Is the HP Z820 Workstation Class Machine…

[David Roth weiss]

Was an awesome machine until the Z840 was released. Now it’s only semi-awesome… However, there are many versions, all with different processors – if you get the precise specs on the Xeons inside I can help you, as I sold many of them while working for a well-known reseller a couple of years back. BTW, if it only has a single Xeon, not dual Xeons, don’t even think about it.

Oh, and be prepared to buy a newer GPU for it, as you can get vastly more powerful cards today for a fraction of the price of what was available when that machine was new.

David Roth Weiss
Director/Editor/Colorist & Workflow Consultant
David Weiss Productions
Los Angeles

David is a Creative COW contributing editor and a forum host of the Apple Final Cut Pro forum.

[Chris Wright]

Are you PC or Mac?

why get the Intel Xeon Processor E5-2643 v2 benchmark 11735 $1808 if you can get
Intel Core i7-5960X @ 3.00GHz 16,000 for only $1049?
you only need Xeon for > 64GB ram. the EEC kind which is waaayy more expensive too.

adobe 2015 cc doesn’t support multiprocessing anyway.
or if you need software that supports these extra virtual cores

so unless you’re rendering c4d or running a server farm, I’d say 512GB ram is a waste of money.
put the money towards a nice raid system

Get one with Thunderbolt 3 that can transfer data at up to 40Gbps (gigbits per second)
AKiTiO Thunder3 Duo Pro 3 External RAID Storage Thunder3 Duo Pro gives Adobe Premiere the ability to edit and playback MULTIPLE streams of HD and/or 4K content and can daisy chain multiple 4K displays simultaneously.

and a good card for cuda playback in premiere. 2x nvidia quadrio M6000
or a Blackmagic Design DeckLink Studio 4K.

You could build a really nice system yourself for very very cheap. Choose your own hard drives, sound card, gfx cards, thunderbolt 3’s, not someone elses prepackaged humdrum.

that HP stuff is living in the dark ages with thunderbolt 2, but then again, its entirely up to you.

[Duke Sweden]

I knew you guys would come through. I wish I could read your comments while responding. This message board is soooo 1996!!!
Chris, see, I didn’t know that 512 whatever it was would be overkill for me. Anyway as it happened, the one I was going to get had NO hard drives so I backed out. But with the info you gave me I definitely will go in that direction. It did have two Xeon’s, Dave. I forget what else you had asked but, like I said, it’s a moot point now. But as Chris said, definitely overkill for my needs.

Thanks again for taking the time to answer the questions of lil ol’ me 😉

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Duke,

Simple question, what is your budget for a new editing PC?

Your idea of a basic machine, and the ideas of professional post house editors may not match up, different leagues. Don’t jump into anything just yet.

Thanks

Jeff

[Duke Sweden]

Hi Jeff,
I have no budget for an editing PC. Take your idea of a total amateur who does this for his own enjoyment, and then cut that assessment in half. That’s me. Only reason I was looking into this was I’d read where the Z820 was an excellent machine. I also read that they go for upwards of $2-6,000.00. So when I saw one for bid on Ebay at $780.00 I jumped in. As it turned out it didn’t have hard drives, and the final bid was $1500+. I was just looking for opinions on it before I committed a bid. I’ve since found out that you need to add a lot of stuff to an editing workstation, so I will continue to trudge along with my measly HP Envy w/12 gigs of RAM and Intel graphics card.

Thanks for responding, though!

[Joseph W. bourke]

Duke –

I’ve been the very happy owner of an HP Z800 spaceship since 2013. I puchased it refurbished from a guy in Texas who buys off-lease pallet loads of them from the likes of Pixar and others. He then pulls them apart, refurbs and sells them on *bay. I picked mine up with 48GB of RAM, dual Xeon 3.2mHz processors, an NVidia graphics card (since replaced with a faster one), and two 2TB storage drives for 1300 bucks! All I had to add was an OS, an SSD for the OS, and the old drives from my previous workstation. It’s still kicking butt almost 3 years later, and it is a true enterprise class workstation. You can pull it apart right down to the motherboard with no tools! I see them all the time on *bay, as well as the Z820s (one gen back from the current crop of spaceships) for cheap. Just vet the seller carefully and you’ll be good to go. And all the support manuals and guides are on the HP site.

Joe Bourke
Owner/Creative Director
Bourke Media
http://www.bourkemedia.com

[Chris Wright]

ah, ok well consider this micro upgrade.

a single SSD Samsung 951 Pro hits 2 GB/s $195 could easily handle 4k cache. so you could run multiple streams with one card without needing a raid controller! but do you have a m.2 spot on your motherboard?

Nvidia GTX 970-980 for 4k cuda playback $300-400

You’d at least stop hitting your head on playback and ram previews.

have you tried my fix-all post on premiere playback smoothness?
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/974834#974842

[Duke Sweden]

ah, ok well consider this micro upgrade.

a single SSD Samsung 951 Pro hits 2 GB/s $195 could easily handle 4k cache. so you could run multiple streams with one card without needing a raid controller! but do you have a m.2 spot on your motherboard?

Nvidia GTX 970-980 for 4k cuda playback $300-400

You’d at least stop hitting your head on playback and ram previews.

have you tried my fix-all post on premiere playback smoothness?
https://forums.creativecow.net/thread/3/974834#974842

Hey Chris,
Thanks for taking the time to respond! OK, first things first, I don’t see myself investing in 4K capabilities. It’s really not worth it for what I do, but I imagine your suggested setup would scream with 1080p content, right? Now, I’ve been in computers since 1995 but I have honestly never heard of an m.2 spot so I have no idea if I have one on my motherboard. The fact that it has an Intel integrated graphics card suggests I probably don’t, but I’ll google if this model has one. Assuming I do, are you suggesting that I should get both the SSD Samsung 951 Pro as well as an Nvidia GTX 970-980?

btw, just to remind any of you who may respond to this thread, this is as complex as my “art” gets
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GfbKhcFNay0

[Duke Sweden]

Thanks, Joe! I was wondering about the Z800 but $1300 bucks plus all the other stuff you had to add is a bit beyond my budget. Well, not really my budget, but for what I want to do (see included video above) I guess it’s overkill. Like buying a Ferrari to go grocery shopping. But, believe me, as always I’m really grateful for the time you guys take to answer my questions.
Cheers!

[Chris Wright]

here is the realtime playback chart created by the foundry
https://help.thefoundry.co.uk/nuke/9.0/content/comp_environment/realtime_playback/realtime_playback.html
1080p is @ 197.75 MB/sec

if you don’t have a m.2, you can get the sata III SSD
Samsung 850 PRO SSD 512GB $219
random read write @ 2mb 300 MB/sec or 4k read 34 MB/sec write 80 MB/sec could handle multiple hd streams
https://www.amazon.com/Samsung-2-5-Inch-SATA-Internal-MZ-7KE2T0BW/dp/B010QD6RX4

nvidia GTX 960-970 could easily handle cuda hd playback
https://forums.adobe.com/message/3377595

what is cuda and what does it accelerate? if you don’t use any of these, you won’t see much performance increase
Lumetri Deep Color Engine
– supported effects
– scaling
– deinterlacing
– transitions
– blending modes
– color space conversions
– maximum render quality
https://blogs.adobe.com/premierepro/2011/02/cuda-mercury-playback-engine-and-adobe-premiere-pro.html

Performance tips for slow hard drives.
—————
-Before you buy a new hard drive for Windows
determine what speeds you need with the codecs and compression in your NLE
and try to optimize OS disk usage
1. leave at least 15% free hd space
2. defrag
3. set power options to performance or gpu gets throttled
4. set some windows services to manual and stop writing other backgrond programs to disk
5. cmd as administrator
“chkdsk c: /r”
will repair any slow sections on your spinning hard drive by writing a new fat table. Warning! this takes hours.

6. in bios, performance set as ahci mode(if no raid)
7. disable drive indexing
8. disable windows search
9. disable superfetch
10. disabling prefetch

and for ssd’s only!
1.connect to motherboard intel ports (color grey) , not marvell/lamd ports (color navy blue)
2. do not defrag ssd’s, instead have schedules of trim command sent to the os
check with cmd then “fsutil behavior query disabledeletenotify” if return 0 means its running

———————
basically my summary is this, buy the SSD first and see if it meets your needs enough before buying a gfx card.