanks for your time

 

[nothingspecial]

First thought is check the Adobe website for which cards are officially supported by CS5 for the GPU acceleration. I know there's a hack to get it to work with unsupported cards (used it to get my 560Ti working - very handy). If the 590 is on there, it might be worth sticking with it, or even looking around for another one.

And just read that you already knew about the hack, so nevermind, but I'll leave that bit in anyway....

For the external storage, it might be worth looking for an eSATA box, and filling it up with WD Blacks or Seagate Barracudas. Will be quicker than the NAS. The Revodrives might be overkill, but if you can afford them I won't put you off. Pair of Corsair Force3 GTs would probably be well enough.

Other than that, I think that's a good spec. 1200 might be overkill for the PSU, 850 will probably be enough.

For comparison, I'm using Premiere/After Effects CS5 on a 3930K@4.4GHz with 16GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600, a 128GB Mushkin Chronos SSD and a 3TB WD Black, with an EVGA GTX560Ti mercury hacked, and I've not run into any real problems, except a low memory warning once or twice when working on a long video.

 

[swancake]

First thought is check the Adobe website for which cards are officially supported by CS5 for the GPU acceleration. I know there's a hack to get it to work with unsupported cards (used it to get my 560Ti working - very handy). If the 590 is on there, it might be worth sticking with it, or even looking around for another one.

And just read that you already knew about the hack, so nevermind, but I'll leave that bit in anyway....

For the external storage, it might be worth looking for an eSATA box, and filling it up with WD Blacks or Seagate Barracudas. Will be quicker than the NAS. The Revodrives might be overkill, but if you can afford them I won't put you off. Pair of Corsair Force3 GTs would probably be well enough.

Other than that, I think that's a good spec. 1200 might be overkill for the PSU, 850 will probably be enough.

For comparison, I'm using Premiere/After Effects CS5 on a 3930K@4.4GHz with 16GB Kingston HyperX DDR3-1600, a 128GB Mushkin Chronos SSD and a 3TB WD Black, with an EVGA GTX560Ti mercury hacked, and I've not run into any real problems, except a low memory warning once or twice when working on a long video.

Thanks very much for the reply, I'll definitely check out the eSATA box, I was considering sticking some drives in raid 10, but as I've mentioned, my knowledge is so limited that I really just want to build a fairly easy machine that will happily handle what I throw at it

I'm guessing the mobo's and ram are pretty much going to be close enough that someone like me won't know the difference? I wondered if the extreme 11 had better pci-e options for my revodrives, and more sata3 connections for setting up massive storage capacity. Fuck knows, I need TTL to build it for me :lol:

As for the revodrive, you are probably right, but at the moment I'm producing a timelapse video, with around 20,000 shots all at 5184x3456 stacked into multiple video clips. My thought's were that I could run this off a revodrive, and once rendered I move the clips to permanent storage.

Thanks again, interesting to see your specs and realise I probably don't have to go mental to get it working smoothly.

Cheers

 

[I Hunta x]

Im no expert with the video rendering side of things by any means (relatively little experience with it tbh) but i can give some pointers over all for the build.

CPU: Good choice.

Motherboard: Either are great choices but the Asrock board basically has an LSI raidcard onboard so would be the best of the 2 for a big multi drive storage array of up to 8x drives so would save you from having an external storage system such as a NAS.

Memory: With rendering the aim is Amount > Speed > Timings (least important by far) IIRC so 8x4gb Ripjawz 2133 would be a good higher mid point and still being able to guarantee it works without any headaches. (If someone could chip in as to how x79 systems handle 2400mhz memory that would probably clear this up a little more as i seem to remember some x79 set ups being funny with such a high density of 2400mhz and higher ram but i could be mixing it up with something else...)

GPU: If im correct even with the hack it can only use a single gpu, If so then the 680 would be the best choice currently as the 590 and 690 count as 2 cards technically by the system so you would only be getting half the use.

Power supply: The AX1200 is pretty overkill, a AX860i will power the system NO problem at all.

Case: Cosmos 2 is a nice case, good airflow and tons of room to work with + plenty of room for hard drives.

Cooling: Nothing wrong with the h100i, the fans on it are a nice step up from the original h100 from what ive seen so good choice.

Storage: SSD wise OCZ reportedly have one of the worst failure rates of any of the big brands so if your looking to buy new/more then i would recommend you look towards another brand such as Corsair, Kingston, Intel or Samsung.
As you already have some however then you could just use them in raid 0 and be done with it for the main OS/program partition as raid0 ssd would be as fast/faster than a revodrive tbh.
To get 10tb of storage 5x 3tb drives in a raid5 setup would give you about the best security without having an excessive amount of drives, or 6x in raid6 to keep about the same capacity while having a 2 disk redundancy just in case of the VERY slim chance of 2 drive breaking at the same time.

And id keep trying to sell your old kit off on the forums till the "for sale & wanted" section gets opened up to you to save you getting a slapped wrist

 

[swancake]

Im no expert with the video rendering side of things by any means (relatively little experience with it tbh) but i can give some pointers over all for the build.....

Thanks for the advice, I removed the information on selling my old system, will wait until there is a proper section for doing that

Great feedback there, I think the extreme 11 sounds like the board then, with the lsi controller I'm guessing I would get a better raid set up compared to using marvell/jmicron.

680 is pretty much what I had my money on, as like you said, only half of the 690 can be used, resulting in a slower overall performance.

In terms of power, I was thinking that running 3 monitors (therefore pushing the gpu to it's limit- 550 watt) multiple hdd, and an i7 using approx 230 watts under load, that an ax1200 would give plenty of head room, running well within it's operational limit? Then again that's why I'm on here asking newbie questions :lol:


Point taken with regards to OCZ, I have read a few things regarding failure rates, so will look at the other options. That said, I have used a vertex 3 for 1.5 years and had no problem, but I will definitely look into that.

I'm almost there, case, cpu, gpu, mobo, cooling, pretty much decided, now I have to research the ram and ssd/raid 0 storage options.

Thanks for your time

Andy

 

[I Hunta x]

If you already have the OCZ drives you may aswell use them, but if your looking at getting some more you can get more reliable drives for the same money so it just seems the logical choice tbh.

On the power side of things a GTX 680 actualy only uses around 175w roughly per card. A similar system to what your planning consisting of a 2011 hexcore at around 4.3Ghz, 16gb ram, 1x ssd and a GTX 680 will use a touch under 400w so you still have well over 400w to play with for the extra ram and the extra drives with a ax850/ax860i.

EDIT: There are also other power supply makers like Seasonic, Enermax, Silverstone or PC Power & Cooling (PPC) that make nice psu's that may catch your eye.

 

[swancake]

If you already have the OCZ drives you may aswell use them, but if your looking at getting some more you can get more reliable drives for the same money so it just seems the logical choice tbh.

On the power side of things a GTX 680 actualy only uses around 175w roughly per card. A similar system to what your planning consisting of a 2011 hexcore at around 4.3Ghz, 16gb ram, 1x ssd and a GTX 680 will use a touch under 400w so you still have well over 400w to play with for the extra ram and the extra drives with a ax850/ax860i.

EDIT: There are also other power supply makers like Seasonic, Enermax, Silverstone or PC Power & Cooling (PPC) that make nice psu's that may catch your eye.

Cheers I think i'll take your advice and go for something in the 850 range then, which will save me some money as well

Regarding the ssd, I'm in the process of looking at other options now. It's fair to say I didn't do much research on ssd's, just looked at the revo's and assumed they would be a great option.

Thanks again

 

[airdeano]

Regarding the ssd, I'm in the process of looking at other options now. It's fair to say I didn't do much research on ssd's, just looked at the revo's and assumed they would be a great option.

Thanks again

not really.. the x4 showed marked improvement over a RAID0 256GB SSD.
after the fouth x4 drive... i was happily refunded towards the 256GB RAID.
for expensive hardware like the revo, it should keep a performance edge 90%
not 20% of the time.
when hassling over a 25GB vid render, i turn to a RAMDRIVE.
yeah, its a technical nightmare, but the perf from that over that revo was
easily twice to almost three-times faster. on 2133 RAM i was clocking best
1.5TB not MB via ATTO64. and when revo was working, 980MB vs 1.45TB.
it is kinda of a pain on boots and shutdowns, but the app performance is worth
it. what i do is start the RAMDRIVE, do my work, save it to network or SSD
and since there is no large file, shutdowns are under 10sec. (caching RAM
to disk).

airdeano

 

[swancake]

not really.. the x4 showed marked improvement over a RAID0 256GB SSD.
after the fouth x4 drive... i was happily refunded towards the 256GB RAID.
for expensive hardware like the revo, it should keep a performance edge 90%
not 20% of the time.
when hassling over a 25GB vid render, i turn to a RAMDRIVE.
yeah, its a technical nightmare, but the perf from that over that revo was
easily twice to almost three-times faster. on 2133 RAM i was clocking best
1.5TB not MB via ATTO64. and when revo was working, 980MB vs 1.45TB.
it is kinda of a pain on boots and shutdowns, but the app performance is worth
it. what i do is start the RAMDRIVE, do my work, save it to network or SSD
and since there is no large file, shutdowns are under 10sec. (caching RAM
to disk).

airdeano

Hey, thanks for the advice. I noticed the new asrock extreme 11 has xfast RAM, and didn't think much of it. After doing some reading though you are definitely right, if I want top performance then ramdrive is the way to go.
Have a raid 0, two ssd main drive, array of hdd in raid 10, and 64gb of ram which will cover the ram drive. Just have to figure out how to do it all now

Cheers

 

[airdeano]

XFastRAM a copy of RAMDRIVE.

my X79 'sperience with ASRock is far from stellar..
ASUS
MSI
EVGA
Gigabyte (watch for weak power phase)
X
X
X
X
X
X
ASRock
in that order of satisfaction

sometimes the "review" to too great and leads others to "same conclusions". whne
the "review" is scurffing around the phoo-phoo and not the real processes behind
the motherboard. just saying.. look deeper into the mobo for X79...

airdeano