Z440 for grading

[Thomas Singh]

We are expanding with extra offline suites and think that the following work station are great for us: Z440 Intel Xeon E5-1650v4, M2000, 16GB. But sometimes it could be neccessary to do some grade and online work on them as well. I know that Z840 are better alternatives for a fluid grade session, but I would like to know if you got some experience with the Z440 in this matter.

[Thomas Singh]

Intel Xeon E5-1650v4 3.6 15M 2400 6C CPU,
16GB DDR4-2400 (4x4GB) RegRAM,
NVIDIA Quadro M2000 4GB 1st GFX,
1TB SATA 7200 HDD,
USB Keyboard,
USB Optical Mouse, 9.5mm
Slim Super Multi DVDRW,
Display Port to DVI-D Adapter,
HP Z440 Country Kit,
HP Processor Air Cooling Kit,
Win 10 Pro 64 Downgrade Win 7 64,

[Margus Voll]

I'm not really sure about that CPU speed and GPU selection.
In that sense Xeon is old tech also in a way for post i would say.

Anu GTX 1080 ti should beat it hands down now if your app supports it if you think of budget side gpu's

[Tom Evans]

XEON is pro technology, and i3/5/7 is toy technology made for gamers and grandmothers. Even the new iMac Pro that's scheduled in December comes with XEON.

[Margus Voll]

Sure but the efficiency.

I can play back 8k red on 8k timeline at 20 fps with only 10 core i7.
Many of my clients on Xeons can not do that. 
Just to compare.

This is one thing why ADK makes and sells so many new machines as they can really show why Xeon chokes.
Talk to MixingLight guys abut that as i believe they have been migrating to those grandmother machines now for better efficiency. Also some of new Xeon and Linux Resolve users i have heard are rather disappointed.

Of course in the end it will depend on your app and how it is optimised. Most of the apps still do not scale well on 56 threads and would work better on less cores with faster Mhz. Just my subjective experience that i have had for now.

 

[Margus Voll]

Here is a video that also tests this idea i'm talking about a bit.

You can see that on some loads Xeon will choke and loose speed thus getting slower.
 

So if we assume your app supports GPU and even multi GPU and as any other app do not scale that well on slower many cores those grandmother computers tend to be very good in speed and have much better ROI. 

This was also my consideration when i went i7 route to have more speed out of lesser investment and i based my comments on that. Essentially i would gain better 8k playback going with 4x Titan X P (the latest ones) swapping out my current 2x Titan X pascal.

Os on M.2 (2000 MB/sec read write) and faster RAM seem to have more effect on your overall speed with fast multi GPU's compared to slower Xeon without fast ram and OS drive .

 

 

[Tom Evans]

Most resellers I've been talking to pushes XEON because that's the pro line and what they trust. That said, it seems like you have done your homework so I will have to look further into this. Thank you Margus. Do you recommend the GTX-1080, EVGA?

[Tom Evans]

And what is the difference between the different versions of the GTX, EVGA's? 

[Margus Voll]

I'm not sure about GTX side at the moment.
Would see what others say around net. My titans are from Nvidia didrectly.

Main issue i see is when you get 8k material Xeon bus speeds and ram speeds plus cpu choking do not help that much.
 

Sure sellers push Xeons still as you probably need two cpu's which are 4k usd a pop and margin on that is much better
compared to 2k usd on top end i7.