Alex Gerulaitis
Forum Replies Created
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[Alex Gerulaitis] “Are there any benchmarks to support this? In my testing, https://www2.hp.com/Hpsub/cache/285683-0-0-225-121.html“>HP Performance Advisor does very little to optimize ISV apps (including any CS apps) unless there is a clear problem with the hardware or OS configuration i.e. sub-optimal memory configuration, not enough memory, etc.”
Creative Cow nearly always breaks HP URLs. Here is the shortened and unbroken one, for HP Performance Advisor:
full URL:
https://h20331.https://www2.hp.com/Hpsub/cache/285683-0-0-225-121.html
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
I am good Chris! (Still wishing Apple for once didn’t make a mess out of a good thing like they did by usurping Light Peak and making a costly, proprietary, poorly adopted version of it and calling it Thunderbolt. It’s clearly a high-end I/O interface – so a year-and-a-half later, why isn’t it available on Mac Pros yet? Now that I am done with my rant…)
How are you, Chris? 🙂
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Keith Moreau] “Tom, what was the exact model you got, speed, config etc, and if I may ask, how much was it?”
Apologies for jumping in: Tom already answered some of these above: Z820 CTO with two E5-2687 (fastest available), GTX-50 which he is getting separately.
[Keith Moreau] “I went to the HP Site and found it really quite confusing and it also seemed the 16 core models were also lower speed CPUs. Do they offer a i7 model for those that might not need all those cores?”
True: the fastest clock is on a quad-core E5-2643 at 3.3GHz and 10MB cache; it’s unlikely to be a good choice for CS apps that need the balance of memory and CPU speed, with cache size and the number of cores. A six-core E5-2667 at 2.9GHz, 15 MB cache is likely to be faster for most CS work-flows. Tom’s E5-2687 is the fastest available (and the most expensive) choice.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
Don,
There is a possibility the card is bad. It’s extremely rare, but it’s possible. The most effective way to figure this out is to borrow or get another q4k and see if the problems recur.
Meanwhile, try uninstalling the drivers and re-installing them in “custom” mode – where you disable any add-ons (HDMI sound drivers; nview; 3D support) and install only the bare minimum. See if that helps.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Tom Daigon] “The big difference is that HP can be optimized to effectively work with Adobe CS6 through HPs Performance Management software.”
Tom,
Are there any benchmarks to support this? In my testing, https://www2.hp.com/Hpsub/cache/285683-0-0-225-121.html“>HP Performance Advisor does very little to optimize ISV apps (including any CS apps) unless there is a clear problem with the hardware or OS configuration i.e. sub-optimal memory configuration, not enough memory, etc.
In addition, there is very little in HP BIOS that can be tweaked for performance with the exception of Hyper-Threading which is on some HPs is turned off OOTB (out-of-the-box) – e.g. no over-clocking or timing options.
On the other hand I am shaving 20-30 seconds off boot times on nearly any supposedly “optimized” HP system by turning off unnecessary boot agents (network, SAS), taking out unnecessary services and run-at-boot OS and app modules. On top of that, showing my clients how to monitor memory and CPU usage helps more than anything else. HP doesn’t do that – they can’t for a number of reasons.
Yet on the other hand many of the options on HP site are sub-optimal as well: HP SSDs are 2 generations old, way over-priced; using SAS boot drives increases boot times by 10-20 seconds; HP memory is over-priced and fails more often than Lifetime, Edge or Kingston memory. Yet not every 3rd party SSD will work well in HP systems: BIOS compatibility issues.
Bottom line, there is more to system optimization than HP PA (Performance Advisor). It does catch some configuration errors but does little beyond that.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
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[Jon Schilling] “Maybe it is the iStorage enclosure, not sure. I would imagine the drives he’s using are the Standard 2TB Deskstar drives, so that much should be OK. The speeds he indicated he’s getting are way too low.”
Agreed.
Four possible problem areas:
– drives
– iSPro enclosure
– R680 and its settings
– OS / host system issuesI’d start by breaking the existing RAID set, and clocking several drives individually via R680 to see if the bottleneck is there; then creating a RAID0 with 2-3 drives and seeing what the numbers are; if they are lower than they should be, take a few drives out of the enclosure, insert them into Mac Pro bays, clock them, see if the numbers are different vs. R680/iSPro.
That might give us enough info to see where the problem is.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Jon Schilling] “Unfortunately there’s nothing more you can do to get more speed except to trade in that ATTO R680 card & get an Areca 1882X card.”
Jon, looks like there are multiple benchmarks clocking R680 at 1GB/s:
– ST8-U5 with 8 SSDs, 1503MB/s
– Dual G-Speed eS Pro (8 drives) – 1GB+/s
– Silverado with 8 drives – 1GB+/sPossibly something’s going on with Nir Shelter’s system or drives?
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Chris Borjis] “I like the report, but its for Ray Tracing in After effects.
Does that equate to Mercury Engine performance on par in premiere?”
The short answer is “no”, and from what I am seeing, the GTX-680 is the fastest card for Pr purposes, unlike for Ray Tracing ones.
It also seems that PPBM5 focuses more on benchmarking whole systems rather than individual components, and thus isn’t a great source for figuring out which GPU is best for Pr.
E.g. all I see (on PPBM5 site) is the “MPE gain” chart (2nd one, “Mercury Playback Engine gain”) which while does help a little, is not really a proper GPU-specific bench test but rather a statistical table.
Studio 1 test is the proper test on a fixed system, and it shows the fastest card being GTX-680, the slowest – GT-240, with the delta between them in the 25% range for timeline render, and in the 100% range (twice as fast) in MPEG export.
To me it means, get the least expensive card suitable for your system if your don’t encode a lot; and if you do, the GTX-680 is the best choice by far.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA -
[Mike Fa] “By the way – this is a self build. The motherboard I’m using is ASUS P8Z68-V PRO LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard with UEFI BIOS. Not sure if this makes a difference.”
Probably not a huge one. What may matter to some degree, is the IRST firmware and application versions.
[Mike Fa] “I’ve never rebuild an array before. I’m assuming I would have to get a Hitachi 2tb drive instead of the 1.5 (since I can’t find this drive anymore?) Once I get the drive would it be as simple as just plugging the drive in and the array will rebuild itself automatically? Or will I have to do something to start that process?”
You may have to designate the new drive as a spare first, in the IRST application. From there, the array should start re-building. It’s fairly straightforward.
Alex Gerulaitis
Systems Integrator
DV411 – Los Angeles, CA