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Over the last year and a half I bought a truck and Side by Side and have been enjoying my new "off road" hobby quite a bit. Also got a new GoPro to capture some of the outings, with that came a lot of time behind the screen editing and encoding the content.
As you can imagine, the encoding process for 2.7k or 4k video can be quite time consuming. I was about to build a new system to replace the one in my sig, it is fairly old after all but after thinking about it, my main issue would still be there, just a bit less so. That being, I can't really do any demanding gaming during the encoding process, even on a new system. The wait could be half or less but that's still potentially several hours.
I've always wanted to buy one of those dirt cheap Dell/HP multi processor ebay servers just to kind of mess around with and thought it would be a fun experiment. Bought a Dell R6510 which came with 2 Xeon X5660 processors (6c/12t) for a total of 12c/24t. 48GB RAM and a pair of 10kRPM HDD's.
Setup the drives in RAID 0 since i'm more concerned with speed than redundancy, but these will shortly be replaced with a single SSD. Installed Windows 10, everything looks good. The real experiment here was whether or not I could get a dedicated graphics card to work since the onboard wouldn't cut it for the actual editing of videos. It being a 1U rack mound server, there is clearly no room inside for a GPU nor is there an x16 PCIe slot. There are however a couple 8x PCIe slots so I grabbed a riser from an old mining rig. Fed the USB cable through the back of the chassis and connected an extra 650Ti I had laying around.
Shockingly everything worked. The POST process still uses the integrated video but once windows loads, it's smart enough to use the dedicated GPU. Encoded a video and got just over 50% usage on the CPU and 70% load on the GPU during the encoding process. Wasn't sure if it was the GPU itself holding me back, the fact that it's limited to PCIe 1x speeds or if the application i'm using only scales to 12 cores. I also happened to have an extra 1060 6GB so I swapped the 650Ti for the 1060 and tried again... MUCH better results.
Overall, pretty pleased with the results. Encodes far faster than my 3770k and also frees up my main system. Power usage not too horrible considering. 360-370 watts under load being pulled from the wall which includes the 1060 with it's external PSU as well a 23" monitor.
As you can imagine, the encoding process for 2.7k or 4k video can be quite time consuming. I was about to build a new system to replace the one in my sig, it is fairly old after all but after thinking about it, my main issue would still be there, just a bit less so. That being, I can't really do any demanding gaming during the encoding process, even on a new system. The wait could be half or less but that's still potentially several hours.
I've always wanted to buy one of those dirt cheap Dell/HP multi processor ebay servers just to kind of mess around with and thought it would be a fun experiment. Bought a Dell R6510 which came with 2 Xeon X5660 processors (6c/12t) for a total of 12c/24t. 48GB RAM and a pair of 10kRPM HDD's.
Setup the drives in RAID 0 since i'm more concerned with speed than redundancy, but these will shortly be replaced with a single SSD. Installed Windows 10, everything looks good. The real experiment here was whether or not I could get a dedicated graphics card to work since the onboard wouldn't cut it for the actual editing of videos. It being a 1U rack mound server, there is clearly no room inside for a GPU nor is there an x16 PCIe slot. There are however a couple 8x PCIe slots so I grabbed a riser from an old mining rig. Fed the USB cable through the back of the chassis and connected an extra 650Ti I had laying around.
Shockingly everything worked. The POST process still uses the integrated video but once windows loads, it's smart enough to use the dedicated GPU. Encoded a video and got just over 50% usage on the CPU and 70% load on the GPU during the encoding process. Wasn't sure if it was the GPU itself holding me back, the fact that it's limited to PCIe 1x speeds or if the application i'm using only scales to 12 cores. I also happened to have an extra 1060 6GB so I swapped the 650Ti for the 1060 and tried again... MUCH better results.
Overall, pretty pleased with the results. Encodes far faster than my 3770k and also frees up my main system. Power usage not too horrible considering. 360-370 watts under load being pulled from the wall which includes the 1060 with it's external PSU as well a 23" monitor.