Mac Pro 3.0 or 3.2 (sorry if this has been asked)

[Jan Sherlink]

There is a noticable difference, 1.6GHz (8*0.2) to be exact.
But working in AE, a 3.0GHz Octocore with 16GB Ram and 3disk Raid0 will surely beat a 3.2GHz 4 GB Ram and single disk setup.

cya,

Jan

[Kevin Camp]

jan’s right… that .2ghz is multiplied by the 8 cores that can be used by ae’s multiprocessing render engine in cs3 (and cs4). so it may be worth the $800 if that $800 isn’t sacrificing something else, like ram or a fast disk array.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Robert Combs]

Thank you for your thoughtful responses. I think I’ll go with the 3.2.

One other thing… Do super fast drives really matter all that much? Any recomendations on the cheapest fast drive (or RAID) option?

Thanks again,
Rob

thanks

[Jan Sherlink]

Let’s say you have a Comp with 4 uncompressed QT’s and you render to an uncompressed QT, and you render with Multiprocessing enabled. (8cores = 16 GB Ram advised)
If you’re using a single disk… the bottleneck of your system will be the harddrive !! There’s to much data that needs to be fed to the processors so your 8 processors will only use about 20% of their power.

The cheapest solution:
use internal drives, 1 for the OS and 3 for Raid0
otherwise check the adverts on this page for external solutions.

cya,

Jan

[Kevin Camp]

i would recommend a pci-e sata2 host adapter and external sata2 striped drive array. if you have your disk array on the same internal sata bus as the main drive, you’ll still likely get a bottle neck with disk cache enabled in ae.

barefeats.com has several reveiws/benchmarks of various sata2 cards and raid configs, as does amug.com. although sas is very fast, i would lean towards sata2 over sas for the disk array just based on price per gb. but you could look at an sas drive as the main drive, the small read/write times are great on sas drives which make them a good choice for boot drives and disk cache drives. the newer western digital velociraptor (sata2) has also good benchmarks and will now easily install in a mac pro internal drive bay.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Robert Combs]

I’m sorry for being so dim about this stuff but any ballpark idea of a MB per Second data transfer rate I should be shopping for?

Thanks again,
Rob

thanks

[Kevin Camp]

it depends a little bit on what you’ll be working with… i think a single stream of uncompressed hd is around 160mb/sec… that is pretty easy to achieve, but that would be the flat out minimum to capture a single stream of hd.

if you were editing uncompressed hd, you would need double that to get realtime playback of something as simple as a crossfade between 2 clips.

in compositing you may composite several clips together, so it kind of depends on what you need… i guess if i had to give a target, 320mb/sec minimum would probably be a decent place to start. 320mb/sec is not too hard achieve and should give you a pretty wide array of choices. and, if you are working in hd, quite a bit of your footage will probably be compressed, and that will have a much lighter data rate.

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Robert Combs]

Thanks Jan and Kevin!

I think I’ll pull the trigger on the 3.2 sysem with 16 Gigs of ram on Monday.
As far as drives go, you’ve convinced me. I’m going to need something kind of fast..

Here’s what i’ve discovered. I’d love to know what you think…

I’ve been quoted a 5×500 GB SATA II drive RAID (internal within the Mac Pro using MaxConnect optical Bay) with sustained data rate of 500+MB/sec for $429. From this company called.. MaxUpgrades.com

Have you ever heard of them? Any additional advice is always appreciated.

This whole thing is a pretty big purchase for me as I am not a wealthy man.

Thanks, -Rob

thanks

[Jan Sherlink]

I’m not a real Mac-Hardware specialist, so somebody correct me if i’m wrong…
Your Mac supports 4 internal SataII connections, so if your using 5 disks, you’ll still need a PCIe Raid controller.
I don’t know Maxupgrades, but the site is all about Power Mac G5, so check that the “Maxconnect Optical Drive Bay” fits in a Intel Xeon system !!!

cya,

Jan

[Robert Combs]

Hi Jan,

As far as the RAID controller… I was told this by Max Upgrades…

“You don’t need the RAID Controller.

There are six SATA ports on the system…..you are going to use that”

thanks