Comments

farss wrote on 9/6/2005, 1:20 AM
I doubt you'll blow anything up but if they say it will not work then probably it will not. The list of things that will not work on Dell PCs is pretty long so I wouldn't blame this on BMD.
Bob.
JohnnyRoy wrote on 9/6/2005, 6:35 AM
> The list of things that will not work on Dell PCs is pretty long so I wouldn't blame this on BMD.

Yea, I would never buy a Dell again (but we live and learn). Since you have a Dell Workstation, I assume you purchased it from a business account (not as a home user). I would have the person who purchases the Dell’s for your business contact Dell and tell them that you expect Dell to find a resolution to this or you’ll be sourcing your business’ computers from elsewhere. The worst that can happen is that they tell you to go away. (the best that could happen is that you stop purchasing Dells)

~jr
GlennChan wrote on 9/6/2005, 6:45 PM
The list of things that will not work on Dell PCs is pretty long so I wouldn't blame this on BMD.

Do you have examples of this? Never heard of this before.

I did hear about the India tech support, proprietary parts, the lookalike ATX power supply that is NOT ATX and will kill ATX-complaint devices, and those great Dell deals.
frazerb wrote on 9/7/2005, 5:30 AM
If you don't like Dell, who do you like?

Buddy
farss wrote on 9/7/2005, 6:02 AM
Build your own, it isn't that hard and at least you know what goes into it. If that scares you find someone who builds PCs for video.
Down here I cannot speak too highly of XDT (xdt.com.au), yes they do sell a lot of gear to the USA but I think that's mainly their station logging systems.
Working with the monster data rates of 10 bit 4.2.2 SD and HD means systems with somewhat different requirements to office systems. I looked at BOXx and was put off by negative reviews of the Tynan mobos they use compared to Supermicro's offering, I even blew an extra $1K to get the Supermicro case, just so I could fit SCSi drives at a later date if I wanted to.
The thing seems to be that most PCs today focus only on CPU grunt, not on data throughput. CPU grunt is important for rendering DV as a lot of calcs are involved but when you get into less compressed video formats with large files sizes buss and drive systems speeds seem to overtake CPU speed as the bottleneck.
My current monster shows this pretty well, encoding to mpeg-2 the 4 'CPUs' going from an IDE drive to the striped array only average around 60% load, going the other way around they're hitting over 95%. In other words the CPUs are being held back by how fast they can get the data when it's coming off a ATA 133 drive.
Bob.