Blackmagic Forum

Hi,

I have been using different apple computers since 1999, but I have to switch to windows now to get the power I need, and since I am using Adobe software as well. Guess adobe and linux is a bad match?

I am a cinematographer and colourist. I most often shoot and colour grade footage from my Red Epic W. 5k-8k resolution. I have a 2012 Mac Pro 5,1 with 2 x 6 core 2,4 Ghz CPU, Nvidia GTX 680 4 GB video memory, 40 GB of memory, internal raid 0 3x2 TB 7200 spin disks and a 512 GB SSD disk for OS. I know you can still upgrade the Mac Pro, but I do not want to put more money in something from 2012.

The projects I am working on are getting bigger, and the formats I am delivering are longer, and I often deliver projects in 4k now.
I am about to buy a windows box and this is what I am thinking of:

Asus-Z10PE-D8 dual socket
Xeon E5 V4 12 core 2,2 Ghz CPU
Titan X Pascal 12 GB GDDR5X Ram
Samsung 960 PRO 512GB SSD for OS NVMe
Cache SSD: 2 x 1 TB SSD in raid 0
Main storage: RAID 10, of 4 disk - 8TB storage
Windows 10

I then have a main board that can run to xeon CPUs, and I am wondering if I should go dual at once, and then I would need 128 GB of memory, and should I also get two titans?

Would these specs be good enough to edit fluently in Davinci? Or should I stick with premiere for editing and grade in Davinci? Would be nice to edit and grade at the "same time", but I think I still would like to edit in premiere when it is formats over 10-20 minutes.

What do you think?

Hey,

I have quite the same MacPro you have, so your post was interesting. And I'm used to do as you (example raid0 ssd for cache...)... and from 1998 too, surprise .

Regardless to the concerns about Xeons (1 or 2, I don't have any advice so far), your shopping list seems relevant, except I would go for 2 Titans at once, to be sure everything's ok with dual processing (assuming you have the Studio version which allows you to tick the right box for it).
So if I was forced to choose between 2 Xeons or 2 GPUs, I'd go for the video cards first.

(By the way, you could even buy them first and put them in the macpro you already have before putting them in your new machine, you would see a huuuuge difference...)

Tell us about your tests.

That was a lot of similarities, funny.

Nice tip. I wonder if it is wise to have one cheaper GPU also for GUI? Or is that just a waste when you have two Titan x Pascal cards? I have the studio version yes. Nice that it works on both windows and in macOS. Would have liked to test Linux if the dongle worked with Linux as well, and you did not need the the panels from Black Magic. I have the Tangent Elements.

I am quite sure that premiere will then use the cheap card for cuda and not Titan x cards?

Would have been cool to test the Titan in the Mac Pro, but I will not have the time for that as I will sell my Mac Pro for the new machine.

I will let you know how the windows machine treats me. I wonder it it will be satisfying speed when editing arri/red footage? 1/2 res or 1/4.

Eric, you might want to check out this video by a forum member. He benchmarks a new Pascal Titan X, and the results are pretty impressive.

Woow, Dan, thanks for the video.
Impressive. I guess with the system that I speced there should not be something holding back another thing in the system, so I will have the full potensial if I will be running two of those pascal cards. The 2 x xeon cpus, 128 GB of memory and fast system disk, chache raid and raid 10 should keep up with each other. Should be a quite powerful machine, and I will be able to run my Epic 8k maybe at 1/2 res good. In Davinci. I think that is quite cool without a red rocket x.

Sorry if I am too enthusiastic. hehe

Eirik Heim wrote:That was a lot of similarities, funny.

Nice tip. I wonder if it is wise to have one cheaper GPU also for GUI? Or is that just a waste when you have two Titan x Pascal cards?

AFAIK, but I didn't experienced it myself, what you gain in dedicating a GPU for GUI is too unperceivable (is it a correct word ?) in this hardware environment, I'm sure you couldn't see any difference, especially in case of a couple of beefed Cuda cards installed. But make your own tests, who knows...

I am quite sure that premiere will then use the cheap card for cuda and not Titan x cards?

What we often experience is that Adobe pieces of software stick to what GPU is connected to your display (I can tell for PS CS6 at least); however, coming from FCP 7 and not Premiere, you may find the right option in Premiere, I'm not sure about what's going on there at this point...

Would have been cool to test the Titan in the Mac Pro, but I will not have the time for that as I will sell my Mac Pro for the new machine.

I can understand it of course

I will let you know how the windows machine treats me. I wonder it it will be satisfying speed when editing arri/red footage? 1/2 res or 1/4.

Don't forget to go to Resolve preferences prior to start any project, to set accurate Arri and/or Red footage in appropriate settings.
Anyway I'm confident, you'll succeed for sure, you're on the right tracks

Ok. I guess I will not bother to think about another GPU, should be way overkill with another card next to two titan x pascal cards. Then Premiere should work as it should with the right card.

Thanks for the heads up about setting the correct settings. Now I will not forget that one.

I am just glad that the software I use is cross platform. Even if I use a week or two to get back into the windows world, the software that I spend all my time will work as before.

Wonder if there is a way to export my mac premiere keyboard settings to the windows version? Guess not?

Robbie Carman is doing a series of instructional videos over on MixingLight.com that detail switching over from Mac to Windows for Resolve users. (Note this is a pay site.) I think what he has to say is interesting and very well thought-out.

https://mixinglight.com/portfolio/makin ... bjections/

Sam Steti wrote:...
Regardless to the concerns about Xeons (1 or 2, I don't have any advice so far), your shopping list seems relevant, except I would go for 2 Titans at once, to be sure everything's ok with dual processing (assuming you have the Studio version which allows you to tick the right box for it).
So if I was forced to choose between 2 Xeons or 2 GPUs, I'd go for the video cards first..

If you only put one CPU in, then you lose access to half the PCI-e slots, as half of them go through the second CPU.

Sam Steti wrote:.(By the way, you could even buy them first and put them in the macpro you already have before putting them in your new machine, you would see a huuuuge difference...)

As the new Titan-X Pascals are based on the same architecture as the GTX 1000 range, do they even have drivers for the Mac OS?

Adam Simmons wrote:If you only put one CPU in, then you lose access to half the PCI-e slots, as half of them go through the second CPU.

Ok, didn't know that, for I've ever had bi-CPU in my hands before starting anything, and never saw less than 4 PCIe slots therefore.

Sam Steti wrote:.(By the way, you could even buy them first and put them in the macpro you already have before putting them in your new machine, you would see a huuuuge difference...)

As the new Titan-X Pascals are based on the same architecture as the GTX 1000 range, do they even have drivers for the Mac OS?

no, actually you're right, the 1000 range doesn't have some so far... I suggested it to quickly, only thinking "Titan X" instead of "Pascal's Titan X". Thanks for this correction, fortunately he won't cope with it because the MP will be sold before

I will check out that switch platform web-site. Thanks for the tip.

I have found a problem now, and that is that the motherboard that the build is based upon now, asus z10pe-d8 ws, can not be used with thunderbolt tech. As all my disks for now are either USB 3 or thunderbolt 2/USB 3, which mean that I can use all my old disks. But what about the future? I would like to be able to have the possibility to do projects that could be done from a thunderbolt 2/3 disk straight from the disk instead of have to ingest it all locally before starting to work.

Will USB 3, or if I can use the new standard 3.1/C be fast enough? Some thoughts on what do to?
As I understand, there are not many or not at all motherboards that has dual sockets and thunderbolt?

Sorry if I misunderstand something now about adding thunderbolt tech.

Hi,
I have an asus x99 aii + intel 6850k. This card has a Thunderbolt 3 connectivity via an optional card: http://www.asus.com/Motherboard-Accesso ... rboltEX-3/ but it takes a PCI slot.

On the other hand, I recommend a CPU with 40 lines of the Broadwell-E series.

Jean Claude, thanks for the tip about the thunderbolt possibility.

But you still recommend me going for what I am intending to yes instead of that motherboard and thunderbolt 3?

Guess it will be OK with USB C 3.1? That is possible.

You could look at the Supermicro X10DAI. That allows you to add in a Supermicro TB 2 card

And the Supermicro X10DAI would be just as good as the ASUS card with the other stuff?
Looks like it does not support SLI for example?

Hi Eirik,

I do not have this card and no thunderblod device (sorry). It is better to read: http://blog.fosketts.net/2016/10/29/tot ... derbolt-3/ and ask a specialist if there are any compatibility issues.

In theory it must work but I have not tested, it is necessary to study this possibility.

Eirik Heim wrote:And the Supermicro X10DAI would be just as good as the ASUS card with the other stuff?
Looks like it does not support SLI for example?

Supermicro X10DAI is better but I think more expensive.

Eirik,
Read : https://thunderbolttechnology.net/products
Hop this help.

EDIT : and https://thunderbolttechnology.net/tech/faq

Eirik, what's your budget? We can probably help better if we knew the financial constraints.

Eirik Heim wrote:And the Supermicro X10DAI would be just as good as the ASUS card with the other stuff?
Looks like it does not support SLI for example?

Why would you want SLI? Resolve doesn't use it.

Jean Claude wrote:

Eirik Heim wrote:And the Supermicro X10DAI would be just as good as the ASUS card with the other stuff?
Looks like it does not support SLI for example?

Supermicro X10DAI is better but I think more expensive.

Over here the Asus board costs £80 more

If I would go for the other board than ASUS and two Titan X Pascal cards, SLI has nothing to say for me? What about other software than Davinci? I use Premiere for editing, since I am much faster with all the keyboard shortcuts and because until now it has been much smother to edit my footage in Premiere. Sometimes I use after effects, lightroom and audition.

My budget in Norwegian kroner when using google seems to be at the max 9400 USD.

That will get me all that i have mentioned earlier included the asus motherboard, two 12 core cpus and 2 x titan x pascal in Norway.

Eirik Heim wrote:My budget in Norwegian kroner when using google seems to be at the max 9400 USD.

That will get me all that i have mentioned earlier included the asus motherboard, two 12 core cpus and 2 x titan x pascal in Norway.

DR doesn't support SLI, so 2 titans doesn't really benefit you, and a titan is super overkill for a GUI only card, not to mention I think David Anderson did some testing a while back and reported that a GUI only card showed little benefit.

Not to mention only having one GPU frees up slots for potential NAS & RAID cards, and imo that has a lot more benefits over the long term.

I think this part list would be a good starting point for you. I left out the graphics card(s) and drives for your cache and main drives, as I wasn't so sure how particular you are about hardrives. I'm personally pretty anal about what drives I use for anything other than RAID 0.
https://pcpartpicker.com/user/dans98/saved/CTDJxr $3890 USD
note: I didn't download and read through manuals to guarantee 100% compatibility between components, but it should be.


The 6950x can easily be overclocked into the 4.4 - 4.6GHZ range with liquid cooling, and is thus a pretty potent cpu. The motherboard will support overclocking the RAM to 3200, and 3200 with a case latency of 14 is the best you can get right now.

The case is a little on the expensive side, but it has 9 drive bays and can be expanded to 15, and that doesn't take into account that you can mount 4 more in the optical bays. It also offers a lot of options for cooling.

with regards to the GPU, if you can wait a few months I would take a look at the 1080 ti when it releases, as its rumored (and likely) higher clock speed might be of more benefit that another 200 or so cuda cores & 2 extra GB of ram. Will probably be more overclockable as well.
http://www.pcgamesn.com/nvidia/nvidia-g ... lease-date


If you do get a titan this a good starting point for overclocking it. Keep in mind DR seems a little more sesnative to GPU stabillity than other applications, so you might not be able to reach these numbers.
http://www.guru3d.com/articles-pages/nv ... ew,36.html

Dan Sherman wrote:DR doesn't support SLI, so 2 titans doesn't really benefit you, and a titan is super overkill for a GUI only card, not to mention I think David Anderson did some testing a while back and reported that a GUI only card showed little benefit.

The OP has Resolve Studio, so having 2 Titan-X's will work really well, just set the first one to 'GUI & compute' and both cards will be used for rendering inside Resolve

Dan Sherman wrote:Not to mention only having one GPU frees up slots for potential NAS & RAID cards, and imo that has a lot more benefits over the long term.

If you put the Supermicro board in a case that has a spare backplate socket below the last socket on the motherboard (like the Enthoo Pro) then you can put a GPU in the bottom socket, one in the next 16x socket up, a TB 2 card in the very top socket, and still have 1 16x, & 1 8x socket left to use with all sockets running at full speed. The board you recommend starts to drop the slots down to 8x when you have more than 2 of the 16x slots populated.

If you were going to go with an X99 board, it would make more sense to go with the Gigabyte GA-X99P-SLI, at least that way you don't waste money on an overpriced board. The Gigabyte board also has Thunderbolt 3 built in

Adam Simmons wrote:The board you recommend starts to drop the slots down to 8x when you have more than 2 of the 16x slots populated.

The CPU only supports 40 total. 40 -16 -16 = 8 and you loose 4 to the m.2

Beware of one thing: many mobo have several slots in 16x but when they are used at the same time, the slot switches to 8x.
On my x99 aii, the first GPU is in 16x and the 2nd GPU switches to 8x. Next with a Decklink 4k extrem 6G: slot in 4x and my M2 uses 4x. In addition I have a ieee1394 = 1x

With a 6850k: 40 - (16 + 8 + 4 + 4 + 1) = 7 free lane but no slot available.

Advantage to the supermicro with 2 CPU.

Edit : is wrong :
The true is : On my x99 aii, the first GPU switch in 8x and the 2nd GPU remains to 16x. Next with a Decklink 4k extrem 6G: slot in 4x and my M2 uses 4x. In addition I have a ieee1394 = 1x

Jean Claude wrote:Beware of one thing: many mobo have several slots in 16x but when they are used at the same time, the slot switches to 8x.
On my x99 aii, the first GPU is in 16x and the 2nd GPU switches to 8x. Next with a Decklink 4k extrem 6G: slot in 4x and my M2 uses 4x. In addition I have a ieee1394 = 1x

With a 6850k: 40 - (16 + 8 + 4 + 4 + 1) = 7 free lane but no slot available.

Advantage to the supermicro with 2 CPU.

What slots are you using for your GPUs?

I run an x99 A ii in my personal machine at home with a 6850k, but only with one gpu.

according to the manual you need to use slots 1 & 3 if you want both gpu's to use 16 lanes.

According to the diagram presented http://techreport.com/review/30456/asus ... reviewed/2 from left to right:
Slot 1: GTX 1070 = 8x => Slot 1
Slot 2: covered
Slot 3: ieee1394 = 1x => Slot 2
Slot 4: GTX 980TI = 16x => Slot 3
Slot 5: Covered
Slot 6: Decklink 4K = 4x => Slot 4

+1 M2 = 4x

Edit : oups : Slot 1 is 8x and slot 3 is 16x

check the manual page 1-7 & 1-8.

http://dlcdnet.asus.com/pub/ASUS/mb/LGA ... UM_WEB.pdf

edit: I see it now, it's because you are using slot 4 and that is dropping slot 1 down to 8x. I need more coffee.

Yes, but read page ix Expansion Slots:
40-Lane CPU
3 x PCI Express 3.0 / 2.0 x16 slots * (single at x16, dual at x16 / x16,
Triple at x8 / x16 / x8)

And since I have a Decklink 4K in slot 4, I'm in Triple => x8 / x16 / x8

If I remove the Decklink I switch to dual 16x / 16x.

Yea, I just noticed that and edited my post above. It's a trade off we must choose when using cheaper boards.

Edit: I see you saw

Dan Sherman wrote:

Adam Simmons wrote:The board you recommend starts to drop the slots down to 8x when you have more than 2 of the 16x slots populated.

The CPU only supports 40 total. 40 -16 -16 = 8 and you loose 4 to the m.2

I know, that's why it's better to go with the Dual Xeon system as it supports 80 lanes, 40 for each CPU

Adams, it would also be nice to give an approximate budget of this supermicro with 2 CPU + 2 GPU + 64/96/128 Gb RAM ECC + adapted box + power + thunderbolt + hdd : in short working and see if it Corresponds to the budget of Eirik.

The components I mentioned earlier on, including 2 CPUs and Titan X Pascals fits the budget I said I had. I am just wondering about what to do with the Thunderbolt solution. It feels a bit strange to use that much money on hardware in 2017 and not have thunderbolt 2/3? When I do not have a SAN or will not use 10 GB network. I guess what's left is USB 3.1? Will that be fast enough for editing/color grading on external disks?

Eirik Heim wrote:The components I mentioned earlier on, including 2 CPUs and Titan X Pascals fits the budget I said I had. I am just wondering about what to do with the Thunderbolt solution. It feels a bit strange to use that much money on hardware in 2017 and not have thunderbolt 2/3? When I do not have a SAN or will not use 10 GB network. I guess what's left is USB 3.1? Will that be fast enough for editing/color grading on external disks?

Just so someone doesn't jump on me because they feel I insulted their personal system The following is my personal opinion.

Eirik, I think think your budget puts you at the tipping point between consumer grade hardware, & enterprise grade hardware, and things like Thunderbolt & USB fall squarely into the consumer grade category.

Take a look at this video done by the same guy that did the video I posted earlier, It's very pertinent to the decision you are facing.
Dual Xeon E5 2673 V3 (12 core 2.4 ghz) VS. i7 6700k (4 core 4 ghz)

Dan, I understand what you are saying about the Thunderbolt & USB and consumer grade hardware. Consumer or enterprise.. Why not have the fastest way of ingesting material or get to edit/grade fast from for example a raid 0 ssd? In my mind that can speed up my work flow and most of people will deliver me some kind of a external hard drive with their project.

Thanks for sharing that video. Interesting test for sure. One of the reasons for switching my hardware is that I am working more and more with projects that are from 45 minutes and longer and the Red Epic W. Looks of course very nice with a cheaper option when it comes to render smaller pieces out of premiere pro and fore some other jobs as well. But I guess one of the things with having multiple cores is that you often do not work with one software alone as well? And then you run out of cores with the I7 quite fast? And another thing about the dual CPU? If you want to have multiple GPUs, video card from Black Magic and other PCI cards, you are better of getting the most of them with dual CPUs?

It also feels a bit strange to go from the xeon CPUs that are in my Mac Pro to I7 one I7 CPU.

If it was me, I would go with the 6950x, its a 10 core 20 thread cpu that would crush the 6700k in the video. and as the video showed 6700k more than held it's own during editing and grading. I suspect the 6950x would be neck and neck with slower dual xeons that need to communicate with each other (overhead).

I'd also forgo the m.2 boot drive and just use a SATA RAID 0 of 3 SSDs and keep proper backups. It's not as sexy as the m.2, but it allows you to run 2 GPUs at x16 and still have room for an x8 NAS or RAID card. You cold start off with a cheap RAID card and the motherboards raid capability, and then when you reach the capacity of your case, you could switch to a NAS, and re-purpose the drives you already have.

I'm by no means a NAS expert (that's my brothers area of expertise), but it's something that I know you can get into dirt cheap if you buy used enterprise grade components, or if you build it yourself. If you do it right, the NAS can grow with you, and with 6k becoming more mainstream and 8k not far off, storage capacity will become increasingly important.

with regards to thunderbolt, it would not surprise me to learn (anybody?), you could probably fit a thunderbolt card directly to the NAS.

Basically I'm proposing a stepping stone towards a full enterprise set-up.

Get 6950x, overclock to 4GHz and it will work better in real life than many dual Xeon systems, but if you want to work with 4K, RED, etc it may be the point where dual xeon will be better. Just buy the one with high clock, not crazy number of cores.

If you have big workstation case then it's easy to do very fast internal storage. NAS is only as good as your connection to the machine, which is not that fast in most cases. Even 10Gbit is not really that fast for 4K.

I would say that going for a socket that supports dual Xeon CPUs with be a more direct step, and in my parts of the world enterprise grade hardware for sure.

If I can have a m2 os disk, and raid 0 SSD disk just for cache, and then again a RAID 10 for working and back up? Would not that be more enterprise and then I have faster disks and also back ups?

And All the cards will fit in the tower as well.

When I edit, I tend to also run photoshop, audition and after effects as well.

But what also is important is to be ability to encode fast, and you could se some differences when encoding only 15 minutes?

Andrew, We shot with Red Epic W and then to shot mostly in the 6k-8k range. So yes, it will be a lot of red editing/grading.

I would say you need more enterprise approach in the case (I still would like to see how 6950x is doing in such a setup).
RAID10 is waste of (relatively expensive) SSDs. Get decent controller LSI/Adaptec and use RAID5 over e.g. 8 disks. If you have money get 16x2TB SSDs and put into Icydock 5.25 bay cages. All very fast (6GB/sec read and 3GB/sec write), smart and hot swappable. HP z840 is always a good choice. You can use z840 internal bay for "big storage" by putting there 8TB HDDs. You can pack a lot into workstation these days.

If I go with the socket I intend to, I can upgrade with faster Xeon CPUs as time goes by. The raid 10 will consist of enterprise spinning disks, not SSD. M2 for os, SSD for cache.

I am looking at the HP z840.

Anyway, at some point there will always be a bottleneck. The hardest is to avoid it as long as possible by harmonizing at best the different speeds of the components during the decoding / encodings. It is useless to want to play a 6k clip if the HDDs do not follow, just as much if the CPU (s) do not follow and the rest. For encoding, we know that Davinci Resolve works enormously with the GPU. If the GPUs follow but the RAM does not follow and then the HDDs: it no longer serves really. The highest balance of loads must be found and all these elements must be taken into account.

You are totally correct. At the same time I think it is wise to think what you can do to future proof as much as you can. The Mac Pro is from 2012, and it still works quite good for almost anything, and it has some more upgrades available. I need to think that the new workstation can work just as long.

I would not count for more than 3 years
The only + side of RAID 10 is fact that you can use internal controller and save PCI-E slot for GPU/etc. Other than this it's still massive waste of drives compared to RAID 5/6.

3 years : tax depreciation period ?

Ok. I will have to reconsider the storage and what Raid to use.

I wonder what the big studios use as CPUs and so on. Not thinking about the clusters and all that.
There must be someone who has experience with what works best for my premiere -> davinci workflow or just davinci workflow with new hardware.

I am willing to pay for dual xeon CPUs it that is the path to follow

They don't use anything special, mainly dual Xeons (HPs/Dell/Supermicro due to support agreements).
In your case HP is a safe way. If you feel adventurous you can try i7 6950x, but you may struggle with PCI-E bus limitations.

I do not want to be adventurous, one of the main reason why I have been very satisfied with being a Mac users. It almost never fails, and actually I have never had a hardware or software problem that has ruined or delayed a project.

I want it to stay like that. I guess a "HP" dual software build is the way to go. Sadly the Linux support of Davinci Resolve requires the original panels. Why? Hope they change that in some years.

Well, windows will be just fine.