Could I get some help second guessing myself?
C_BRAUN Jan 10, 2011 10:04 AMHi I am building a set of new systems for work.
We are a small graphics and animation house with 3 animators. Earlier this year we lost our 2 editors, one to retirement and one who decided to go do his own thing.
So at the moment things are relatively good as we are getting a good deal of 2d and 3d animation work. I was tasked by my boss to come up with new systems that would "for now" bridge the gap for company that would be 3 all a round systems for 3 all a round broadcast generalist.
Our core software that we use is Autodesk Max/Maya and the CS5 production suite. Our use breakdown is around 50% 3d and 50% compositing/editing per job. Our editing demands are not full 24/7 editing but mostly rough cuts for compositing. My boss would like us to strech ourselves even a little bit thinner than we are and for us animators to be able to do unsupervised edits and in our 2 edit suites still hire full freelance editors on a per project basis until we can hire a new editor(s).
Here is what I can up with and a few notes. PLEASE any thoughts are welcome.
OS: Windows & professional 64 bit
Motherboard:
Supermicro H8DGi-F
CPU's: (x2)
Opteron X12 6134 G34 2.3G
Notes 16 cores total the most that Adobe and Mental Ray under Max and Maya I think will handel
GPU
PNY nVidia Quadro 4000
Had to got *pro card here it's not the fastest but unfortunatly the drivers for 3d are important to us, to the point we just could not pass them up.
Memory:
G.SKILL 4GB 8 kits (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333
32 Gig total that means we should be able to support 9 fully funded cores for HD 1080 work for rendering in AE/Premier correct?
PSU:
Corsair Professional Series Gold High Performance 750-Watt Power Supply CMPSU-750AX
Needed for the pin outs for the AMD motherboard. I think I got enough voltage if I did my math right yes/no?
OS Drive:
Revo Drive 120 GB PCI Express solid state RAID drive
Used this drive so as to not take up a Motherboard SATA slot so I can squeeze 1 more drive into the raid and still have a DVD/Blueray burner. Given that it should act speed wise in parity with the raid as well seemed like a great option...or was I wrong?
Raid Drives: (x5)
SAMSUNG - SPINPOINT F1 DESKTOP CLASS 1TB 7200RPM 32MB
Seem like the most common raid drives atm from what I have seen. A vendor we are working with suggested instead that we use the Seagate Constellation™ ES drives but I am unsure. I was also told that yes even though motherboard raid controllers are bad that 5 of either of these drives should be able to play back an uncompressed HD 1080 stream. is this correct?
Blueray/DVD
LITE-ON Black 12X BD-R 2X BD-RE 16X DVD+R 12X DVD-RAM 8X BD-ROM
anyone know if this drive is compatible with encore I cannot seem to find the encore compatibility list?
Audio Card
ASUS Xonar DS 7.1 Channels 24-bit 192KHz PCI Interface Audio Card
included for compatiblity sake here just in case someone has used this card and has had problems.
Monitors (x2)
Dell UltraSharp U2211H 21.5"W Monitor
IPS panels with display ports...they don't have the highest refresh rates but most ips panels don't, from what I see should I go with PVA Panels instead here? Still will need a display port hook up if I don't as the Quadro 4000 only has one DVI and I hate non native connectors.
additional questions: \
I see all the top performers in Harms' list are in the 980x camp and I would like to explore this option but intels hold such little amounts of ram. I know that a lot of the premier performance is on the Cuda side now for simple things, but for more complex tasks I thought 1080p HD required 3 gig per core to process a frame. I look at the pass mark scores and just don't see them doing as well as they do if given a 12 Gig system, what am I missing?
The reason I am posting this system here is frankly of all the disciplines we cover at work I know the least about editing and Premier. I know for 3 the purposed system is A level and on the compositing side still in the B level because the disk perf and ram are in order with the CPU's but is this system ok for editing tasks?
Our budget is around $4500 per system given that our demands are pretty steep covering 3d/2d/compositing and some editing how did I do?
-Carl
second guessing myself like crazy because as a company we need to hit this nail on the head.
*edited for spelling mistakes




