Gadgetory

this episode of system-config is powered by Corsair back in the day when I first started editing home videos of my GI Joes I was about as fast as a Mexican standoff between two koalas they have poseable thumbs I checked so technically that scenario was possible as years went by I learned my hotkeys and developed my craft until I was no longer limited by my skill but by the performance of my computer luckily that just meant my family had to wait a few more hours before watching my debut of saving plastic Ryan but in a professional workspace having a slow system could cost a production company several thousand dollars in poor productivity and render times today I helped a professional overcome this costly situation on episode 3 of system-config hello my name is Jacob Brumfield I work for jump creative we are an entertainment marketing and production company we do everything from 3d TV shows to social media marketing we will be using this computer for motion graphics for rendering raw files for editorial and we'll be using it for color correction we'll be using DaVinci Resolve After Effects and avid my current system is a Apple Mac Pro it's like from 2009 and it's just outdated and this is gonna be like quantum leaping one of the main reasons why we're upgrading to this system and away from our Mac Pro is because it's render time simply that it's the artists need to be creating instead of waiting for a ram preview or something to render for this new PC we're looking to spend about 3 to 4 ok the goal for this upgrade is to decrease render time and increase increase productivity that's why I called title I'm looking for a hot rod that's what I want this thing to be all right guys I have brought Jakob into my humble abode and I've actually asked him to bring in his old system the one that he was just telling you guys a little bit about so the reason why I had you bring it in is because I just wanted to take a look at where you're coming from take a look at some of the hardware inside we're gonna go over the specs just briefly and then from there we can do a little performance test of it and just see what you've been working with so far sound good sounds great alright so I'm gonna pop this the this guy off see what's under the hood I believe it just lifts up like that actually never disassembled a MacPro before like this so this is new to me I'll take that for you so underneath we've got this looks interesting Apple always has a very innovative way of mashing their hardware together first up I know that this is rocking a quad-core processor right an Intel Xeon processor which is actually a fairly decent piece of hardware but it is fairly dated as well you said this was 2008-2009 yeah something like that so I'm still still getting a little bit sluggish there and the memory is kind of interesting why don't you pull that out really quick and we can take a look at it I also use a can of compressed air probably probably wouldn't hurt from that either yeah okay this is really interesting so we've got a total of eight sticks of memory and I think these are two gig modules so we've got 16 gigs and that's ddr2 memory so we're definitely dealing with the we're having a blast from the past right now I believe it's running at 667 megahertz so but this is kind of an interesting layout nonetheless they've actually taken all of the dims and installed them onto a single PCB and then from there you just kind of slide it back in so I'll just let you go ahead and do that the video card is this guy right here right I believe that's that's all just integrated power right I think it's just getting power directly from the motherboard it's a 70 300 GT so if you guys look up the specs on that or I could just tell them to you right now it has half a gig of memory 512 megabytes of gddr3 on a video card so as Jacob pulls that guy out here yeah there you go all right so you've got a heatsink on there there's your PCI Express slot it's an old timer you got to love that that bright green PCB there's something very nostalgic about it so this is definitely an outdated system it still works nonetheless but the rate at which things are advancing in the post-production world you need your hardware to kind of advance along with it absolutely so I think with that said let's get down to the nitty-gritty and see how this thing actually performs in kind of a post-production workflow alright great let's do it alright guys so we finally booted up into the desktop it took us a whopping 2 minutes and 41 seconds so within that time Jacob and I actually had a nice little lunch so now that we're all energized and ready to keep going we actually have redcine-x pulled up here which is a nice program that's used to look at dailies and look at your footage and it'll do a lot of transcoding functionality but that's basically the gist of it and also we have a fork uncompressed raw file here that's actually taken from a that Jacob and his team of junk creative did four new egg the company I work for for those of you who didn't know I was four eggies video is a thing that we did at CES really cool productions but this is a clip from that and we're basically just gonna do a quick run-through and see how it does playback at different resolutions so why don't you walk us through that Jacob alright cool so I've loaded a couple of these into the media bin and we'll see if we can play it back we're at eight resolution right now or eight quality and it's looking alright so far it'll play back if we go to quarter you'll see that it'll play back for a bit and then it thinks but definitely like more than a hiccup I mean it just it completely stops it's really not work I want real-time is already gone at a quarter resolution and then at half quality we we run into an issue where it takes it even a while to load the frame well and then for playback it it'll sit there and think for a while and it'll it'll jump into playback and once it jumps in it goes for about a second less than a second and stops again so just one more test before we actually move on to the hardware of your new system and that's gonna be a render test we're gonna take a clip 4k uncompressed once again and we're just gonna render it and see how long it takes because honestly that that can take a long time if you're running with a slow system right right right : so what kind of clip do we have on what settings we're gonna be transcoding with we have a red raw file from the shoot and he was talking about earlier and we're gonna we're gonna export it as an MXF test okay now it's rendering and exports pain and how large would you say this file is like how many gigs is this is this one file that weird this one file is it's likely seven or eight gigs okay and do you know the length of the clip about okay it's fifty seconds so a fifty second clip at 4k uncompressed is taking 14 minutes almost 15 minutes to render this one file and it's not even a minute long so hopefully hopefully we can actually squash that number down significantly total you build so why don't we transition switch gears here and talk about the actual hardware that we're going to be putting into this new awesome editing rig for an editing rig of this caliber it's imperative that it can support a large capacity of high-speed memories while offering substantial PCIe support so the Ivy bridge-e platform seems like an appropriate choice with its quad channel memory interface and a ridiculous amount of PCIe lanes at the heart of this x79 build is the core i7 49 30 K which supports six cores and twelve threads to help Jacob minimize those render times since this is a workstation PC it makes sense to go with the workstation board so here we have the Asus p9 X 79 ws workstation motherboards will generally build with higher grade componentry than their standard or gaming series counterparts enhancing their performance and increasing reliability high resolution video editing is definitely a task that benefits from lots of high-speed Ram so we decided to go with this Corsair Vengeance quad channel memory kit rated at 20 133 megahertz and due to the awesomeness that is the x79 platform there's four more empty bin slots in case Jacob wants to expand his memory bank even further later down the line the video card of choice is nvidia quadro k 4000 with three gigs of gddr5 memory and 768 cuda cores this beast of a workstation card is crafted entirely by nvidia to ensure supreme reliability and integration with professional applications the card retains an unobtrusive single slot form factor and notable features like 10-bit color depth is sure to aid with accurate color correction in DaVinci Resolve cooling our 4930 K is the H 100 I all in one liquid cooler from Corsair aside from great thermal performance thanks to the 240 millimeter radiator and 2sp fans the Corsair link software is handy for monitoring temperatures and controlling fan speeds straight from the OS 4 power we have the corsair ax 860 watt power supply it's fully modular 80-plus platinum certified and comes with black sleeve cables that are long enough to accommodate larger cases it can also go incognito when the system is idling or doing basic tasks stopping the fan completely for silent operation moving away from the sluggish load times of the Mac Pros mechanical hard drive we're throwing in an SSD for our operating system and the bulk of applications Jacob will be using to make 10 videos Corsairs neutron GTX has a wicked fast Lam controller for data intensive tasks and does an outstanding job in read consistency meaning right performance won't be heavily compromised as the drive fills up of course we still need a mechanical drive to store the bulk of data that will be captured on a regular basis so we the WD black 2 terabyte hard drive since jump creative already has a backup server with a serious raid array from which they work from it eliminates the need to set up a raid configuration here which is why more than one hard drive in this case would be superfluous now as we all know optical media hasn't been as necessary these days but every now and again a situation arises where you wish you had installed an optical drive in your rig so with the prospect of better safe than sorry we've included this combo blu-ray drive from Asus I also thought it'd be a good idea to throw in this card reader from Roseville to help streamline the capturing process when shooting on flash media the beats having to fiddle with an external card reader and it's advertised to support 40 different types of memory cards all of which I'm sure Jacob will be using rounding out this lineup of parts is our chassis the corsair 750d from their obsidian series is an excellent choice for an editing system in part to having great air flow a spacious interior for large hardware and generous support for additional hardware like having 9 expansion slots it also has a classy aesthetic and a large side panel window to appreciate those pretty workstation components adding on a copy of Windows 7 Professional for our operating system brings the total cost of this build to 3200 dollars veering towards the shy end of jump creatives budget and since looking at all this perfectly packaged hardware is giving me major building xiety I think it's time that we put this together all right the build is finally done we've put all of the hardware together this thing looks pretty freakin sweet if you ask me it's great and I'm assuming it's going to be somewhat of a powerhouse when we get into the actual performance test which we're gonna do in a moment I briefly just did want to mention a few of the shortcomings or a few of the obstacles that I faced when building the system one of which was the video card the Quadro k4000 that's actually the second k4000 that we purchased because the first one was DOA it was completely dead I was troubleshooting for two or three hours just thinking it's gotta be me it's user error clearly because these things are extremely reliable that's what they're built for but sure enough I did enough troubleshooting to the point where I realized it's just dead so I'm shoot the RMA and Vidia got that to me right away so thank you would video and this one works out beautifully so it's gonna serve you very well the other thing is that I did have a card reader that I wanted to install but completely forgot to get the adapter it's a three and a half inch card reader these are five and a quarter inch bays didn't have the adapter so maybe that's something that Jacob and his team can install later if they need that type of connectivity I think there was a couple things that you were gonna even add-on further to this system one of which was gonna be dual booting correct yeah we were gonna I want to dual boot it into Lennox because we have DaVinci which runs in an enterprise level and Linux that really benefits by the speed performance that Lennox can bring to it cuz you can add other nodes and a lot more cards and other stations to help with rendering so you just offload some that Duty somewhere else the other thing we're looking at is probably putting a black magic the 4k extreme card in there to soar so we can get the 4k out monitor capabilities along with the new red rocket card ya heard that really helps d Baird this this red footage sweet sounds good you've got plenty of open PCIe slots to help you with that there's four more in there that's great why don't we start it off by booting this thing on and kind of starting off where we left off with the boot test I think the time to beat is two minutes and 41 seconds which I don't know man I don't know if we can do it it's gonna be tough fingers crossed here we go I got my timer right here and go I like the digital readout on the board yeah it's a it's a debug LED so if there's anything that's wrong with the system it'll spit out a code you can actually look that code up in a legend in the manual it'll tell you exactly what's wrong like oh that's great stick of memory not seated so you don't have to sit there for a couple hours troubleshooting he'll just have it right there for you I really like that so we're already starting Windows we got the windows logo I gotta get ready to stop this Oh Windows updates we've been punked we've been punched oh no we have to do this twice doesn't count we're cut are we doing that three two one start boot my guess is it's gonna boot up about 30 seconds or so if I had to guess ready oh stop Oh nope I gotta keep going aha dammit okay so that was probably about three seconds that I need to add on because the little pinky the icon was still going so that's about 34 seconds it's not bad 34 second through time down from 2 minutes and 41 seconds so that's not terrible yeah it's great now the next test would be to do the the playback test yeah let's check this guy out let's reopen redcine-x and take a look at that same we're gonna be using the same clip that we were using in the last computer for the Mac Pro quality and 1/8 was able to handle it pretty well they could play 1/8 so you play it real time so of course this is gonna be able to match that at least it looks extremely smooth no problems now 1/4 is where we started to see a hiccup or two at the lastest it would play for a couple of seconds and it would stall yeah the play though install gotcha so let's see how this fares so far so good no hiccups no still going real time all right all right true test half rest it's gonna hiccup never Wow okay so awesome you guys can clearly see that we're having no issues at all running this real time even up to half quality can we see what whole entire full quality looks like okay so we're getting a bit of choppiness here a little bit of stuff yeah but it's still not it's still play it's still plays it's not coming to a halt like it was a quarter with Mac Pro so all-in-all this is looking really good awesome so I think the next test I think we're ready to do our vendor test so we're actually just gonna use the exact same settings as we work with with the Mac Pro it's once again it's a 50 second clip and it's 4k uncompressed res okay make sure settings are the same okay where should we put this guy I like putting things on the desktop cuz I can see it I don't forget about it it doesn't like hide in my system forever holy crap it's it's going it's almost done fifty percent 10 seconds ETA Wow okay alright so it's done and that took I didn't even have time to press the timer that must have been less than 10 seconds yeah so we went from 14 minutes and 11 seconds I believe 14 minutes to 10 seconds less than 10 seconds that's I don't even know what percent increase that is of speed but it's extraordinary that's extraordinary well you guys are in good shape now hopefully this will get to save you guys a lot of time and I know in the film industry time is money absolutely this is gonna be a huge help and improvement to you guys and is this the first PC that you're actually integrating into your workflow or one of the first ones yeah it's it's our first one and we're planning on going directly into just all pcs we're getting out of the Mac ecosystem awesome sounds good man well if you need another PC you know we're fine but you have for sure man thanks Jacob thank you very much for your time well thank you and thank you guys for watching this video if you guys enjoyed it please like and subscribe to awesomesauce news if you have an hour and I'll see you guys in the next one