[Christopher Hutson]

I’ve got another system but it’s heavily in use with an editor getting close to picture lock on an indie feature so I can’t risk it.

I’m in Perth, Western Australia and put a call through this morning to BM’s office in Melbourne. Their tech support is not back yet from the break so I’ve left a message.

Have also spoken to my local supplier and emailed them the details as per these posts. Awaiting their advice.

Cheers and thanks for your interest Sascha.

[Christopher Hutson]

Thanks Sascha. I’ve followed one of BM’s recommended configurations. Internally I’ve got 5 drives; 1 the original Apple system drive sitting in the optical bay supported by the OWC bracket set and 4 x 2TB WD Black Caviars in a software RAID. According to their specs they each draw 10 watts, so that’s about 50 watts total. I’m worried about the PCIe bus however:

NVIDIA GeForce GTX 285 – 204w (up to 408w in some Quake 4 test reviews)
NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 – 50w
BM Decklink HD Extreme 3D – ? (no power specs published)
TOTAL – 254 + ?

Apple’s published limit – 300w

According to above calculation that leaves around 46w for the Decklink

What puzzles me is that it all worked okay when I was grading in Color and using the Decklink for external monitoring but when I went to set the preferences in Resolve as soon as I selected the Decklink for I/O – sudden death. CUDA cores weren’t even been driven by the application yet. According to the manual you close Resolve after making your preferences and then restart for them to take effect. I didn’t get a chance to.

I’m loathe to put the Decklink card back in case it’s faulty and I don’t want the motherboard’s PCIe logic controller to get fried. I’ve also got a Quadro FX 4800 which draws less than the GT 285 – 150w. It, however, has less CUDA cores than the 285 which is BM’s preferred choice. Also the 4800 is a pricey card and I can’t risk it.

I guess I’ll have to wait until I can return the card and speak to BM.