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Impresssive. That machine is so fast the cores probably get confused. Quantum Mechanics next?
JJK

> "Here's a link to eVGA's Mods Rigs site, which has the full skinny on the components, and a couple of pictures."

That is a *wicked* build! Thanks, ;-)

~jr

"Here's a link to eVGA's Mods Rigs site, which has the full skinny on the components, and a couple of pictures".

Did you build the system yourself or did someone build it together for you? How much did it cost? Thanks

RZ

John,

It's OK, I was able to put the fire out.

But seriously, thanks for explaining the trick. I will definitely play with it. But is seems that at this point, it is really project dependant on the threads, as I pointed out on the other thread, even when I knocked threads down from 16 to 2 there was no effect.

But I love having access to this. Will totally look into it.

Thanks.

Michael

John,

Yes I built it myself. Just too busy to update my dinky little web prescience with the build. Maybe I will have time over the Christmas break.

I love the eVGA SR-2 motherboard and they are supposed to be coming out with a new model in Q1 2012 so I would wait for that.

I'm not going to spark a Mac versus Windows battle here but like the flexibility I have in building very specific hardware combinations which I feel is best done in Windows.

If you or anyone has questions on builds, feel free to message me. This is the 4th water cooled rig I've made and I've built more computers than I can remember. Only got good at it because of f'ing things up enough along the way to learn.

Michael

> "I'm not going to spark a Mac versus Windows battle here but like the flexibility I have in building very specific hardware combinations which I feel is best done in Windows."

My reasons are purely driven by the fact that I switched to using a Mac for everything else this year so Vegas is the only reason I keep a Windows PC around anymore. It's unfortunate that I can't "legally" install OS X on a home built PC and I agree with you that building your own gives you more flexibility and better quality at a cheaper price.

What I was surprised to find was that if you don't plan to build it yourself, the Mac Pro 12 core is actually $1,000 cheaper than a comparably equipped HP Z800! So it's definitely either going to be another home build system or the Mac Pro for my next workstation.

Thanks for sharing your build specs.

~jr

Hi Guitartoys, welcome to the club!
I have an EVGA SR 2 myself. I have two xeon 5680 on it, I can give you more specs later if you want. (And update my profile too..)

I managed to up the number of cores to 24 using the procedure described here, but after restarting Vegas 10, it is back to 16 core again. Do you experience the same?

And when it comes to working on the time line, editing video, I do not think it is as fast as it should be. Not at all. I wonder if some of my settings are wrong. A single AVCHD file will often not play back in real time, and I remember it did on my old quad core workhorse.
You say that editing video is like a breeze on your SR2, what footage do you use?

ingvarai wrote: I managed to up the number of cores to 24 using the procedure described here, but after restarting Vegas 10, it is back to 16 core again

Really, really unfortunate if Vegas just so can change the number of cores in our CPUs.

I have a Mac Pro with double Xeon Quads = 8 physical cores.
Do you think that if I start Vegas 10 (or 11) once more that it might change my hardware to more or less than the 8 cores??

Do you think that Vegas 11 with GPU assist could change the number of GPUs in my graphics card (GeForce 450) too??

@ritsmer
>Do you think that if I
Sorry about that, I meant rendering threads, not cores
When opening up task manager, I see 24 "logical" CPUs (24 boxes under CPU Usage History).
I am now not sure anymore what the number of rendering threads really mean, in my case.

XBERK, I remember spending $999 for a 10MB (not GB) hard drive for a TRS-80 system!

Hi,

Just wanted to follow up on this.

I went ahead and updated the internal preferences for the 2 max threads for rendering in 64 bit, and it simply doesn't look like it sticks.

If I enter the values, and then render, I can see I'm using only about 1/2 of my cores.

If I go back I see that the Maximum Video Render Threads for 64 bit dropped back to 16. while the Max for Maximum Video Render Threads 64 bit stays sticky and remains at 24.

If I close the preferences dialog, and go back, I can see that the value is still set to 24, but once I run a render, I can see that 1/2 the cores are being used. Once the render is complete, and even still using the shift to get the internal tab, I can still see that the video tab has the max set to 16.

So while the prefs are set, I suspect that the render is an externally called DLL and likely has a variable set, which allows the preference value to be passed, but the render DLL likely has its own cap at 16, and is ignoring any value larger than 16

So it looks like there is an internal limit still being overidden.

Peace.

Michael

Hulk was making a good point about Hyperthreading. You've got 12 physical cores, not 24. (actually, with dual hex core processors shouldn't you have 16 cores?). Hyperthreading splits those physical cores so that they can always keep an "ear open" for other requests from the system, but the engine for those hyperthreaded cores is still the physical core. So you might consider disabling hyperthreading in your BIOS. I don't know if it would actually make a difference, but hyperthreading isn't meant to give you more processing power, it's there to increase responsiveness. It can also make memory access a little more efficient on some processors.

<edit>Corrected enough typos to make it worthwhile to say I did so.</edit>

Rob

It looks like you really just need to mess with it to get it to work.

But it also looks like it has mixed results.

It looks like the first time I set it to 24, it started rendering on the bottom 12 threads. That was just odd, as normally it renders on the top set of cores, starting at 0.

I rebooted, and reset it, and it is now working on all 24 cores.

Another thing I noticed, is that when rendering to MP4, it uses both of my GPUs pretty well, averaging 25% to 35% on both GPUs (I have SLI)

But when rendering to an m2v file, only one of the GPUs is being used, so their code isn't taking advantage of SLI in the same fashion as MP4. Obviously, different formats, different code, but the MP4 seems to leverage the GPUs better.

So I took a 1:20:00 long show recorded in 1920x1080x12 M2TS files, and when I rendered it to Blu Ray, with audio, with GPU on and 16 max threads, it took 48:48 to complete.

But, when I bumped it up to 24 threads, rather than going down, it increased to 57:58

So now, I am going to have to figure out if there is a sweet spot with thread count.

As the other thing to consider is that the Xeon processors support 2 threads on each core. So when running 16 threads, that's really across 8 physical cores. And I have 12 physical cores. SO it would be best to spread the processing out to 1 thread per physical core.

Just wanted to report back some findings.

Peace

Michael

Perfectly right - and just what I wrote some posts above:

I have a double Xeon quads (8 cores, but no HT) and using it

The peaks are pretty steep - let us hear where your machine works at its best.

Btw. the 16 threads that you mention are not running on the 8 physical cores only - they are distributed on the available (HT) cores - and the very same thread may even be shifted between several physical cores as processing goes on.

@ Guitartoys

ok ok...you're killing me...how much does the computer cost??? lol

Rit, you are spot on.

I will try to figure out the sweet spot over the holiday break when I have some spare time. I will take your notes to heart. I actually just did a little render, and it is still using my 24 cores.

But it does seem like GPU use it totally dependent on the output file format. As it looks like the MP4 render type is smart enough to use both GPUs, where BluRay, which is what I would think would be the most prevalent only uses one GPU. I would hope that they would have spent more time on the BluRay rendering engines.

Jimi, well, I never added it all up before, because if I did, and my wife asks me, I'd have to admit it to her. According to Edmunds, I could have bought a Honda Civic Sedan. The processors were $3,400 alone. All told, including the 3 23" 3-D displays, 4 Vertex 3 SSDs, 4 Hard drives, RAID Controller, around $11K, then probably on the order of $1K to $2K for all of the water cooling components, and external radiator box

Guitartoys wrote: But it does seem like GPU use it totally dependent on the output file format.

IMHO we are in a time of change - and SCS does not write all the used codecs themselves - meaning that in this very moment some codecs might be fully GPU capable (but probably not finally fine tuned for that) and some codecs are more or less not.

Probably also the newest third party GPU capable codecs are more expensive - and I would actually prefer not to pay for the full bells-and-whistles-GPU-assisted-everything - but I would prefer the possibility to be able to buy the latest and fastest versions of the few codecs that I use (actually only the MainConcept mpeg-2 Blu-Ray).

AFAIK there is no possibility to buy the latest GPU-super-optimized codec from i.e. MainConcept as a plugin - I did ask recently - so until Vegas is opened up for that possibility we must make do with the codecs supplied.
In the V11 predecessor AFAIRemember the GPU assist worked only on a single Sony supplied codec - and now that is expanding - so the gents at SCS are focussing and working at it - something will happen - my own only problem is patience :- )


As to the "number of threads" discussion I think that as little as 1 single Vegas thread will start an avalanche of API calls each again running several sub APIs and threads - and so always utilize a -for us- totally non-transparent number of physical (HT) processors.