A single Core2Quad will be sufficient for what you are trying to do. (Realtime performance, etc.) A dual socket Xeon workstation will be faster. (Faster exports and renders, realtime WHILE rendering in another app, etc.)

As far as Intel's new releases, prices haven't fallen as much as I expected, but that is because Intel is not shipping in volume yet. That is a giant unknown and I wouldn't count on it unless you have a lot of time to wait.

Powerful GPUs can speed up renders for certain applications. The 8800 cards should not be any worse than the 8600GT, so if you have found a suitable solution, it likely will work on a faster card. You might want to consider ATI if you end up having issues, because they don't limit video overlay, before opting for a Quadro at least.

I forget, are you definitely planning to use Prospect as your editing solution?

$1,500 faster? :)

I have but have not tested it with Prospect HD yet. From your story it sounds like it will not work :(

The guy at the store told me not to touch ATI. I guess everyone has a preference but I prefer nVidia and I know more about them than ATI ones. I'd probably prefer to go Quadro than ATI. Especially since I'd probably struggle to get an ATI card to run in parrallel with my nVidia 8600GT... Would a Quadro card run ok with the 8600?

I am definitely going to use CS3, but as for Prospect, I am fairly sure but not certain. I'm going to be editing EX1 footage, which is edited in other apps as MXF after conversion in the awful Sony software. CS3 edits the MP4s out of the camera natively (despite neding to render upon import) so I don't need Prospect but depending on opinons and advice, I may end up with it. From what I understand, it's another way of enhancing performance, yes? I honestly don't care too much about the real time effect of the transitions and stuff (no rendering required) because most of my rendering will be Magic Bullet anyway, which will certainly never be render-free.

So do you have an opinion on whether Prospect is a good upgrade or another thing like the RAID card that is a bit of a bonus?

Cineform Prospect can be VERY helpful for many things, so I highly recommend it. I have used it for many different things. Highest quality compression available. CPU intensive, and will benefit the most from Xeons, but will not require tham.

Raid is necessary, but an expensive Raid card is not. For Raid-0, the motherboard Raid controller, or a Windows dynamic disk solution is fine. Regardless, you will want that speed. Expensive Raid Cards are only useful for getting the added security of RAID5 without impacting performace too much.

$1500 faster? How about twice as fast? The question is, is it worth it/necessary for you? If you use it to make a living and will be sitting in front of it everyday, it probably is. If this is a side thing, and you do other things as well, then maybe not. Also, do you have the money available, do you want to save money and just buy a new one in two years anyway?

What is wrong with your Geforce 7800? That is the ideal Prospect card. Powerful, and overlay is not disabled. Combining an ATI and Nvidia card might be positive, in that each would give you separate overlay options and control. I never usually use dual graphics cards, the USUAL solution to your display combination is to use the XenaLHe to power the fullscreen displays, and the VGA card to drive the two 22" desktop displays. The Xeon system with the Xena card is the usual professional hardware solution for Prospect editing.

I like the idea that it speeds things up a bit but I have no idea about its actual affect on the footage. And for some reason, the thought of having an avi instead of an mp4 makes me more comfortable, though I have no idea why!

I'd like to never have to buy a new one! But I know that I probably will. If I can get an extra year or two out of the Xeons then that would be another incentive to go with them, but I don't know for sure that I would. They probably wouldn't last any longer than a Core2Quad, would they?

That's an interesting idea (assuming you can still get 7800s) but it may also be a no-go because nowadays, the drivers for the 7 series and the 8 series are the same. So the most current drivers would disable the full screen display for both, wouldn't they? I'm not really sure about that...

However, it raises another issue, which is the fact that the 7800GT is NOT HDCP compliant, which means that it cannot view HD-DVDs or Blu-Ray Discs, which is the ONLY other thing I would use this computer for. I have HD-DVD & Blu-Ray drives for my PC and would want them in the new one as well. As I've said, I have my PC hooked up to my Bravia, and the two drives are my DVD players, so I need the HDCP complaiance. Therefore I NEED an 8 series nVidia card in order for it to be HDCP compliant. I can get spotless HD playback on my monitors out of the 8600 but the 7800 produces a garbled mess of pixels.

The Xena is a WAY over the top expense for me. I certainly don't need the SDI output for monitoring on my Bravia and I can't see myself ever NEEDING the SDI capture capability so it would just be wasted on me. I think dual VGA cards is the way to go. But I have to figure out a way to enable the full screen video playback...

I can't even test Prospect with the 8600+7800 combination on my PC at the moment. PPro CS3 (and 1.5.1 for that matter) are both refusing to work at all. I have 125 not-so-patient customers awaiting their primary school children's production... but I can't finish it :(

Core2Quad will probably become too slow to edit with a while before the Xeon will, but the money saved on a cheaper system should be enough to replace the guts once faster parts are available. How much time do you waste waiting for your computer to render or export?

ATI might be the solution to your Overlay problems, especially since they work better in YUV mode in ProspectHD. I would take a look into it. I personally prefer NVIDIA, but in your case...

AVIs will be able to be imported into other programs easier, if you ever need to. And you need to figure out what intermediate codec you want to render to, since I doubt MP4 is an option for that.

to buy DPS, i like its free...

For a scene with Magic Bullet effects, sometimes hours of rendering per minute of footage. Other times, it's never ending because my computer crashes.

I'll start my research.

Can you explain this to me? You can still render out to an avi, even if your imported footage was mp4, right?

Those hours of renders are where the Xeon advantage kicks in.

For intermediate codec, I meant if you don't use Prospect, what do you render your other files to? (Exports, titles, AE work, etc.) Yes AVI, but in what codec? Uncompressed requires lots of fast hard drives, which is much more expensive than just using Prospect. Other formats are usually much slower, or lower quality. With Prospect you use Cineform compression for all of those files and exports. That is worth much more than the realtime effects etc. that the RT engine offers as well.

I've been following this thread for a while now. I too am in the same boat as the original poster and will be using the XDCAM EX. I'm VERY new to the whole video editing thing but wanted a computer that would last a while and have good performance when editing. Harm described a good system which is what I decided to base my build on. The problem is availability of the parts! Many aren't yet in stock anywhere. I had to order from a number of different sources to get everything. I just thought I'd post my parts list and what I paid to give everyone a good idea what it cost and what's available. here it is.

Supermicro X7DWA-N $698
Supermicro 743TQ-760R chassis $615
Intel Xeon E5440 $770
Kingston KVR800D2D8F5/1G (x4) $308
Areca ARC-1261ML $820
Areca battery backup $129
Areca ARC-1000 LCD $79
Areca 2GB Memory Upgrade $189
Seagate 500GB ST3500630NS (x8) $1199
Western Digital Raptor X 150GB $175
Adaptec .5M SFF-8087 to SATA4 w/sideband cables (x2) $62
Sony BWU-200S Bluray burner $599
Dell 2707WFP Ultra Sharp $875

I pulled all that from my receipts. I just realized that I forgot to order the video card which will be an Nvidia 8800 Ultra. So add another $700 or so for that. With the list above and the graphics card that comes to $7218. I haven't yet picked a keyboard but I'm looking at the Bella or a Keylogic and a Shuttlepro.

Some glaring things about my choices above are the price of the motherboard. It's very expensive compared to what others have it listed for however no one with a cheaper price actually had it in stock. The Areca card has more ports than I'm sure I'll ever need. But it was only $100 more than the 1231 card so I figured I might as well go with it. Why the Xeon E5440? Because I couldn't find any faster 45nm Xeon in stock anywhere. I wanted the X5472. And good luck finding memory listed as compatible with the motherboard on the Supermicro site. While Supermicro lists many different recommended memory modules the ones I listed above were the only ones I could find available anywhere for doing 4GB on the system. And even then I had to order direct from Kingston.

Just to reiterate, these are the real prices I paid for this stuff where I could find it IN STOCK. I found the biggest problems with the previous configurations that people listed is that while they may be great, you can't find half the parts.

Any comments on what I've ordered here?

This is one SUPER workstation. My remarks with regard to your post are the following:

1. Availability: You have composed a system which consists of leading edge parts, some of which were only recently introduced. They are also top-of-the-bill parts, so not every distributor is willing to take them into their range of products. Some parts have been announced but shipping may have been delayed.

2. You have chosen the redundant PS which gives you a lot of extra security, possibly because the 865 with 'silent' PS was not available, having been introduced only 3 three weeks ago. I know that none of these have yet been shipped to the Netherlands, so I would be in the same squeeze to find it here and possibly would have to order it directly from SuperMicro in the US, like I did with the SC-745TQ-800B for a client.

3. Price comparisons are difficult, but if I use what is a general feeling over here, that 1 $ in the US is 1 € over here, I think that in general you paid fair prices, especially the 2G Areca cache is cheap in comparison to Dutch prices (€ 565), but the Seagates are a bit expensive I think. If they have not yet been delivered, you may consider changing your order and opt for the Samsung Spinpoint T166 ones, which run quieter and cooler and may even have a better price. Here the 500 G version is € 85 a piece.

When installing your software, make sure you have your BIOS settings correct especially the AHCI settings, and before installing Windows, install the drivers with F6. If that does not work, reset the BIOS to not use AHCI, let Windows install itself, then from Windows install the Supermicro drivers for AHCI, reboot and then reset your BIOS to use AHCI. That should take care of any installation problems.

Congratulations on a really SUPER Workstation and happy editing. Oh, and if you can post your benchmark results with PPBM+ on Bill Gehrke's site, that would be very helpful.

You are right, the 743-TQ865 is not yet available from Supermicro, only announced. I verified that the 743-TQ760R is the exact same chassis except for the power supply. The redundant power supply can be removed and replaced with the power supply from the TQ865 when it becomes available if I need the extra power.

The hard drives were a bit more for the Barracuda ES series which are server class hard drives made to be run in RAID enclosures. The standard Barracudas were $119 ea. as opposed to $149 ea.

A quick lookup of currency conversion: 1 euro = US $1.48

Thanks for the tip on the BIOS settings.

You purchases TWO Xeon CPUs, correct? If not, that is a lot of capability going to waste. But that should be a fast system, have fun with it. I only plan to spend about $3K, but my system will definitely be XDCamEX capable. I hope you are doing something really crazy that can take advantage of the added system horsepower.

Nope, just the one CPU for the moment. Will be adding a second later. From what I've read even though many NLE packages (PPCS3) can take advantage of up to 16 cores the second CPU won't make a dramatic difference. I may be wrong with this assumption however. And actually, I'm just impatient. Won't be doing anything too extreme. Just wanted the best system I could get within reason.

I will be honest, your configuration makes no sense to me. The only reason to get a workstation class system is for the dual CPUs, and the high bandwidth I/O slots. PCIe has negated that difference to a degree, and you aren't using any PCI-X solutions like AXIO or Xena. Why not get an LGA775 based Core2Quad system? The 8800Ultra doesn't make much sense either, unless you play games. I have an 8800GTX in my edit system, only because I got it for free, and I play BF2. It doesn't work well for editing, runs hot and loud, and doesn't support full screen video overlay.
Any reason you chose the 5440 over the 5365. The older one will be faster, you aren't taking advantage of the new faster FSB, why use the newer gear? If you aren't using the faster FSB, why get the newer MB? I mean if you have money to burn, have at it, but it doesn't make sense to me.

Just my thoughts on the matter. The new 45nm CPUs are a big disappointment, so I am just going to get older gear (Woodcrest/Clovertown) for cheaper, after waiting months for the new release.

In comparing the X5365 to the X5472 I noticed over here that they are around the same price, at least according to initial, preliminary offers. If that turns out to be the case then the increased cache (8 >> 12 MB), the increased FSB, the higher clock speed, the inclusion of SSE4 and lowered TDP make the newer generation very worthwhile.

I agree that such a server board is best used with both sockets filled. To keep costs somewhat in hand I would personally use a nVidia 8800GT card, not an Ultra. They are very close in performance but not in price. Most NLE's don't use the GPU very much, so here you can save some $$ on an otherwise very powerful and costly system.

Why do you consider the Harpertown so disappointing in comparison to the Woodcrest/Clovertown?

Lack of availability, the increased FSB is only available on the highest models, didn't bring down prices any. I usually purchase a step or two below the top of the line (no Extreme Edition for me). Compare the 2.66Ghz version between 5300 and 5400 series and you will see what I mean.

Yes, the new SSE4 instructions.

Don't hold your breath. I am not saying that that is not true, but I will wait until I see an independent benchmark before I believe it. 10% is a bit more realistic, and wouldn't surprise me.

Oh, I'm not. I'm ordering parts and building a machine. I'd say those waiting for benchmarks are holding their breath.

I simply made my post to give people in the states an idea of what was actually available and not just announced and it what it cost me to get those parts.

I'm not holding my breath either. I am planning to buy an HP XW8400 today, since it is the last day for a particular deal. I am buying dual 5150s, with the plan to upgrade to 5400s once they become widely available, if I find myself needing the quad horsepower.

Make sure that HP delivers a mobo with the Seaburg chipset (5400X) and with DDR2-800 FBDIMM's, otherwise you may end up with another costly upgrade when you decide to upgrade to 54xx CPU's.

Since the Nvidia 8 series GPUs are out of the question, I'll take to my new machine the 7800GT + one new card.

Could I get some recommendations for the other card.

Priorities are:

1. Full screen preview available with Prospect & CS3.
2. Render speed improvements in Magic Bullet.
3. Price approx. $300 or less.
4. HDCP support.

I'm looking at the 7600GT, which is nice and cheap or the Quadro FX 570, but I don't know what the benefit of it is.

Someone posted to my site today to report that they couldn't get a new 5400 series CPU to work in their XW8400, but the presumption was that a BIOS update could be expected to fix that. I still have not purchased one yet, they were out of the one I wanted, but I still plan to get one before the end of the year. I am trying to find a refurbished one with 5300 CPUs, so that I won't have to worry about trading up in the future, but they are hard to come by. I am aware that the new 1600FSB will not work with the XW8400, but I could still get up to a 3.0Ghz model with the 1333FSB if desired.

As far as GPUs, the 7600GT should be cheap. Get one and try it. If you don't like it, keep it as a spare and try another one. It is hard to predict how certain combinations will work together, and if you are going to be experimenting, it makes sense to try for the cheaper solutions first.

Think I'll do that.

Also, is there a 3.00GHz quad xeon in the 53xx series? I can't find one higher that 2.66GHz. The only 3.00GHz I can find is in the 54xx series, which isn't available over here yet...

Also, just spoke to another guy who's doing a quote for me and he said I was insane for looking at the Xeons. He said if I could see a performance increase in 8 cores of Xeon over the Core 2 Extreme QX6850 3.00GHz he'd give me the computer!

He also told me that CS3 wouldn't even use the 8 cores and that the 8800GT may have the full screen preview re-enabled, unlike other 8 series Nvidia cards.

So he just confused me and I don't know what to make of his opinions...

It is the X5365, introduced in august.

I would take him up on his word. It may save you significantly on expenses! I just tested a two E5345 CPU Supermicro system with both Edius and Premiere Pro CS3 and while rendering or exporting/encoding to MPEG2-DVD, all 8 cores were used in both applications. Tested with ProcExp running. The difference between these applications is in the memory footprint, Edius is clearly less hungry for memory.

The nVidia 8800GT/512 is around € 200 over here and delivers far better performance than the 8600 GTS/256, which runs around € 150.

That guy doesn't seem to know what we is talking about. There are tons of tests you could run to prove that the Xeon system is faster, provided you had the systems to test with. Any complex comp in AE with Render Multiple Frames on will see improvement. PPro will see improvement in HD exports in Native mode, and should also see improvement in CineformRT mode but I am not certain on that. There are no indications that the 8800GT re-enabled overlay. If so I am sure we would have heard about it from all of the excited owners. There probably are workarounds with old drivers and XP, but that is of limited use.
As I said before, Core2Quad will probably be SUFFICIENT, but Dual Xeons will be FASTER. The only legitimate question is, is the increased speed worth the significantly increased cost?

The Xeon 5365 is thechip that Apple has been using in its 8core Macs since April. It is available from a number of distributors in the US, hopefully you can find one down there.

Found it! It's $1,500 AU, whereas the new 45nm equivalent is just under $1200!!

RT mode? Real time you mean? If so, how can it be improved upon real time?

I don't want to mess around with workarounds - that's why I want a super-duper computer, so that I never have to fiddle under the hood or mess with drivers or have trouble with footage not playing or blah blah blah...

I haven't had a week with my PC without troubleshooting. I'm hoping that goes away with this new one.

At this stage, my quotes vary in price by about $1700 but I may be able to reduce the Xeon system by $700 in which case I'll definitely get it. The Intel S5000XVNSATAR motherboard supports the 65nm chipsets as well as the 45nm ones, so I'll be able to upgrade in the future. I may even wait a month for the 45nm 3.00GHz processor because it's not that much more expensive than the 65nm 2.66GHz one!

But I thought that CS3 and Prospect HD don't use the GPU so it doesn't matter, right? Though I think it was Mike who said that a good GPU would help with Magic Bullet one way or another.

I'm now looking at the 7950, which is HDCP compliant and would still have full screen video enabled.

Either that or it's go with an ATI or Quadro card...

Also, the board he reocmmended for the Core 2 Extreme system is the Intel DX38BT. which apparently does not have Hyper Threading enabled according to the site on the link. I don't know what that is, though someome told me I should have it.

Is that board better than something like the ASUS Striker Extreme or some of the more common gamer boards?

John,

I know that $ 200 here and $ 200 there soon adds up to real money, but at this moment the nVidia 8800 GT gives the best bang-for-the-buck. Whether you will see any performance increase with the current NLE's is doubtful. At most it is marginal. For that reason you could easily opt for a nVidia 79xx series and save some, but if you intend to use the system for several years or do 3d animations for instance, you may well benefit from the more advanced capabilities of the 8800 GT.

Hyperthreading is no longer available on the Core family. It has been abandoned.

Good to hear that the 45nm release resulted in lower prices somewhere.

Xeons could improve realtime by supprting more layers and effects, etc.

The 8800GT is unquestionably a faster card, but that capability comes at the expense of overlay compatibility.

Stay tuned for hyperthreading to be re-introduced to the new archetecture next year Nov, as well as CPU integrated memory controllers, like AMD. Regardless, I wouldn't sweat it at the moment, rumors and vapor-ware for now.

but I can't do full screen preview to my nice big 24" monitor with it. So it's out of the question unfortunately.

It's interesting - some retailers are saying that they'll be more expensive but don't have prices, some are saying the opposite, but the only actual prices I can find have them cheaper.

Have a look at this comparison of the 5355 which is the one in my system quote and the 4530:

http://www.techbuy.com.au/compare.as...re_68923=68923

Am I missing something here? These two CPUs are equivalents aren't they? 65nm vs 45nm and the 45nm one only about 60% of the price??

John,

Just comparing prices quoted, I would have no doubt choosing the Harpertown. Even if prices were equal, I would still choose Harpertown because of the larger L2 cache, SSE4 extensions, lower TDP and further optimizations. The E5430 is quoted by Intel as having a price of $ 455, so in AUS$ this seems like a fair price. Keep in mind that one is passive and the other active, so there is a slight difference in price (normally less than $15) but check the correct one for your mobo. For instance the SuperMicro chassis I have been talking about require passive version for the air shroud to work.

For comparison the quotes I got in the Netherlands for the X5355 are around € 680, the X5365 around € 1020 and the X5472 around € 960. Prices are inclusive of 19% sales tax.

Wow, I though Sales Tax was high here.

I have been finding these lower prices the last few days. This is what I was expecting to see happen, but had seen no evidence of it taking place during the first few weeks after the "launch."

This is why I have been waiting. I will be a lot more confident once I see them in stock somewhere, but things are looking up.

Me too. I am right in assuming that the 54xx series CPUs are the 45nm ones, right?

All the retailers list them as being 65nm still.

Maybe I'm just way off...

And what's going on here exactly:

5450 vs 5450

Why do they have the same specs and model numbers but different prices?

I have seen the same thing happen over here. Usually it is caused by the fact that they use different sources/suppliers to get the same goods. If purchase prices differ amongst different suppliers you can benefit, but also noteworthy is that the cheaper offers are almost always out of stock, whereas the pricier ones are often in stock.

Intels that start with 5xxx are Xeons, the second number is indicative of the chip generation, 1 for Woodcrest, 3 for Clovertown and 4 for Harpertown. The last one is a member of the Penryn generation, 45 nm technology. The prefix E or X is indicative of the TDP, for instance the E5472 and X5472 have a respective TDP of 80 W and 120 W but for the rest do not differ, apart from price.

So all 54xx are 45nm PCUs? Becuase the web sites are listing them as 65nm... weird. It's so frustrating not being able to get expert advice from retailers. The help that you two guys have been giving me is enormous and invaluable, whereas most people over here - the very people who will end up building the machine - have been relatively useless...

TDP?? I assume it has something to do with power usage. It's probably not a big deal right?

TDP relates to heat generated (Thermal Dissipation Something or other). There are 5 series of LGA771 Xeons:

5000 series: Dempsey, dual Netburst cores, less efficient, 3.73Ghz max
5100 series: Woodcrest dual core, 3.0Ghz max, 65nm, June06
5200 series: Wolfdale Core, dual core, up to 3.4Ghz, 45nm, Nov07
5300 series: Clovertown quad core, 2 Woodcrests, 3.0Ghz max, 65nm, Nov06
5400 series: Harpertown quad core, 2 Wolfdales, 3.2Ghz max, 45nm, Nov07

5400 should be faster and cheaper than 5300 at a given clock speed due to the 45nm process, its called progress. Same with the 5200s over the 5100s. The 5000 series exists on a different scale since it is PentiumD based unstead of Core2 based architecture.

I've decided that (if I go with Xeons) I'll definitely get dual X5450s at 3.00GHz each. However the motherboards that have been recommended to me I'm not so certain about.

Looking at them online I can't see any evidence of them supporting the 45nm chips, nor that they even support quad core cpus.

Intel S5000VSASASR
Intel S5000XVNSATAR

I'm way too confused about the motherboards. I'm pretty sure one of you guys said the VSA was ok in an earlier reply (I'll check in a sec) but I can't remember. I'm starting to tear my hair out...

This is what you said, Mike, about the VSA MB:

Could you suggest a more appropriate workstation board that definitely fits the 45nm quad cores?

Also, you said this:

Can you elaborate here? Does Magic Bullet utilise the GPU to increase rendering speed?

And if so, am I better off with:
1. Dual Quadros
2. Quadro + my 7800
3. my 7800 + a 7600

I'm not prepared to pay big for a GPU because I will not use it for gaming and I'll probably never do 3D work (unless Magic Bullet is 3D but I don't think so).

So if I did get a Quadro (or two) I'd only get cheap ones - can you advise me on this as well?

Thanks so much again!!

John,

On the motherboard, I would have a serious look at the one I mentioned earlier, the SuperMicro X7DWA-N, which supports the 5400 CPU series and uses the 5400X Seaburg chipset. That is a workstation mobo, not a server one. It is the latest upgrade from the Greencreek X chipset.

I will respond later on your graphics question.