Ultimate Workstation Pt1: $20,000 of GPUs & 3970X PC Build

erek

erek

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But is it actually even any better than the new Mac Pro @ 53,000+ USD? Hmm.

"Part 2 will show the loop building and assembly. We weren't planning on it originally, but we'll also run a follow-up piece with some performance metrics. We've been using the machine for a little while now and have found that, much to our surprise and excitement, the Teslas actually have a massive impact on all of our work. We'll run some numbers for a later video. In the meantime, in this video, we're putting some EK Titan V water blocks on the Tesla V100 32GB cards, and we'll be using Water Cool components for the reservoir and Threadripper CPU block, coming up in part 2. This system's job will be to tackle complex Blender animations and product renders, Adobe Premiere editing (and it's better utilized than expected), and proper multitasking of renders + editing simultaneously."


 
Uhm, yeah, I'd imagine it would smash the $53k mac pro in anything that doesn't use that proprietary FPGA accelerator they have on there.
 
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Most of us wouldn't really get anything out of that. Cool watching it be built tho.

GN does a lot of video editing (obviously) so makes sense for them to have workstation tier components ($10k Tesla's). (still listening to it)
 
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extide said:
Uhm, yeah, I'd imagine it would smash the $53k mac pro in anything that doesn't use that proprietary FPGA accelerator they have on there.
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Hmm, the Mac Pro has a proprietary FPGA accelerator? i wasn't aware of that one :-\ Bogus, wonder what it's all for
 
24 minutes to install two water blocks on the GPUs, is part two going to be another 24 minutes of putting the motherboard into the case?
 
Desig...naray? I kind of assumed it was supposed to be pronounced "Design-air"
 
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erek said:
Hmm, the Mac Pro has a proprietary FPGA accelerator? i wasn't aware of that one :-\ Bogus, wonder what it's all for
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Speeds up some stuff in Final Cut Pro -- it's called the Apple Afterburner
 
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I love GN, but I don't really get how this type of build is useful for their "editing needs." The same goes for the others like Jay. These guys are running single camera production setups and the editing consists of simple jump cuts and sometimes a caption. There simply isn't that much compute involved in this. These guys could be doing their editing on the iOS version of iMovie.

I mean, I do love seeing this kind of build and it would be great to see more. But, as the arbiters of Epeen Enhancement vs Useful Upgrade, it's kind of funny to see how readily they blur that line when it comes to their own hardware usage.
 
tesla v100 ... it's no longer $10k it's ONLY $3850 each on Amazon. One would think he would have been grounded with a wrist strap before handling it
 
Thunderdolt said:
I love GN, but I don't really get how this type of build is useful for their "editing needs." The same goes for the others like Jay. These guys are running single camera production setups and the editing consists of simple jump cuts and sometimes a caption. There simply isn't that much compute involved in this. These guys could be doing their editing on the iOS version of iMovie.

I mean, I do love seeing this kind of build and it would be great to see more. But, as the arbiters of Epeen Enhancement vs Useful Upgrade, it's kind of funny to see how readily they blur that line when it comes to their own hardware usage.
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I think the graphs they have in most of their review videos use animations from Blender to do the row highlights while Steve is talking to highlight the data points he is discussing while in the background of all graphs there is constant animation of the background plus the "timer bars" on either side that drop away according to the amount of time left displaying that chart page on the screen. Yeah, it's all fluff when it could be just a screen grab of an Excel graph, but GN likes to fancy their stuff up quite a bit and Patrick (or maybe one of the other guys) is good at Blender so they probably have a Blender scenario set up for bar charts/graphs that allows them to set up animations rather quickly, so this new render machine would make things happen faster.
 
This is kind of an over the top build for over the tops sake.

Thunderdolt said:
I love GN, but I don't really get how this type of build is useful for their "editing needs." The same goes for the others like Jay. These guys are running single camera production setups and the editing consists of simple jump cuts and sometimes a caption. There simply isn't that much compute involved in this. These guys could be doing their editing on the iOS version of iMovie.

I mean, I do love seeing this kind of build and it would be great to see more. But, as the arbiters of Epeen Enhancement vs Useful Upgrade, it's kind of funny to see how readily they blur that line when it comes to their own hardware usage.
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So tru, I lol'd. Btw, when I benched redshift and vray and some other industry apps, the Titans weren't necessarily faster than the 2080ti. And now that I think about it, I don't recall seeing many Tesla's in the the results.
 
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Azrak said:
I think the graphs they have in most of their review videos use animations from Blender to do the row highlights while Steve is talking to highlight the data points he is discussing while in the background of all graphs there is constant animation of the background plus the "timer bars" on either side that drop away according to the amount of time left displaying that chart page on the screen. Yeah, it's all fluff when it could be just a screen grab of an Excel graph, but GN likes to fancy their stuff up quite a bit and Patrick (or maybe one of the other guys) is good at Blender so they probably have a Blender scenario set up for bar charts/graphs that allows them to set up animations rather quickly, so this new render machine would make things happen faster.
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The animations and overlays look good for sure. They also look like the kind of thing a mobile web browser can render in real time. If it's taking GN an hour to render those in Blender (this is a completely made up time - I have no idea how long it takes them), then something is very broken in the HW-SW-User chain.

And just think: >85% of their viewers watch these videos at under 1Mbps. Now picture that in context with LTT's insistence on shooting 8K RAW.
 
Thunderdolt said:
I love GN ... But, as the arbiters of Epeen Enhancement vs Useful Upgrade, it's kind of funny to see how readily they blur that line when it comes to their own hardware usage.
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But that's why they are kinda perfect for doing hardware reviews, they really are techy nerds like most of us.

Who can say they've never bought a hardware upgrade that they didn't "need"? Plus, if it speeds up video production, gives them more time to work on other stuff, or help keep them from getting burnt out.
 
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