Yet another New PC thread.......

[Jeff Harper]

I use Cheetah 15.7K SAS drives in raid 0 as my scratch drive. They are fast, and I know that whatever might slow down things during editing, it is not the hard drives, because they are never more, or much more than half full.

Same project on another, slower drive will lag like hell, but then my edits are all three and four cameras. I think you are right, CC and stuff is CPU related and the drive don't help with those things at all.

I can edit simple things on other drives with little or no improvement in response, but for multicamera projects I prefer my fast SAS drives.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Gerald Webb

I am using a 384 core GTX 560Ti right now and was going to pull it out a put it on Ebay.
It has done nothing for my current system as an upgrade from my old GT240, Vegas is no better with the 560ti and neither was Premiere Pro 5.5. MPE was great with the GT240,

Your current rig might have been dragging down the performance of that GTX 560 Ti. Or maybe it's just that you have been running both cards in CS5.5 in MPE software-only mode, or it's that your workflow does not involve much if any CUDA-accelerated effects.

In any case, I tested both a GT 240 and a 336-core GTX 560 on my current i5-2400 auxiliary rig, and found a significant difference in performance, especially in the encoding tests in PPBM5: HD-to-SD MPEG-2 DVD encoding with a multilayered timeline that's less than 60 seconds long took more than 100 seconds longer with the GT 240 than with the GTX 560 - 278 seconds with the GT 240 versus 169 seconds with the GTX 560 (both tests were with the CPU at its default Turbo speed of 3.2GHz). H.264 Blu-ray encoding took 15 seconds longer with the GT 240 than with the GTX 560 - 113 seconds versus 98 seconds.

And yes, much of my encoding workflow on that auxiliary rig involves downsizing 1080i HD to 480i SD for DVD. In this case, then, every second counts.

[Gerald Webb]

Thanks Randall,
PP was in Hardware mode, ( did the hack for both cards).
I guess my disappointment with the 560Ti mainly came from Vegas as I was looking for preview in Vegas like I get in PP, full res with no dropped frames. I dont dispute your findings at all as I never bench marked the cards, it is glad to know though.
So, opinions, what would you guys do?
Should I give the new rig a go with the 560Ti first, or just get the 3gb 580 and be done with it?
Would love to save the money on the 580, but dont want to drag down the new build.
Arghh! It was easier choosing the names of my children, lol.

[Randall Leong]

Originally Posted by Gerald Webb

Thanks Randall,
PP was in Hardware mode, ( did the hack for both cards).
I guess my disappointment with the 560Ti mainly came from Vegas as I was looking for preview in Vegas like I get in PP, full res with no dropped frames. I dont dispute your findings at all as I never bench marked the cards, it is glad to know though.

Speaking of preview, there was only a two-second difference between the GT 240 and the GTX 560 on my i5-2400: 9 seconds versus 7 seconds. However, for some reason there was a much greater difference between those two cards in preview/timeline performance when they were running on an i3-2100 system: The GT 240 took all of 14 seconds with the i3 versus only 9 seconds from the GTX 560. And all that while the GT 240 still took about 100 seconds longer than the GTX 560 in HD-to-SD DVD encoding performance on that i3.

[Gerald Webb]

Well, Finally have it up and running.
3930k
32gb of 1600 ram
Crucial M4 SSD system drive
10TB of Raid and Data drives
3GB GTX 580 GPU
The thing is an absolute beast!
Having a few teething problems though, a few times its just locked up and needed a hard restart,
VLC will not run, just crashes on start up. Reinstalled it three times, not solved.
I can preview at Best Full with a lot of the Magic Bullet pre sets on some 1080p MXF files ( Swing tilt and other blurs still stop it in its tracks though, Preview Half for those, still real time though).
GPU for preview seems great, but not for Rendering, see clip below.
i7 3930k v 920 Comparison. - YouTube
Overall I think I'm happy, about 33% faster is pretty good.
Just got to work the bugs out.