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Workhorse Workstation

Randy Brister

New member
I could use a little advice. I'm going to configure an Alienware MJ 12 Workstation. I don't have the knowledge, time or inclination to build my own from scratch. I know that there are less expensive routes to take, but I've had two Alienware laptops, and I'm extremely happy with their build quality, as well as their customer service.

That being said; the vast majority of my heavy lifting is done in Capture One, processing jobs with 3000-4000 Raw Canon 1D, 1D mkii, and 1Ds files. I do a fair bit of PS work, batch actions, and working on smaller files, rarely exceeding 100MB. C1 is where I really need the speed help.

I can configure this thing with a single dual core AMD 265-285, dual, dual core AMD, 265-285, single dual core Xeon 1.6-3.0, or dual, dual core Xeon 1.6-3.0. What is the general concensus for an optimum system for crunching big C1 batches? I'll spend whatever it takes, although it has to make sense. A 10% increase in performance isn't worth $1000 to me, for instance.

Randy
 
This month the dual core Xeons (the new ones) are the king of the performance hill. Go with the dual dual core 51XX Xeons if C1 is multithreaded. If not, go with just one. Or, if you can save $1000 go with a dual Opteron 275 or thereabout.

Do you want to run XP or XP-64? XP-64 supports more RAM. If you do this, then go for 8 GB of RAM in 4 sticks (8 sticks will entail taking a performance hit and I note Alienware will only sell that to you with maxed out RAM). That said, noting your $1000 criterion, sticking with XP-64 and 4 GB of RAM should do. Please note, with XP (32-bit) you will only have about 3 GB of usable RAM out of 4 GB without monkeying with OS internals.

Photoshop may speed up with 6+ GB of RAM by using the OS disk cache rather than writing directly to the scratch disk.

If you are going to run dual display, then get a graphics card with at least 256 MB of onboard RAM and dual output. The second display tends to increase human performance by 30-40% and this means it is easier to keep the CPU/s busier. Photoshop without question benefits from dual display. Does C1 benefit from dual displays?

Finally, if you are comfortable installing XP, consider buying a Mac Pro from http//store.apple.com and a copy of XP and running it on that. You may be able to get the dual Xeon for less money.
 

Randy Brister

New member
I plan on running XP-32, not sure that I'm ready for XP-64. I had read (somewhere?) that C1 was more efficient on an Intel processor than an AMD. Don't know if that's an urban myth, although there seemed to be plenty who supported this idea. One area where C1 bogs down is when I'm processing a batch, then try to bring more images into the program, the previews build at almost a snails pace. Will a single dual core help in that regard?

Any idea when C1 will be able to take advantage of the second dual core?

Thanks for all the insight.

Randy
 

Nill Toulme

New member
I don't know the answer to either question, but I do know I'm getting what I consider good performance in C1 from my new dual-core Athlon system. I'd be glad to run a few tests for you if you like. I have 1DMkII and 20D files to work with.

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net
 

Brian Hamfeldt

New member
Randy,

As Sean said..."this month, the dual-core Xeons" are top of the line. But being on the 'bleeding edge', the consumer pays the initial R&D and first run production costs.

I have several servers for crunching .JPGs at shows, my first ones were based on dual Athlon MPs, followed by dual HT Xeons, and my latest build are dual Opterons. My disclaimer here is that I don't use C1 - rarely shoot RAW - but do process up to 90,000 jpgs per day - simple rotate and shrink. I would cede to Nill, who recently built a box for C1 processing.

What I can say about my dual 2.8Ghz HyperThreaded Xeons versus my dual 2.0Ghz DualCore Opterons - is that the Opterons at 40% slower clock speed - aren't a little slower then the Xeons and they aren't a little faster than the Xeons... the Opterons smoke the Xeons as far as performance. Everything else in the boxes are the same: RAID 10 w/hot spare data drives, RAID1 w/hot spare OS/program drives, 2Gb ECC memory, 4Gbit NICs - yet the Opterons can crunch through images about 40% faster than the Xeons!

My scripting does take advantage of multiple threads - as many as I need. And having multiple RAID arrays helps with the feeding of images.

What I can say for your purposes, really depends on your workflow...???
When you have C1 batched, are you doing anything else? PS-CS?, downloading? Flight sim? ;)
What are the sizes of your images?
What is the destination? (file format, size, location)

Why I ask these things will determine if you have the need for:
- Extra memory
- more CPUs (either now or later)
- Multiple drive channels - whether independent or RAID

With my workflow, I need just over 1Gb of memory, so 2Gb fits me just fine right now on my servers that are just processing the images.
Although on my PS-CS box, I can never have enough. If I was to go new with a box now, it would have 6-8Gb of memory running x64 and CS2, to dynamically and intelligently take care of my memory management.
If C1 can use two CPUs, and you are doing more things, you may want to get more CPUs. Or at least get a motherboard that you can add a CPU to if you find yourself maxed out on horsepower.
Multiple drives arrays is where I've found to be a critical bottleneck. I started off with RAID10 for performance and redundancy and it worked well. For a couple weeks, I ran RAID5 to get more drive space and the array couldn't handle keeping up with the simultaneous downloading of new images and processing of original files to web sized ones. Also, I have a secondary RAID1 array that I dump the processed images to - that way, I'm not overtaxing the main array with additional writes with simultaneous reads all across the drives.
Another reason I recommend RAID - although it doesn't replace the need for backups (why I have two servers - actually two of everything) - is that when (not if) a drive goes down, you are not sitting still. With a single drive situation and a good backup, you still have to replace a dead drive, reload the backup before you can continue working. With RAID, you simply keep working. For me, I have hot spares - that automatically kick in when a drive goes bad. No need for me to down everything and replace the drive to start rebuilting, I replace the drive when I get back to the office, knowing everything is still running fine. Granted, my demands on hardware do not mirror that of many, but even as a hardware junkie, I don't want to be spending my time troubleshooting/swapping out hardware, when I need to get images to customers.

Anyway, some things to think about - again, based on your work flow, demands on time, and respect for redundancy.

Brian.
 

Randy Brister

New member
Brian, you do have some, shall I say, unique, workflow issues. Mine aren't quite as extensive.

The MJ-12 box will hold 4 drives, and my plan is to set it up with 4-500GB S ATA 7200rpm w/ NCQ and 32MB cache in a Hot Swap Bay. I'll run them as 2 seperate Raid1's. I really like the idea of a large C drive, as both my downloaded jobs, as well as C1 previews reside there. I need to keep close to 500GB readily available at any given time. This may not be the smartest way to go, help me understand if it isn't, and what the smart thing to do is. For instance, I don't know if I'll suffer a performance hit if I put the C1 previews and my download image folder on the second Raid set. If not would 150GB (2 x 150GB) Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s 10,000 RPM w/ 2 x 16MB Cache - NEW ! make any sense?

I rarely, if ever, run any other program when I'm crunching Raws in C1. The Raws are all converted to 4-8MB jpegs, BTW, and I can send them to either the same drive as the OS, or to the second set of HD's.

I want expandability, I'm assuming that I'll put XP64 on this machine at some point in time before I retire it. I'm looking at 4GB Dual Channel DDR Registered ECC SDRAM at 400MHz - 4 x 1024MB , there will be room for 4 more when the time comes.

As far as a video card, NVIDIA® Quadro™ FX 1500 256MB GDDR3 w/ 2x Dual Link DVI.

Nil, with my present 3.2ghz box and 1GB Ram, I can convert 1Dmkii files in about 17secs. I'd be curious to know what kind of time you're getting with your AMD.

Again, I appreciate all of the help. I take pretty good pictures, and have managed to figure out a bunch of software, but I'm close to clueless when it comes to hardware.

Randy
 

Nill Toulme

New member
I get about 9 seconds to 16-bit tif. Probably not significantly different to jpg, but I'm not sure.

The system has 4GB RAM but of course XP only sees 3 of that. The OS and apps are on a 150GB Raptor; images are on a 1.1TB SATA internal RAID5 array running off the mobo, nothing fancy.

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net
 

Nill Toulme

New member
I was just wondering about that myself, as I can't find it (the specs, that is, not the box). :)

Basics are Asus A8N32-SLI mobo with Athlon 64 X2 4800+ in Lian-Li PC-V1000A six-drive case, 4GB RAM, big honkin' power supply, 150GB Raptor OS/apps drive, 160GB PATA drive that just clones the boot drive, four 400GB SATA drives for data running as a 1.1TB RAID5 off the mobo, no separate RAID card yet, and some sort of nvidia video card running an NEC 2090uxi.

Bought it a few months ago, so it's obsolete now. :-(

Got it from Monarch Computers which is about twenty minutes from my house. They had very good reseller ratings at the time and did a nice job on the system although it seemed to take forever. I notice their ratings have dropped quite a bit lately.

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net
 

Brian Hamfeldt

New member
Randy,

You are well on your way to knowing plenty about the hardware side of things. Here are a couple of resources that are great to browse if not get feedback from their forums:

www.2cpu.com
www.storagereview.com

And there are plenty of others: arstechnica, sharkyextreme, anandtech, tomshardware, extremetech, firingsquad, etc... most of them gaming sites/reviews - but nothing pushes hardware performance like gaming freaks (used to be one of them)

I think when it comes to all out performance on a box - you can get all the memory you want/need. You can also throw enough CPU at the workflow - both in quantity and speed. The issue of dealing with batches will come down to throughput - reading of images off the drive, into memory, crunched, write the output, repeat. And if you have multiple instances going on at the same time, then you are reading/writing all over the drives, slowing everything down.

If it were me - and I didn't want to realize that my bottleneck was I/O, I'd up the ante a little on the drive spex. (I can say this, because this IS what I've done) Even with the Alienware case, if you can utilize two external bays (or with most other cases that have more drive bays), then I would use the onboard SATA channels to run 150Gb Raptors at RAID1 - partitioned as 50Gb C: drive and 100Gb D: drive (or keep it as one) Then, get a nice 4 channel RAID card to run 4x 250-500Gb drives in RAID10 - all as one partition.

This is exactly how I run my systems (except for raptors, which weren't out at the time).

Check out the storagereview site for more details on RAID arrays, but the basics (as you probably already know) are that RAID1 gets you a slight read advantage, but also a slight write hit. RAID0 gets you all the speed, but with the chance of dumping ALL data on both drives. RAID5 gets you better read performance with more drives, but also more of a write hit to split the data and calculate the parity bit. With RAID10, you get the speed of RAID0 AND the redundancy of RAID1.

Looking at the math of your sessions - say 5000 RAW images at 10Mb each nets you only 50Gb. I assume that the C1 previews are like thumbs, and will generate quite fast while reading off of the RAID10 and writing small images to the 10K-RPM raptors. Also, when batching, you can get sustained read off of the RAID10 and sustained writes of JPGs to the RAID1.

The main idea is to have separate channels for reading and writing - this will allow the system to not be waiting on data.

Now I know how other people feel - when they suggest things that I should buy... it is kinda fun spending other people's money!

Good luck... I'm not trying to sell you the farm, nor would I suggest it if I didn't have direct experience with it. Again, the only thing I do not have experience is C1.

Brian.
 
Randy Brister said:
I plan on running XP-32, not sure that I'm ready for XP-64.

With a pre-built system there is nothing to be ready for. It just allows you to use more RAM. With homemade boxes there are definite device driver issues.

Randy Brister said:
I had read (somewhere?) that C1 was more efficient on an Intel processor than an AMD. Don't know if that's an urban myth, although there seemed to be plenty who supported this idea.
It really depends on the algorithms involved. The Pentium 4 EE processors with hyper-threading can really shine on some media encoding tasks.

But the CPUs under discussion on this system are the new Core2 microarchitecture and they truly shine from everything I have read. Albeit, I have a dual core AMD.
 
Brian Hamfeldt said:
As Sean said..."this month, the dual-core Xeons" are top of the line. But being on the 'bleeding edge', the consumer pays the initial R&D and first run production costs.

... the Opterons smoke the Xeons as far as performance. Everything else in the boxes are the same: RAID 10 w/hot spare data drives, RAID1 w/hot spare OS/program drives, 2Gb ECC memory, 4Gbit NICs - yet the Opterons can crunch through images about 40% faster than the Xeons!

The Xeons here are the new Xeons based on Intel's Core 2 Microarchitecture and they are fast according to all the benchmarks and they are faster than the Opterons. Nonetheless, a dual core Athlon 64 may yield better performance per dollar.
 

Randy Brister

New member
Thanks for the insight, Brian

The Alienware box has room for only 4 drives, so if I set my C Drive as Raid 1, I have 2 drives left. I'm not sure how I would set up a Raid 10 utilizing 2 internals and "an external bay".

Do you think the Raptors have that much better performance, at the scarifice of the added capacity of the 500GB drives? Curiously, the Raptors are not an option on the Alienware if I go with the new Intel CPUs, but there is a (very expensive) option for a 15k 147GB SCSI, however I then lose the option of the hot swap S ATA bay. BTW, the new Intels run about the same price, at least pretty close, to the comparable AMD.

The C1 previews are actually pretty large, around 3000k, so the preview folder gets pretty bloated pretty quickly.

I spend other people's money all the time. I just talked a good friend into buying $8000 worth of risers to shoot High School football teams. He went kicking and screaming. However, he's now shot 6-10 teams on them, and he calls me after every shoot, telling me how great they look, and thanking me for pushing him.

Randy
 

Brian Hamfeldt

New member
Sean,
Agreed, I think any new CPU should be the fastest kid on the block. It's just getting over paying the premium to get the newest, fastest product on the market - knowing in just weeks there will be a newer, faster solution and your CPU now costs half as much.

I also just have alot of respect for AMD in being able to be so effecient with their cores. They can do more processing at less speed - and therefore less power (usually). Intel's approach has always been to throw more clock cycles at it to make it faster. Only recently are they realizing the ability to redesign cores to be more efficient at lower clock speeds to save power and also heat.
I do have a thorn in my side from one of my Xeon boxes - that I only use on for three days every weekend. Yet with a dual CPU box less than 2 years old, one of the Xeons burned itself up. Probably a fluke and I can't say all Xeons have a problem, but all my AMD boxes have been running faster and cooler for longer.


Randy,

While I have great respect for SCSI, I know that SATA drives are closing the gap with performance:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&numDrives=1&devID_0=283&devID_1=308&devCnt=2
And if you RAID1 them, you gain a little more performance without worrying about the die-hard longevity that SCSI normally offers. (Then again, if you utilize RAID with a SCSI array, then you better hold on to your hat - except that you had to sell your hat with everything else to afford all the drives and the controller)

Comparing the 150Gb Raptors vs 500Gb SATAs:
http://www.storagereview.com/php/be...&numDrives=1&devID_0=308&devID_1=315&devCnt=2
Shows the Raptors are better in every aspect except noise and power.

What I was referring to on the Alienware case was not using external drives - just the external bays inside the case - if Alienware is willing to get a 4port RAID10 card from Areca or 3Ware. And I certainly have great respect for Alienware boxes - they are a nice build from what I've heard.

However, if your previews are that large, then maybe the speed vs space issue become more of a priority on space. I don't think you'll be disappointed with two 500Gb RAID1 arrays. You'll certainly have a new box with all the new bells and whistles (make that fans) - so you'll notice a very peppy increase in speed over what you currently have. I was just looking at taking it further and eeking all possible performance from every aspect.


Brian.
 

Randy Brister

New member
Brian,

Thanks for the link comparing the 150GB Raptors to the 500GB drives. Actually, the Raptors smoke the larger drives when it comes to read/write speeds. And yeah, as sexy as a pair of 147GB 15k SCSI's would be, I'm just not up to the $1800 extra cost. So, if I decide on the Raptors, at least with this Alienware case, I go with the AMD's. If I think the 500GB space is more important, then I can go with either the new Xeons or the AMDs.

And just to clarify: If I put my download image folder and my C1 preview folder on my C drive, will I benifit from an I/O standpoint by writing the converted files to the second Raid set?

Randy
 

Don Lashier

New member
Randy Brister said:
Brian,
And just to clarify: If I put my download image folder and my C1 preview folder on my C drive, will I benifit from an I/O standpoint by writing the converted files to the second Raid set?

One caution about where you put the C1 previews folder. Mine is on the C drive and after a reboot the first "browse" click of the C drive from any program takes a number of minutes because of the hugh number of files in the folder. I'd suggest putting the previews folder on a separate drive or partition.

- DL
 
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