Hey guys, As a few of you know- because I talk about myself a lot.... too much... oh well... anyway, I do a lot of audio composition/production/mastering as a second income and am getting into video editing, too. Mostly for recitals and small orchestras. Well, I have gotten spoiled again using the Macintosh based software as it works a little better in terms of workflow and my three week old hackintosh experiment just isn't gonna do it. The main programs I use are Logic Pro, Final Cut Pro, Compressor, and Motion. The most intensive and time consuming are Logic Pro (the software that I use to compose/edit/master/render audio/music) and Compressor- by far (the spectacular program that takes finished frames and renders/packages/compresses them into movies/DVDs/ youtube files/etc. in a professional manner.) Both of these programs allow for Load sharing with other Mac's via Ethernet links. Pretty bitchin, right? I need a little extra power for Logic when I am using a shit ton of audio effects plugins, and there just isn't such a thing as enough power for Compressor- render time is atrocious even for that quad core monster processor. My current Hackintosh: Q9550 Intel Asus P5G41T-M LX 8gb 1333 DDR3 Corsair RAM. GTX 210-- haha, in between cards at the moment. Antec Kuhler 620 closed-loop. Rosewill Rack Case My plan is to use that computer as the secondary and build a new, top-end rig as the primary and write the whole damn thing off as tax expense Here is the potential list of parts that matter: Motherboard: GA-P67X-UD3-B3 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128488 Its got hackintosh support AND has a built in Firewire. I use a Focusrite Saffire Pro 40 rackmount soundcard that is connected via firewire. Nice that its built in. Processor: 2500k http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115072 RAM: stuff I already have... maybe. More on this in another thread. Video Card: EVGA GTX 550ti 2GB http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814130652 why? I need the video processor in the main rig to have lots of ram but doesnt need to be spectacularly fast... maybe? I dunno, there isnt a whole lot of research on how mac software reacts with GPU power because macs are supposed to be all alike. not mine Case: Rackmount, of course. Here's my cool'n'quiet formula: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811147155 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817194067 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835209049 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835214028 gonna try these out: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835233033 Oh and throw a small and cheap SSD <160gb and a similarly sized traditional Hard drive (for periodic backup of the OS and applications, unless I get the SSD for cheap, then I will get two and mirror them) and two 1tb drives running Mac software RAID for redundant storage. remember- silence is PARAMOUNT. I cant handle a noisy rig. Especially if there is gonna be two. My current Hack is dead quiet. I would like to continue that trend- hence the little extra expense on fans/liquid/passive cooling. That'll give me plenty of power for most jobs and then I will have the backup mac for when I am doing big scores of music or large renders that need to be complete quickly. Thoughts? Improvements? Remember, needs to be hackintosh friendly. Oh- and for the legal beavers out there. I own my software and I have Mac OSX Licenses- so there. and for those wondering why would I do this? GTFO
I havent finished reading through everything yet, just the first couple paragraphs, but I have to ask. How much performance improvement do you think you will see via an Ethernet link? Max speed is 1gb/s which is 128MB/s. Actual performance is still a bit lower but that is max theoretical. Processors work in gigabytes a second, as do interconnects, memory, etc in the system. So really you can put together a system from the 90's on a single core and have the same performance as a modern day computer sending all its processed data over Ethernet because you top out at 128MB/s of data. Maybe I dont understand it well enough, but I think it would be far better to spend money on a much more powerful single hackintosh to do your work on. Ok I see you are planning on building a new main rig and moving your current off to a secondary. SO I guess that answers my question. However I am still wondering on how much data it will be able to process given the max data speed of your Ethernet? I would upgrade to a 2600k as video encoding and rendering greatly benefits from higher threads more than anything else. I would even say go for a 3930K, but I doubt Mac has driver support for that chipset yet. Does your software support GPU rendering? You talk about it like the software does support it, but I didnt know Mac was up there on that yet except for in Adobe Premiere Pro. If you do plan to use the GPU to render the videos then the faster your card the better, and video memory actually doesnt matter all that much. Anything over 1GB is fine for that. But having additional shader processors benefit the rendering and encoding greatly. However I have to caution you about using the Nvidia GPU to do your rendering, as testing has proven it to be far inferior image quality compared to other GPU's or even CPUs. But the time speedup may outweigh the quality difference for you. But then again, maybe image quality from GPU rendering is a lot better now on Mac. I can only speak from experience on Windows using an Nvidia GPU to do that sort of thing as well as the tests I have seen done on the matter, all on Windows though. If you do plan to use your GPU to do the encoding of videos and all that then you probably dont need the upgrade to a 2600k since it wont be doing the work anyway. Also, MUCH better power supply: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817121092 As for a SSD, Crucial M4 is known to have issues in some Mac's, and the Intel based drives also have been known to have some issues too. I dont know if it is specific to Mac firmware or not but I prefer to go on the safe side and just get a different drive that is known to not have problems. If you can find them, the Samsung 470 series was the official Apple solid state drive for a while, and now the newer 830 series is out. SO either of those will do nicely. I dont think 470's are sold anymore though so that would leave this: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147134
All very good points. Yes, current rig would handle overload from new rig. Also, great questions about the ethernet based interconnect- ethernet is an extremely common connection medium in the music realm. The bandwidth is WAY more than enough to handle the data. Good thing this is a technical forum, as this is about to get nerdy. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Digital Audio Workstation (DAW) Software works with uncompressed audio, of course. So, at 96khz and 24/32 bit resolution -what I run - you expect about 400kb/s. The plugins that manipulate that data would be installed on each workstation in the farm, naturally. The only data flowing over the ethernet line is uncompressed audio, a midi clock to keep the timing perfect, and possibly another control stream. In other words, very little. The problem is these very small files have to move though a truly spectacular amount of complex processes in no time at all. The sheer amount of computer power required to make a convincing replication of a concert hall's reverberation alone is pretty baffling. Now, add another few effects per track and stack up the track count, then add in synthesizers to fill in effects, and have them all render in real time. That's the problem: Parallel requirement. Small files- big computations. Sure, you could do whats called "bouncing." This is where you get a track where you like it and bounce it to a master file that is just a .wav file. Logic even has a complex function that lets you go back and re-edit any bounce you create after the fact and re-bounce, but it only sorta works and its not something that you can do on the fly. You cant manipulate while playing the whole mix- which is key to getting a good master. This is where nodes come in. Little files are sent to slaves that the DAW deems will overload the host to compute in parallel. This will add a ms or two to overall latency. But, the DAW's available these days all have auto latency compensation. If you program the DAW right, then you get 1 or 2 ms of latency rather than 50ms or more. Imagine hitting the play button and having to wait 75ms for the thing to start playing. Or while the track is playing, you hit a key on the keyboard (piano) and nothing happens for a bit. Its unusable. You have to break the mix down to a skeleton and/or record your playing or whatever to the click of a metronome. no fun. no good. ------------------------------------------------------------------- nerd moment over. As for the 2600k, I looked at that. I liked it, but discredited it on the fact that it has a 50% price premium over the 2500k. Is it really worth it? I mean, I eventually have to put my foot down on the budget. But if there is a legitimate gain over the 2500k for the purposes of the build then I will reconsider. The Final Cut and Motion software does load share with the GPU. Compressor does not. Nor does Logic, afaik. Something important to know about Adobe and Apple: If one does something, the other will very quickly update. Its actually pretty spectacular. The competition between Premiere and Final Cut is fierce. I use both, as I got a fat discount on Master Collection 5 through the university that my girlfriend attends- And yes copyright nazi's, it can be used commercially. Check the EULA. So, if I found a significant gain by using Premiere, I would switch. I haven't, yet. As for the power supply suggestion. I like it a lot. Honestly, I picked the power supply I did because I have had such spectacular experience with the case fan also listed by Enermax. Has the same ultra quiet fan style and included a spare fan for cheap and was 80 plus certified. I figured, why not? But this one you posted- on paper- is very intriguing. It has beautiful efficiency numbers. I would assume it would also be a quiet rig, but I'd want to be sure before buying. Do you know any db ratings? Finally, it seems that the ssd is more of an apple issue. Not sure why, but the hackintosh community tends to report ssd's with massive success. It must be more hardware compatibility then software. Mac's do work kinda funny with how their version of a boot record and swap files work, and it evidently beats the hell out of any hard drive- especially ssd's. This is precisely why I stated I wanted small. I tend to have about 60gb of OS and applications, and would like about 40gb of additional free space to work current projects. Because the issue concerns me, I'd like to mirror the SSD if I can get a second SSD cheap enough. if not, I can do nightly/weekly backups image updates using apple's really nice built-in time machine utility app to a traditional hard drive. It can backup the OS drive to a restore image on a traditional hard drive and duplicate any project files onto the larger 1tb drive that will also be RAID 1ish.
sorry for the book. We oughta get paid for sharing this much knowledge! edit: oh and interesting comment about the render capabilities of Nvidia vs ATI. I was not aware. I'm pretty settled with the NVidia because its what I know, and I know how finagle them into working on the hack. You'd think that Ati's would be easier as thats what they come with - they aren't. I find them to be somewhat flaky on the fake macs.
Great review on the 550w version of that PSU: http://www.jonnyguru.com/modules.php?name=NDReviews&op=Story&reid=219 Conclusion area:
very nice. this would be a very nice setup for a side-window display case. the cabling is so discreet- love the flatwmolded snakes. Definitely on my radar now.
know anything about those RAM sinks I listed? Those and the power supply are two items I have not tried, but read very good things. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835233033
Id look for some other people's experience on additional threads for audio use. Id imagine it would work well since it tends to benefit video encoding so much. It stands to reason that audio encoding would also benefit. Hyper-threading for Intel is an additional thread per core, while the main thread is waiting on data, the second one can do some work in the down time and pick up some slack. I have not used those ramsinks, but they look well designed. RAM heatsinks are pretty much all the same or similar in design and can only benefit so much. Having a heatpipe directly touch the chips in the middle and transfer the heat away to a set of fins seems like the pinnacle of air cooling for RAM and I dont think it will get much better. Only way to make it more efficient is to add a fan directly blowing on those fins and the rest of the heatsink, or to go water. Which they do have for RAM, but since you are not using a full water system then it doesnt work for you. Be aware that those heatsinks probably cannot be placed right next to each other. It looks like they are too fat on top. So that limits you to only 2 sticks in the system. Best get some 8GB sticks for the computer. Also with that much RAM, a RAMDisk is quite handy for a scratch disk
You know, thinking about it more I wouldnt even get RAM sinks. They are pointless for normal speed memory and voltage. IT is only helpful when going for big overclocks or huge speed on the memory, which you arent doing with this. It is a better idea to just get a TON of RAM. If you can get 32GB (which you can for around $200 right now) then do that. Use 10GB as a scratch disk, and another 10GB as a read cache for your project drive (maybe even read/write cache). The other 12GB is used by the system for things.
Great thoughts. I hadn't considered this. I've actually never set up a RAM-based scratch before on PC or MAC but it makes a lot of sense. For the audio stuff, it could work. However- Typical 90 minute long recitals are comprised of 7 gb of actual files. I may or may not actually experience any gains due to the small sizes of the files. Ive never experienced noticeable hd lag at all because I think the software intelligently caches required files all up in RAM, anyway. Thats pure speculation, but how else would they be so responsive? But for video and dvd authoring, then it would get pretty handy. But, I'd need to have a scratch of around 30gb to be effective. So, now we are talking server motherboards. As much as I'd love to just do another xeon setup with the latest bells and whistles, its just not in the cards. I'm no longer a studio manager that can write a 15k check to pay for a monster setup. The setup using the 2600k, power supply suggestion, and 4x8gb DDR3 1333 mushkin RAM bumps the cost to $1200 bucks on the nose at newegg- about $300 more than I would like to spend. isn't that the was it always works...
small files are the bane of hard drives. SSDs are about 1000x faster (literally) than HDDs in this area now days for a high end drive, but RAM is still 10000x faster in small files than even a SSD But if the software already caches the section you are using into RAM, you are right that you may not actually see a large performance increase. It would however prolong the life of your drives by not hammering them with a large amount of writes. RAM is designed for this kind of stuff. You could weigh the choice of only 1 SSD and extra RAM instead of 2 SSDs and less RAM. Using the RAM as your scratch disk and cache would put less strain on the SSD and would not wear it out as fast. But then again having a mirrored backup is always really handy. And as you said, you may or may not see a large improvement in performance with the additional RAM.
well then... I just got bitch slapped with a couple big bills. So, this projects gonna wait for a few weeks. :/