Decklink with Dell Workstation

[Bob Zelin]

They suck with AVID products, so I don’t know why it should be any better with the Blackmagic products. AVID and Blackmagic use HP at their trade shows. Dell computers are a pain to work with when you are dealing with expansion boards (they work very nicely as office desktops, for sending emails and using Microsoft Word). When you want to load up a computer with Decklink cards, as well as SCSI cards, SATA cards, etc., the Dell 650 is a poor choice.

Bob Zelin

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Rick,

In the DeckLink Minimum System Requirements for Windows we mention that Dell Workstations are not certified for use with DeckLink cards and are currently unsupported.

However if you already have one and are hoping to use it with DeckLink cards, then the main thing to check is it’s graphics card. It is very important to use an NVIDIA graphics card as other cards frequently encounter problems when combined with DeckLink cards in these PC’s. We know of some customers who have had success with the 650 and 670 models of PC but others have had too many problems and hence the fact that we do not support this model of PC.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Felix Dames]

I own a Dell Precision Workstation 670 Dual Xeon 2x 3,4 Ghz with Decklink Pro
2 GB RAM
136 GB SCSI Raid 0 with 10000 U/per minute
Nvidia Quatro FX 1400

I can say it is one of the rock solid systems I have ever had !!! I Love it 😉
I do a lot of uncompressed capturing & playout from/to digital Betacam in SD quality
Work with Aftereffects and Premiere…
absolute frame sync & fast! even when disc is defragmented!
It’s also great and fast enough for 3D Rendering
system benchmark with Sisoft Sandra 14000 GFLOP!

But for HD1080 you should use SCSI Drives with 15000 U/per minute
because the 10000 only do: Read:104 MB/sec Write:103 MB/sec only enough for HD720 not for HD1080

Felix Dames

[Sameer Shrivastava]

HI,
I am using DELL SC1420, with 2×2.8 ghz xeons, 1.5 gb of ram. with it’s 2 ch embedded sata raid. the system seems to work ok. right now i am using ati 8mb pci graphic card that came with the system. will changing that will help in any way. please let me know.
sameer

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Felix,

It’s great to hear that you have a stable system with the Dell Precision Workstation 670 and the DeckLink Pro card. Thanks for posting your configuration as that might be the key to a stable system.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Luke Maslen]

Hi Sameer,

[Sameer Shrivastava] “the system seems to work ok. right now i am using ati 8mb pci graphic card that came with the system. will changing that will help in any way.”

If your system is working OK, I would recommend against changing the graphic card unless you experience problems.

Regards,

Luke Maslen
Blackmagic Design

[Rick Godin]

Thanks for the feedback. The Decklink product looks so good, but I hate to give up my investment in my Dell 650.