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Welcome back to Dave's Tech Table.
Today, we're going to talk about putting together a high performance workstation,
and to do this, you need to solve 2 basic problems.
The first problem you need to solve is data speed,
which is moving information from the computer's bus
to the VRAM on the graphics card.
If you think about how many gigabytes of information
you need to move up and down the graphics card
to process and display the graphics data,
you'll get a better sense of why you need a powerful computer
like this HP Z820.
What makes the difference is support for things like the new Intel 602 chipset,
PCI 3.0,
and DDR3 1600 megahertz RAM;
all of this results in much faster data transfers.
Remember, products like After Effects
spend most of their time just moving pixels around
and moving them as efficiently as possible
as part of the trick to get a high-performance editing workstation.
The second problem we need to solve is data processing speed.
This is once the pixels are transfered.
This is where a balance CPU and GPU system
play a huge part as they need to work together.
This is one of the main reasons to consider a dual processor workstation.
While the Intel Core i7 Extreme is an excellent processor
and will satisfy many users,
it's the efficiency of a dual processor system
where you'll really see the difference.
Let's take a closer look inside this HP 820,
and I'll show you what I mean.
So removing the outer cover,
I'm going to go ahead and just show you a little bit how this system is put together.
Everywhere you see a green tab
is where you can grab and start to remove things.
None of this requires any screws.
So if I pull the hard drive out--
this is my boot SSD, you see I'm able just to
put this in and out and not have any issues
with screws.
I can also go in here and take a closer look
at where we have the slots on the inside of the machine.
Here you see I've got a Quadro 5000 board
along with a Tesla C2075.
Now together, this is what makes up an NVIDIA Maximus system.
We're going to talk about that just a little later.
Let me go ahead and remove the fan housing
and give you a better idea what's sitting beneath it.
Here you see we've got 2 Intel processors.
Remember I talked about the importance of a dual processor system,
and these are E5 class processors,
very, very fast;
liquid cooled in this particular system.
You will also notice that we've got lots of room for RAM in here,
up to 512 gigabytes of RAM, as a matter of fact.
In here, I've got 32 gigabytes of RAM,
which I think is a pretty respectable amount of RAM
for a typical production premium system.
Many people will go with 64 gigabytes of RAM,
and the reason they might do that
is it's a good rule of thumb when you have 32 threads, like this machine does,
to have 2 gigs of RAM per thread.
So in this particular system, I'm going to start out with 32,
because that's what I typically use in my system.
I'm going to go ahead and put this system back together.
I'm going to actually remove the Tesla board,
because I want to show you sort of a good, better, best scenario
as we start to add on more power,
and we'll benchmark some of that.
So let me put this back together, and we'll jump into Premiere Pro.
So as you can, the system's back on,
and I've removed the Tesla board.
Let's take a closer look at what's actually in this machine.
So let me just go to the computer here
and bring up the properties.
The first thing you might notice is I've got
a very decent Windows Experience Index of 7.6,
32 gigs of RAM, as I've mentioned before,
but what you really want to look at
are the dual Intel E5 processors that are in here.
If I bring up another window--
my Task Manager Window, you'll see I've got 32 threads
working for me in this production system,
so this is a very, very good system.
And now I want to concentrate on,
now that I've got the system set up,
I've talked about CPUs, let's talk a little bit more about GPU power.
So if I bring up a program like Premiere Pro,
what exactly is this going to do for me?
Say you start off with a system with a Quadro 2000 board.
What's beautiful about the Maximus system
is you can start with an inexpensive card like the 2000 board
and at any time, add a Tesla card.
So if you add this card do your system, you've actually got
both of these cards in here.
Now what Premiere will do is actually use the card with more cores and more memory.
In this case, Premiere is going to end up using the C2075 card,
so again, you can start with this and end with this.
It's excellent; any time you want to go ahead and upgrade your card,
you can remove this card and maybe put in a 4000 card.
It's really a very flexible system.
So Premiere Pro, when you go over to your Project Settings
and you look at your Renderer here,
it's automatically going to see the GPU engine.
Remember, it's automatically going to use that Tesla board.
Products like After Effects work a bit different,
so I'm going to spend most of this demo
and speed differences talking about After Effects,
but I just wanted to point out that Premiere Pro
will use the Tesla board; it just won't use the Quadro 2000 or 4000
or 5000 together with the Tesla board.
So I'm going to jump into After Effects.
And let's open up a project and take a closer look at what's actually there.
So I'll start off with a typical graphic.
Now before I get in to play anything on the timeline,
I'm going to go to my preferences and take a look at my previews.
You'll notice there is a GPU information here.
When I click on this, this is going to tell me what After Effects is seeing right now,
and as I mentioned before,
I remove the Tesla card so the only thing it sees right now
is the Quadro 5000 card.
So just to get a little bit of sense to this,
I'm going to turn off the GPU for Ray Tracing
and just show you why we're even bothering to talk about GPU.
An this is not really a realistic way to work,
but again, I'm just making a point.
So I'm going to go ahead and just start to play some of this out.
So as you can see, it's working as hard as it can work
just to process 1 frame.
This is what the CPU is actually doing,
and again, this is not really the way you would use After Effects
when you're in a ray trace 3D environment.
You would always use GPU,
but again, I just wanted to make a point.
So let me go back over to my preferences,
Previews, go back to GPU
and tell it to force everything on the GPU.
Once I click OK,
you'll notice I get a completely different experience.
As soon as I come down here,
I'm actually able to move this around.
I can hit the space bar to preview,
and you're actually seeing very, very decent performance
coming out of his machine,
and you'll notice that this particular one is actually rendering
and autorendering out of third resolution,
but it still looks great.
Another very critical area that you need to look at is drive speed.
This is an area that people often overlook,
and when I listen to people talk about their systems,
I'm always kind of listening for the balance of CPU and GPU, of course,
as we said, but also drive speed.
I'm going to use an industry test like Blackmagic Speed Test,
which is what I typically use to test the speed of my systems.
Let's go ahead and select my target drive,
which is my internal raid,
which consists of 4 standard 600-gigabyte drives,
and I'll go ahead and hit start.
And you'll see that when it starts to do the write test,
I'm getting over 735 megs per second.
And you see on the read test,
I'm getting even higher data rates,
752.
Now in order to get higher speeds than this,
you can always put in something like an Intel SSD.
Their 320 series--I've been using for a while, and they're incredibly fast.
So make sure you tune your system
along with the high-speed drives.
I recommend a minimum of 2;
4 if you can fit it in your system like the HP 820.
Let's go ahead and install the Tesla board
and show you some extreme performance.
Okay, so now I've installed the Tesla board back in the system,
and I'm going to bring up the NVIDIA utility
to sort of show us what's in the machine.
So I'm going to go down to System Information over here.
I'll click on that,
and the first thing you'll notice is it shows me the Quadro 5000 board
plus the Tesla 2075;
again, this is what makes up an NVIDIA Maximus system.
So this machine's ready to go,
so let me jump back over in After Effects
and take a look at what After Effects actually sees.
So I'm going to go to my preferences,
and the first thing I want to do
is delete my media cache
to make sure that I'm starting this test fairly,
and the next thing I'll do
is I'll go back up here to my previews,
and I'll click on GPU Information,
and you'll notice, if you look right here,
it shows that After Effects is actually using the Tesla board
and the 5000 board,
so you can even upgrade your system
with a card like a Quadro 6000 card,
which has 6 gigs of RAM,
and we already know that the Tesla has 6 gigs of RAM.
That way, After Effects will have 2 cards with 6 gigs of RAM each.
So it's important to understand how these cards work in tandem.
So for this particular demonstration,
since I've got the Quadro 5000, as I've said,
each card is going to use a maximum of 2.5 gigs of RAM.
So let's take a closer look at After Effects
and see how some of this works.
Now I've cleared out my cache, and I'm ready to go.
I'm going to go ahead and put this on full preview;
before it was on auto, when you saw it was sort of going down to a third resolution.
Now, I'm just going to go in and grab this time marker
and start to move this around,
and you'll instantly know it's pretty fluid.
You'll see that it's an incredible way to work.
I can go ahead and start to render this out.
And again, this is ray tracing at full resolution.
It looks really, really good.
And this is the main reason people would jump to a Maximus system.
Again, this Quadro and Tesla system working together.
It is a great way to work in After Effects
and really gives you amazing results.
Now what I want to do now is I'm bring up a different project.
Let me go ahead and close this one down
and bring up a project that's a little bit more complex.
It's got a complex background
and you see it's got lots of different things going on here
with different fill lights and back lightings and camera,
so what I want to do in this particular instance
is I want to go ahead and start to render some of this out.
So what I'm going to do
is we'll do a couple of different things here.
I'm going to remove the card, once again,
and we'll have 2 different sides of the screen where we're going to show you
the Quadro 5000
and then the Maximus system working with the Quadro and Tesla system,
so you can sort of see a comparison
on how these things will render, so check this out.
So now that our tests are done,
you can see--and I just want to point this out again
that we were at full resolution here
when we were running these tests.
Typically, you might be at auto resolution,
which will really speed things up a lot while you're working,
but I wanted to show you the full power of the Maximus system
when we're testing this out.
As you can see from the test results,
the Quadro 5000 card, by itself,
gave us a render time of 10 minutes and 15 seconds,
while the Maximus system, Quadro 5000 plus Tesla 2075
gave us a shocking result of 5 minutes and 10 seconds,
cutting that directly in half.
And you can see why there's a big value in having a balanced system.
So this is Dave from Dave Tech Table. We'll see you next time.
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