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Vegas/PC Upgrade reality check
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[Stephen Mann] “lso, I seem to recall that the MS Windows license is one per CPU, so that a dual-cpu board would require two licenses for Windows. Since I’ve never built a dual-processor rig before, I never looked into this.”
Not quite. Microsoft only licenses Windows Home for a single core. But you’ll need Windows Pro to get beyond 16GB anyway, so it’s not a significant issue.
Dual processor is a way to go, but you have to be careful about how that propagates pricing. Most dual socket motherboards are intended for servers, so they’re large, they require registered DIMMs or even FDIMMs, they may not have enough PCIe or USB ports. Some are intended for workstations… that’s what you’re looking for. Expect to pay about 3x as much for the main board, but for that level of performance, maybe not a problem. Asus has a line of workstation main boards like this (example: Z9PE-D8 WS), Supermicro does too still, I think (I had a dual-socket Supermicro system, ages ago).
Similarly with the CPU… the i7-39xx are essentially the same as the Xeon E5-16xx series. The Xeon E5-26xx are just like that, too, only allowing dual socket operation. What you want to watch out for is that most server work demands more cores, not faster cores. So some of the Xeons drop their speed considerably, but enables more cores. You want both, speed and cores, in a workstation, and shouldn’t take a hit on peak speed.
Also, consider drives and other I/O… LGA2011/X79 systems usually have 40 PCIe lanes. The consumery LGA1155 has only 16 PCIe lanes. These aren’t just used for adding multiple GPUs, but for more SATA ports (my main board as 12), more USB, perhaps other peripherals. As well as those sockets that can handle 3 or 4 GPU boards.
-Dave
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I am researching using two 960 GB SSD drives that sell for about $1,000 each and smaller maybe 520 GB for rendering. Not totally convinced but I would prefer to have Vegas, OS on one and the media on the other and a third to render plus externals for archival. Not interested in RAID drives at this point. I’m not shooting 4K or Red footage (yet) so not a must have. Plus I would rather spend resources on items that increase efficiency. I want rock solid components and am not shy about paying a bit more for it. If I am overlooking something please share that.
Question for John ..
When is the latest and greatest from Apple being released? No info I have seen from Apple or what the specs are. Running Vegas on means you’re are using bootcamp I trust. That being said are you saying that the hardware they have will be superior to PC’S?Apple does ensure component compatibility with their systems based on their Linux OS but do they do the same for the Windows OS?
After all the CPU is Intel and in actuality it is a PC…but with an Apple OS.I own a Mac and it is very solid and trust worthy but I don’t use the MAC side very often. So what will the real difference be unless you have gone to the dark side and are using FCP. ???
Xeon processors are designed for servers not workstations so I am wondering the application realism. Are there any dual processor motherboards using other Intel CPU’S?
Thanks for all the suggestions…keep them coming.
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[Joe Mantaratz] “I am researching using two 960 GB SSD drives that sell for about $1,000 each and smaller maybe 520 GB for rendering. Not totally convinced but I would prefer to have Vegas, OS on one and the media on the other and a third to render plus externals for archival. Not interested in RAID drives at this point. I’m not shooting 4K or Red footage (yet) so not a must have. “
Keep in mind, unless you render in raw HD (and I sometimes do, for animation), you’re getting absolutely no advantage out of an SSD as a rendering drive. That one 25Mb/s or 50Mb/s stream is not going to need 350-500MB/s (2.8-4.0Gb/s)… rendering won’t go a hair faster than if you dumped it to a USB stick. Not true, of course, if you’re using just the one drive for assets and rendering… SSD will outperform single drive and even a small magnetic RAID there, due to seek times.
I like a RAID for the main drive because, once your software is in place, it’s mostly used for reading. The OS does writes, sure, but small ones — another thing that magnetic drives don’t use. But SSDs still have a much shorter life cycle than magnetics, due entirely to the limited erase-write cycles. Used as a system drive, it should be a fairly moot point, since you’ll probably want to replace it with a larger, faster drive, before it’s dead. But writing many, many gigabytes to the drive on a regular basis? Not ideal. Particularly if you’re using an MLC-flash drive rather than a very expensive SLC-flash drive.
I should mention I also have two project drives… I mount SATA drives and use them as dedicated project discs, for larger projects.
[Joe Mantaratz] “When is the latest and greatest from Apple being released? No info I have seen from Apple or what the specs are. “
I’m not John, but the only Mac I’d consider viable for video work is the new Mac Pro. And it’s a wonky system — looks like a trash can, no internal expansion, no HDD, no optical. It’s kind of cute — about 1/8 the size of the current “looks like a desktop PC” Mac Pro.
You have dual ATi/AMD FirePro GPUs, on custom boards, so you’ll have these for the life of the PC. Which is probably not a problem, though keep in mind, very few OpenCL programs can use dual GPUs right now, though OpenGL can. These share a fairly interesting cross-point switch with some Thunderbolt ports… which is of course a new Intel thing that only Apple is currently using. Of course, there’s FirePro and there’s FirePro — today’s top of the line W9000 cards cost $3500 each, low end are under $300. This is one of the reasons no can but guess what these things are going to cost.
The high speed expansion is Thunderbolt, and you have six ports. But as mentioned, there’s a cross point switch, which flips the port to either Thunderbolt or DisplayPort, depending on how it’s connected. So if you have two monitors connected, you only have four TB ports available.
One Thunderbolt port runs two 10Gb/s channels, a bit faster than a single PCI Express 3.0 link. They also support Thunderbolt 2.0, which lets you aggregate the two links into a single 20Gb/s channel, much as PCI Express aggregates links, like the 16 that usually feed a GPU card. Great for external storage… you’ll need that. Not usable for external video cards or some of the other things pundits immediately thought about when this machine was debuted. And of course, four USB ports… gotta connect that keyboard, still.
This is going to be pricey, when it debuts later this year… they’re waiting on Intel’s 12-core Xeon; again, a part that’s not out yet, and no specific version mentioned. Given the retail price of the high-end 6-core i7 is over $1000, this, too, could add some weight to the price. Same memory type as my far cheaper machine, not sure what they’ll be shipping with, but it’s an LGA2011 Xeon, so four memory lanes of DDR3-1866.
For storage, it’s got PCI Express based Flash, which they claim is 1250MB/s… that’s damn fast. Faster than SATA 3.0… presumably they’re using a 2x PCIe link. The problem is, you won’t get much of that storage… going to make dual-booting Mac and PC an issue.
This will be a kick-ass machine. Then again, assuming the typical Apple pricing, any machine in that range will be.. I’d be surprised if they sell a 6-core version for much under $4K… probably more. Though it was nice to see Apple getting back into the pro market — their current Mac Pro is ancient, the design dates back to late 2009.
More here: https://arstechnica.com/apple/2013/06/a-critical-look-at-the-new-mac-pro/
[Joe Mantaratz] “Xeon processors are designed for servers not workstations so I am wondering the application realism. Are there any dual processor motherboards using other Intel CPU’S? “
Xeon processors are usually just modifications of Intel desktop processors, with more cache and sometimes more core units. There’s nothing inherently “workstation” vs. “server” about them, except that they support server-class RAM (registered DDR, FDIMM, depending on generation). You optimize your processor selection for the job. Some Xeons add cores and lower the peak clock, which pushes them toward server optimization; others keep the higher clocks, perhaps with fewer cores. No idea about the 12-core chip, since that’s not out yet.
Intel doesn’t support dual-socket for anything but the Xeon, even though the LGA2011 i7s and LGA2011 Xeons are essentially the same chip in some versions. They could, of course, they choose not to… they get more money for Xeons. Ages ago, there were hacks for this with some of the chips, but it’s simply not work messing with.
-Dave
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[Joe Mantaratz] “When is the latest and greatest from Apple being released?”
Apple said Fall of 2013 and it’s certainly getting cool here in the North East so I assume that means October’ish but this is just my guess. That’s next month so that’s pretty soon. There are only three months left in the year so I can say with 100% confidence that it will be released in the next 3 months. lol 😉
[Joe Mantaratz] “No info I have seen from Apple or what the specs are.”
Did you go to their site and watch the Mac Pro Demo? Here is a summary of what it says:
New-generation Intel Xeon E5 chipset with configurations offering up to 12 cores of processing power, up to 40GB/s of PCI Express gen 3 bandwidth, and 256-bit-wide floating-point instructions. 4-channel DDR3 ECC memory running at 1866MHz delivering up to 60GB/s of memory bandwidth. Dual AMD FirePro workstation-class GPU with up to 6GB of dedicated VRAM. Next-generation PCI Express flash storage that’s up to 2.5 times faster than the fastest SATA-based solid-state drive and up to 10 times faster than a 7200-rpm SATA hard drive.
For expansion there is built‑in Thunderbolt 2, USB 3, Gigabit Ethernet, and HDMI 1.4 ports. Thunderbolt 2 delivers twice the throughput, providing up to 20Gb/s of bandwidth to each external device. It allows you to daisy-chain up to six peripherals per port, so you can plug up to 36 external devices via Thunderbolt alone. The network is 802.11ac Wi-Fi which is faster than anything current PC motherboards have.
[Joe Mantaratz] “Running Vegas on means you’re are using bootcamp I trust”
No. I mostly run Vegas Pro in a virtual machine using VMware Fusion right inside OS X. Here is screen shot of me running Vegas Pro 10.0 fully integrated into the desktop on my older Snow Leopard MacBook Pro (note the Vegas Pro icon on the dock!):
I will only use bootcamp if there are intense GPU processing to be done but with all the power of the new Mac Pro, I’m not even sure if I’ll need to set that up. I mostly use Boris FX Continuum Complete which uses OpenGL and VMware Fusion 6.0 already supports that on OS X so I just got Fusion 6.0 to check it out.
[Joe Mantaratz] “That being said are you saying that the hardware they have will be superior to PC’S?”
Without a doubt there is no PC that has the advanced components (e.g., next-gen flash storage, Thunderbolt 2, etc.) that the new Mac Pro will have. Combine that with the small desktop footprint and it’s gonna be even better than my Mac Mini! lol
[Joe Mantaratz] “Apple does ensure component compatibility with their systems based on their Linux OS but do they do the same for the Windows OS?”
I believe OS X Mountain Lion added support for Windows 8 bootcamp so Apple does keep up to date with Windows versions if that’s what you mean.
[Joe Mantaratz] “I own a Mac and it is very solid and trust worthy but I don’t use the MAC side very often.”
I am the exact opposite. I only use my PC workstation to run Vegas Pro and I use my MacBook Pro for everything else. I agree the Mac is solid as a rock and I would never go back to Windows. I’m not only video editor; I’m also a software developer working on cloud computing so I live on Linux and Mac all day long. I have no use for Windows which is an inferior platform for developing software as a service. If you don’t beleive me, just go watch any of the many video tutorials for Ruby on Rails and you’ll see that all of the developers are using Mac’s.
[Joe Mantaratz] “So what will the real difference be unless you have gone to the dark side and are using FCP. ???”
I have FCP X because I wanted to learn it and I like it a lot. It feels a lot like Vegas Pro and I’m sure the Apple developers did that deliberately. Apple said that it’s being updated to take advantage of the new Mac Pro so I’m sure will leverage those two GPU’s quite a lot. It still doesn’t have the audio capabilities that Vegas Pro has (e.g., buses, etc.) and probably never will and it doesn’t have scripting which is why I can’t switch from Vegas Pro. Nothing comes close to Vegas Pro for audio and productivity using scripts and I’ve been using it for over 10 years so I’m quite set in my ways. I’m hoping that Sony ports Vegas Pro to the Mac like they did for Sound Forge. That’s what I’m really hoping for.
[Joe Mantaratz] “Xeon processors are designed for servers not workstations so I am wondering the application realism. Are there any dual processor motherboards using other Intel CPU’S?”
Xeon’s are workstation class CPU’s as well. All of the workstations made by HP, Dell, Apple, etc. use Xeon’s. The problem is that the motherboards usually don’t have “desktop” features like an abundance of USB 3.0 ports because servers don’t need those but there are desktop motherboards for Xeon’s. You just don’t get a big selection.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Dave Haynie] “And it’s a wonky system — looks like a trash can, no internal expansion, no HDD, no optical. It’s kind of cute — about 1/8 the size of the current “looks like a desktop PC” Mac Pro.”
Actually that’s one of the big selling points for me. I have a Mac Mini and I’ve often said, “why can’t Apple put a powerful processor in here with more connectivity?” and now they did. I really like the new form factor of the Mac Pro and I’m looking forward to getting this huge PC monolith off of my desktop. All I need is the Mac Pro and my RAID enclosure on my desktop and I’m good to go.
[Dave Haynie] “… keep in mind, very few OpenCL programs can use dual GPUs right now”
Apple said that they’re updating FCP X to take advantage of the new Mac Pro’s features so I’m guessing that all that is about to change. Other NLE’s will be forced to catch up.
[Dave Haynie] “Thunderbolt ports… which is of course a new Intel thing that only Apple is currently using”
Actually, both ASUS and Gigabyte have Thunderbolt motherboards for the PC. Don’t forget that this is how Firewire started. It was introduced as an Apple exclusive and then all the PC’s followed. Thundrebolt is the new Firewire in the industry.
[Dave Haynie] “The high speed expansion is Thunderbolt, and you have six ports. … So if you have two monitors connected, you only have four TB ports available.”
True, and with 36 daisy-chained peripherals per port you’ll only be able to connect 144 devices. lol 😉 (just kidding)
[Dave Haynie] “And of course, four USB ports… gotta connect that keyboard, still.”
Actually No. Keyboards, mice, and touch pads are all connected wirelessly via Bluetooth on a Mac. No need to use up a USB port for that.
[Dave Haynie] “This is going to be pricey, when it debuts later this year…”
That’s what I’m afraid of. The old 12 core was $5K. Still $1K less than HP or Boxx who are selling their 12 cores for $6K but I’m really worried about the price. 🙁
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I have always known WIndows was a far inferior platform from back in the when I worked with servers and a software developer who designed programs for us.
To really date this I still recall the tried and true DOS systems and and how you needed a decent grasp of it to be proficient. Cant ever remember a time having any problems with those systems. We used to write our own batch commands to automate some of our multi system functions.
Then came Windows…I really appreciate all the great and quite varied info, so from this chair I will assemble the best list I can from my budget, By next year it will be obsolete anyway.
LOL -
Lots of good details here to sift through and understand…thanks.
Once question to help me understand a bit more about the SSD.Can you explain why using a dedicated SSD/HDD doe rendering would not result in shorter render times? With no heads and spinning discs one would think it would be a faster process. No doubt I do not have a good grasp on the meaning spec data of either. As mentioned before, I have always used dedicated drives for separate tasks and enjoyed efficiency and thought the same would apply using SSD’S.
Understand about the defined write cycles of SSDS but don’t have a comparison of what the life would be vs HDD. Not really concerned about the SSD dying as all the media would be archived and only the Vegas project file would be updated. I’ve always made sure to save the project to other drives with all the media in one folder. Nothing of mine is ever spread across multiple drives.
Thanks for the assitance
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[Joe Mantaratz] “I will assemble the best list I can from my budget, By next year it will be obsolete anyway.”
Because of this fact, some people use a strategy of buying last year’s technology and upgrading more often. I have never done this. I usually buy the latest and upgrade every 5 years but an equally good strategy is to buy what was just replaced and upgrade every 2-3 years. This is why I had to upgrade even though I wanted to hold out for a Mac Pro. My workstation was 5 years old and really showing it’s age. When Apple didn’t deliver a new Mac Pro last year I knew I couldn’t wait another year so I had to reluctantly build another Windows workstation since none of the iMac’s had 6 cores.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Joe Mantaratz] “Can you explain why using a dedicated SSD/HDD doe rendering would not result in shorter render times? With no heads and spinning discs one would think it would be a faster process.”
Spinning discs is not your problem. 99% of all renders are CPU/GPU bound. You could be writing to stone tablets and it wouldn’t make a difference. If the disc is waiting for the CPU to render, it doesn’t matter how fast the disc is, the render will take the same amount of time. So you are wasting your money by rendering to SSD’s.
Bottom line: Unless your hard drive light is on solid during your renders, your render is not I/O bound and will not benefit from faster storage.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
[Joe Mantaratz] “Can you explain why using a dedicated SSD/HDD doe rendering would not result in shorter render times? With no heads and spinning discs one would think it would be a faster process. No doubt I do not have a good grasp on the meaning spec data of either. As mentioned before, I have always used dedicated drives for separate tasks and enjoyed efficiency and thought the same would apply using SSD’S.”
Any render is a pipeline… think of it as a bucket brigade if that helps. The first bucket is any number of disc to buffer transfers, then those decoded to raw video, then FX applied, then compositing, then rendering to your output format, then than buffer dumped back to disc.
Each of those buckets consumes some resources: memory, disc, CPU, etc. If each of these were unlimited, you’d have a finished product seconds after you pressed your “Render” button. Which of course doesn’t happen. The speed of the render is determined by what’s essentially the weakest link your system.
Given the work that needs to be done, the weakest link should be computation. When you look at your system’s CPU and see every CPU core in the system going at close to 100%, you know your CPU is at that point the weakest link in the system. Even with infinitely fast discs, you’re not going to see much faster rendering.
Why? Well, it’s simple.. most of the time, your “write buffer to output file” bucket is empty, waiting for more data from the rest of the pipeline. If you’re rendering to AVC or MPEG-2, you’re probably not going much more than 25-50Mb/s. You can write this to an SDHC card (10MB/s = 80Mb/s), a single HDD (100MB/s = 800Mb/s), a RAID (250MB/s = 2Gb/s), an SSD (500MB/s = 4Gb/s), it doesn’t matter… that media will never stall that part of the pipeline. And on a modern PC, the CPU has very little work to do in that write… most is managed by DMA channels in the system hardware.
It’s more possible to run into stalls on input media, IF you have lots of input media (multiple AVC/MPEG/DNxHD/raw files, large still photos, etc). This is mostly the product of hard drives thrashing… as you read more separate streams from the same HDD, your throughput tends toward seek time rather than peak transfer time. On the other hand, if you’re reading and decoding N AVC streams, you’d be hard pressed to make the HDD the weakest link even at that, because AVC streams are relatively small, so it’s pretty easy to suck up many frames of each stream at once… and then they’re a big CPU hog to decode. I’ve never had a problem with too many AVC streams from a single HDD. I have run into it intentionally trying to make the HDD the bottleneck with multiple 144Mb/s DNxHD streams, and ran into it ages ago with a couple of HDV streams and hundreds of 6 and 8 MPixel JPEG photos in a project.
There was also a concern about using the same drive for programs and data. Today, I look at that as more an SSD vs. HDD issue, but it was a valid concern, especially for music (I was doing DAW stuff for years before video). Again, with many audio tracks, you have lots of seeking. You’d like to have 8, 16, 64 of these, depending on the project, and they need to be mixed in realtime, particularly if you’re overdubbing. In short, a more difficult problem than video editing.
So the system drive… when a program starts up, it can simply load into memory. Some do that. Some load DLLs (dynamic libraries), and make those on-demand… so only features you’re using get loaded. Another way to do this is via “speculative loads”… the program is marked in virtual memory as having been loaded but isn’t actually loaded, so that chunk of the program doesn’t get loaded until run, then it’s trapped and loaded from disc via the VM system). And in the past at least, you might not have enough memory to run all aspects of the program at once. Code could be kicked out when not used, reloaded, etc. That results in disc activity; even more if you have to much data in memory and some starts to get swapped out to your swap file. So a system disc can be active, which means a few more seeks, and something that could throw a twig in your realtime mix, or technically, slow down a video render, at least a bit.
Thus, we started using secondary drives, to keep this (and any other disc-related system or app activity we leave running while running that DAW or NLE) from glitching our primary work. I have 64GB of RAM on my system… I’m pretty such these are not rational fears about the main drive versus the data drive. Nothing’s getting tossed out of memory. There could be speculative or DLL loads, but they’re only an issue once… not a big deal.
[Joe Mantaratz] “Understand about the defined write cycles of SSDS but don’t have a comparison of what the life would be vs HDD. Not really concerned about the SSD dying as all the media would be archived and only the Vegas project file would be updated. I’ve always made sure to save the project to other drives with all the media in one folder. Nothing of mine is ever spread across multiple drives.”
There are different measures of lifespan. In terms of just sitting there, an SSD should outlast an HDD. The systems are often rated in MTBF… Mean Time Between Failure…. basically the average time a device of any given generation will run before it fails. HDDs are of course mechanical systems, and current ones should deliver an MTBF of 500,000 hours or more. SSDs, being all electronics, should deliver a MTBF of better than 2,000,000 hours.
But that’s not the whole story, because of the difference in write cycle life. As mentioned, a typical MLC Flash cell has a life of only a few thousand write-erase cycles. All SSDs use wear leveling logic, so you can write the same location 100,000+ times without problem — the drive will logically map that write to different areas of the flash chip from cycle to cycle. Consumer drives should be good for better over 100,000 write-erase cycles randomly across the drive. Of course, if you decided to re-write the entire drive, you’d get a couple thousand cycles of that before it failed. Enterprise-class drives use SLC flash, which can have 100,000 cycles per cell or more. So these last millions of cycles in practical use.
HDDs don’t usually have any specific limit to the number of write-erase cycles. But they will wear out, mechanically… and of course, at the worst possible time. Drive heat can also cause premature of the disc.
In the do as a I do department, I have an SSD as my system drive and a RAID10 as my data drive. The RAID10 configuration delivers 6TB for less cash than most 1TB SSDs, it’s pretty fast (350-375MB/s for reads, typically) and it’ll ensure the abuse of constantly changing data much better than an SSD would. I also need the space. Sure, it won’t be as efficient dealing with a huge number of assets, due to seek time, but that’s only a problem in 60 layer animations using raw video files, so far. Intermediate files for a project like that can get well into the hundreds of GB, so for a serious project there’s always a project drive as well, with some of the assets living there. Either way, FX and compositing are often still the bottleneck on this kind of project…
-Dave
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