Rendering Nightmare Made my mind up to radically upgrade from my current PC

E

EIREHotspur

Well-known member
Ok guys....have always been into Technology and now I am finally going into Business for myself.

Had a job where I was doing a 90 minute Video which because of the dark venue I had applied Magic Bullet effects in Premiere.

I rendered Video Previews overnight for 7 hours and when it still showed 5 hours I quit and redone a straight export to Mpeg2-DVD and that took 12 hours.

If I am to do any more long videos then I am going to seriously upgrade my PC to do my CS6 products justice.

My question is if I go from current My Current Pc Specs:
Intel Xeon CPU E5620 @ 2.40GH
12GB Ram
NVIDIA Quadro FX 4800
Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit

to

Intel Xeon 8-Core E5-2670 2.6 GHz 20M L3 Cache
64GB Kingston QUAD-DDR3 1600MHz
4GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 770 or 4GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GTX 690 DUAL GPU (much of an advantage between single/dual?)
Windows 7 Ultimate 64

What kind of speed could I expect to see?
At the moment I am getting 90 minutes taking 12 hours....that is 8:1

Could I expect 3:1....4:1??
 
You'll need to figure out a bit more before you know exactly what to focus on. First off, have you ran any benchmarks? If not, this one works well for me: http://ppbm7.com/ and http://ppbm5.com/index.html (same program, I don't know if your GPU is CUDA enabled or not). That will help you narrow down the bottleneck. You should also be running Resource Manager during renders to see what maxes out and what doesn't.

Hard drives are usually the biggest bottleneck, although I would like to see more high speed RAM used. Have you considered storage upgrades as well? I also notice you didn't mention the speed of the RAM you're using now, just the future upgrade. Not critical, just worth noting. So, what type of hard drive setup do you have now? And what type of budget are you looking at for upgrades?
 
In a couple of months, Caldigit will put out relatively cheap Thunderbolt external raids. Those will be fun rendering on....... So combined with a relatively new computer with Thunderbolt ports your get things going pretty fast. Too bad the new Mac Pro is going to be so ridiculously expensive otherwise that would be a wonderful machine to have for the coming 4K world.
 
Lads..thanks for taking the time to answer my dilema and sounds like you know a hell of a lot more than I do about ideal setups.

Cassius...I never really went into speed of my RAM because I have turned my mind and focus to a new Workstation to do CS6 justice.....my budget is 4-5k...I am buying a PC for the next 5 years as I am starting out in business.

legrevedotcom....I had never heard of Caldigit...so their website has some interesting products.
I don't see the option of adding Thunderbolt ports to the system on PCSpecialists website?

I am going to buy my PC from pcspecialist.co.uk...best price from my research.
Was initially going to go with an Intel Xeon 8 Core E5-2660 2.2GHz but after reading a discussion here http://forums.adobe.com/message/5188038
I decided to go with an Intel Core i7 Six Core Processor Extreme i7-3970X.
I suppose a good question to both of you......If you were me and had my budget...what would you go for PCwise?
 
It's been a long time since I was involved enough in the tech industry to know all of the products out there, but I'm a big fan of the i7 build. Otherwise, I think everything you wrote number wise in the first post is fine and I would mostly do the same. But all of that processing power is useless without some serious thought on the storage solutions.

I highly recommend a RAID0 made up of a number of different small and fast drives for your working files. That will be what you read to and write to primarily. This can be external with a number of connectors. Thunderbolt is very promising, but on PCs is very limited. It started out as an Apple connection and pretty much stayed there. I know there's at least one expansion card, the ThunderboltEX PCIe, which would run you about $200. I don't know if there are other options, or what they would be. Like I said, I've been out of the loop for a while.

Then you need a RAID enclosure. The Pegasus J4 will cost about $380. Then you need hard drives. I'm not going to look into which ones, but you want fast more than big. This enclosure becomes your working drive, where all projects being read and written are stored. After that you need redundancy. Mirror drives add unnecessary processing, so my recommendation is to get a drive equal to your RAID array. Say you have 2TB of storage with a few 500GB drives on your RAID array. You would also want a 2TB stand alone drive (probably also external), and a backup process that periodically copies an image of your RAID array onto this backup drive. Your internal hard drive just has to be big enough for system files and odds and ends, but should be fast for the sake of a streamlined experience. I'm not going to say SSD, since we're not working with unlimited money here, but something decent. If you want more storage space it would be as something more archive-like, and how you want to do that would be entirely up to you. 2TB, if you maxed out the J4, should be plenty for most working loads. You can go bigger if you want with the J6 and so forth, but I don't think you need that.

With that setup you will see serious throughput, in the 450MB/s range according to the manufacturer, and if you get really into it you could upgrade that array with SSD's for something truly beautiful. Now, all of this could be an issue with your budget, and may require you to make cuts elsewhere. Such as the dropping the RAM down. But I believe that you could cut your RAM in half, down to 32GB, and still come out ahead of you invest in a proper storage system. And you could always come back and upgrade the memory later if you felt the need.

So basically, my answer is that storage needs to be at the top of your list of priorities.

Next comes a cooling system that allows you to keep all of that hardware functioning at peak efficiency, but we can leave that for another discussion.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top