New Computer Questions

Question

Hi
I have two clients who are asking me to upgrade my computer. The type of work I do is slightly different from most people, in that I do content for video projection. Almost everything I do uses a non-standard resolution. For example the current project is 1920x3240. Currently the slowest part of the workflow is previewing and rendering. Typically the final rendering is a photo sequence of some type and encoding is done on the media server and is not part of my workflow. I used limited amounts of video footage, with most of the content created in Cinema 4D and After Effects. I use a fair amount of 3rd party effects like trapcode with high particle counts. Content is almost always broken down into small segments that are then played back through the media server, because of this, the amount of video used is pretty small.
One of my clients is willing to split the cost of a new system, so I'm willing to spend more than I normally would.
Based on reading this and other forums's here is what I'm looking at:
Case
  Fractal Design Define  ATX Full Tower Computer Case                                          $129.99
  CORSAIR AX1200i 1200W Digital ATX12V v2.31                                                  $329.99
  Noctua NH-D14 SE2011 140mm and 120mm SSO CPU Cooler                          $89.99
  Fractal Design Silent Series R2 FD-FAN-SSR2-140 140mm 140mm Fan          $17.99
System
  ASUS P9X79-E  WS                                                                                                                                    $499.99
  Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 3.2GHz (3.8GHz Turbo) LGA 2011 130W Six-Core                 $560.99
  G.SKILL Ripjaws Z Series 64GB (8 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 2133 (PC3 17000)     $679.99
  EVGA GeForce GTX 680 FTW+ w/Backplate 4GB 256-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 3.0 x16               $539.00
Drives
  areca ARC-1882I-MS PCI-Express 2.0 x8 Low Profile SATA / SAS RAID Controller Card                  $640.00
  Western Digital WD WD5003AZEX 500GB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" (Qnty 4)   $299.99
  Corsair Force Series GT CSSD-F240GBGT-BK 2.5" 240GB SATA III MLC - (Qnty 2)                         $479.00
  areca CB-R87SA-75M Right Angle SFF-8087 MiniSAS to 4 SATA Breakout                                        $39.98
From a drive setup I would do the following:
SSD - Boot
SSD - Cache
HD Raid - Content
HD Raid - Content
I have an external raid that has backup data.
I have a number of questions regarding the system.
    Does the GTX 680 make sense or should I consider a Titan?
    Will the Areca Controller make a big difference in the system for the type of work that I'm doing?
    I looked at the WD VelociRaptor10K drives, would that get much of a peformance gain?
Thanks
Martin

Answer 1

The Areca ARC-1882i-8 has 8 internal ports, so you could go for two 4-disk raid3 or raid5 or even easier for one 8-disk raid3 or raid5, possibly with a hot-spare. Roughly, a n-disk raid3 or raid5 will give a sustained transfer rate of around 0.85 x (n - 1) x T. So a 4-disk raid3 or raid5 will give around 380 - 400 MB/s. A 8-disk raid3 or raid5 will have a transfer rate of around 900 MB/s. This shows the advantage of more disks in an array.
Software raids, whether in BIOS or in Windows are limited to striped or mirrored arrays, parity raids are way too slow. Striping is too risky and mirroring does not help speed.
Rendering for previews are helped by hardware acceleration for accelerated effects only. But the effectiveness of the video card depends to a large degree on the speed of the CPU, memory and disks. Unless the CPU is significantly overclocked to 4.5+ GHz, memory runs @ 2133 and the disk setup is very fast (400+ MB/s) a GTX 660 TI will not noticeably be slower than a GTX 680.
Rendering for export is only helped by a CUDA card when scaling, blending or blurring are applied. If you start with HD source material and export to HD resolution, there is no scaling and thus no acceleration by a CUDA card. It is all done by the CPU, memory and the disks.
If you are talking about Velociraptors 10K, no they are not faster than the HGST Ultrastars.
If you are talking about 15K SCSI disks, yes they are faster but require a SCSI controller, both of which make them much more expensive.
Despite having made the feature request for a render farm numerous times, I think since CS3, this has not yet been effected for PR. A render farm like you have in Vue would be a nice addition, but alas...
If you want to have more room for future growth, I would have a look at the 12+4 or 16+4 port ARC 1882iX controller cards. Not only do they expand on the number of ports to 12 or 16 internally, they also add 4 external ports and most importantly, they can accept up to 4 GB cache on the card, where the 8 port versions are limited to 1 GB fixed cache. Do not forget to add a BBM battery backup module to the Areca controller.
If you were to take this step and have all those ports available for future expansion, then it could be wise to have a look at the GTX 780, provided overclocking is applied. The GTX Titan is just too costly to justify.