Best mobo for photo/video editing workstation?

[Vincent231]

Any thoughts? I'm not stuck on any particular chipset or CPU -- all options are open.

My priorities are:
- Stability (no-overclocking for me)
- The ability to max out on fast memory (for big photoshop files)
- Having IDE RAID 0 and the latest interfaces so that I can avoid as many bottleknecks as possible for video editing
- Anything else that will let me enjoy the board for as long as possible.

I'm running a Dell Dimension PIII 450 at the moment; it's defimately time for an upgrade, so let me know what you would get if you were in my shoes. I'll be building the system around this yet-to-be-determined board, hooking up a Matrox P750 card (8X AGP) to a Sony Artisan 21" CRT display + 15" LCD combo, and I don't need a huge amount of expansion slots, just enough to run my CDR drive, a DVD recorder, a decent sound card (I have an EDIROL UA-5 USB Audio capture device for recording voice) and ~ four hard drives.

It's been a while since the days when I kept up with the latest motherboard releases, so any thoughts are appreciated. I am leaning towards the P4S800D-Deluxe SiS 655FX, but I already have a wireless router that I use to connect my laptop (and i prefer to have my desktops hard-wired to the network), so that may be overkill. I'm open to any suggestions at this point, particularly from photo/video/2D design enthusiasts, or anyone who has an opinion!

Thanks,
Vincent

 

[Mday]

how much do you want to spend? i recommend waiting for an athlon64 solution, or an opteron based system with an agp slot.

 

[Vincent231]

OK, thanks for that... Athlon 64 is expected to be a good system for 2D design & video? I'll do a little research and look up the Opteron solution while I'm at it. I haven't been keeping up with the new and upcoming developments in chipsets, etc. What is it about the Opteron + AGP system that will be particularly attractive?

 

[Aenslead]

Opteron has shown to be a much better workstation CPU than Xeon, simply because the bandwith on SMP mode is handled individualy per processor, contrast to Intel's solution, which bases the number of processor on the same memory path, which potentialy criples its i/o performance.

Opteron is your Workstation of choice, also giving you space for a 64-bit upgrade.

If you are unnable to afford a dual-Opteron workstation, then I suggest the ASUS SK8N, with nForce3 chipset.
dual-Opteron motherboard of choice could be an MSI K8T Master2-FAR, at http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/server/svr/pro_svr_detail.php?UID=484

or, much more better, but whith the need of a better power supply, is the TYAN S2885, at http://www.ocworkbench.com/ocwbcgi/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1061363735,36507,

Good luck.

 

[Peter]

That Tyan board is the first serious WORKSTATION Opteron board - runs two processors, has AGP Pro 110 _and_ PCI-X slots. This is ready for lots and lots of RAM, really fast storage controllers (not those 32-bit PCI toys) and any graphics card you could possibly think of.
No it won't fit a standard ATX case, and it won't run on any random power supply either.

 

[Vincent231]

Those are nice looking boards, and yikes, are they ever pricey. I'm a little confused about why Opteron is better than a P4 3.0C solution for 2D design and photo/video editing; content creation seems to be higher on the P4 (http://www.anandtech.com/cpu/showdoc.html?i=1818&p=5), as does video encoding. I like that these boards have PCI-X, AGP 8X, and gobs of memory expansion. And I could get 2 X 1.4ghz Opteron's for the price of one P4 3.2Cghz. + I'd have an upgrade path to Athlon 64... but is this the way to go for photo/video editing? I know the storage controller and hard drive combo will make a big difference for video editing, and the memory bandwidth on the opteron would probably serve me well in photoshop. But would the additional expense of a dual Opteron setup be worth it in terms of performance for photo/video applications?

Thanks for helping me wade through the options.

 

[Peter]

There are no P4 boards with fast PCI slots - so your mass storage will be bottlenecked at around 100 MB/s whatever you do. 64-bit 66 MHz (or PCI-X) slots will let you go WAY faster, with IDE RAID, or better yet, SCSI RAID.
Smart software will be a lot faster on a dual Opteron machine than on a single P4, simply because each Opteron CPU has its _own_ RAM controller, and thus the machine can work on two data sets, each at full speed. Most of the stuff in the benchmark suites isn't quite there yet, though.
Finally, Opteron boards take a lot more RAM than P4 boards do.

Of course, all those things cost money. Sitting there and waiting for the darn job to finish costs money too. You choose.

 

[Aenslead]

Also, those benchmarks are altered to favor Intel's arquitecture, so you shouldn't really pay attention to those. Many many people have experienced much better multi-tasking with AMD systems thanks to their strong FPU unit.

Should you be on budget, I suggest a big AMD system... say, a 3200+, 1Gb in RAM, nForce 2 motherboard, SATA150 Raid... wich would be cheaper than Opteron/P4 solutions, and would still give a great performance on the tasks you are doing.

BTW, and your budget is...?

 

[Vincent231]

As far as budget goes, I haven't set one yet I am interested in getting bang for the buck though; I don't have the pockets or the desire to spend a huge premium for, say, a 20% performance increase, but I will spend what it takes to get a solid system that will boost productivity. With creative applications like photo/video, it makes a big difference to work on a responsive system. I will probably be going for IDE RAID 0 rather than SCSI, to keep noise and heat down.

Out of curiosity, does Windows XP 64bit support the Opteron processor, or will it run only on the Itanium family? And is photoshop optimized for 64bit processors yet?

 

[Peter]

When you're after an increase, and you say your stuff is I/O bound, then any chipset that doesn't have higher bandwidth slots is not going to help. Planting a RAID controller onto a standard PCI bus is not going to give you more than ~100 MB/s. Even if it says 2x 150 MB/s on the box ... sure, SATA channels have that kind of throughput, but they got nowhere to feed it on a 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus. Note that this is just as true for onboard controllers.

If you want big iron performance, you need to use big iron chipsets - and that means Xeons, dual Athlons, or Opterons. The best RAM performance and scalability is on the latter.

 

[Aenslead]

Well, the REAL plus on SATA drives is that they consume much less processor power when accessing large data chunks, which can also reproduce on overall increase of performance.

Opteron will work perfectly on any 32-bit AND 64-bit enviroment, whereas Itanium will work 'ok' on 64 bits but will be crappy as hell on 32-bit apps.

 

[TypeM]

With the new Intel ICH5-R chips (found in the Intel 865 & 875 chipsets) the SATA controller is built into the Southbridge. It gives you a direct connection to the I/O hub at maximum SATA speeds. You do not access the PCI bus at all.

 

[Peter]

The same is true for VIA 8237 and SiS 964 south bridges. Still, that's only two-drive RAID, so that's either performance OR security - and it still is a RAID array managed by the main CPU, not an independent controller entity.
While this is nice for the enthusiast, serious workhorses are a different breed.

 

[render]

Dual xeon with raid 0 setup

 

[Toymaker]

Here's one for ya. Sata raid directly off the southbridge controller. Dual channel DDR, 4 GB max. It's expensive though for around $300.00 and four 1 GB sticks of PC2700 (about $140.00 each) plus the cost of your choice of 533 Mhz Zeon CPU(s). But, it's available now.

Asus PC-DL

 

[Peter]

Sorry, this uses the usual Promise RAID controller - on the 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus. Toy soldier, that one.

 

[Vincent231]

All this is very interesting. Are any of the manufacturers planning to release dual Opteron boards similar to the TYAN S2885 (http://www.ocworkbench.com/ocwbcgi/newspro/viewnews.cgi?newsid1061363735,36507) without integrated six channel audio w/ SPDIF? Everything about the board seems just right (true PCI-X, AGP 8X, 8DIMM slots for lots of regular bang-for-the-buck 512MB DDR chips, etc) but I'd rather not pay for high-end integrated audio when I have already invested in an external 24bit/96KHz usb audio capture/playback device.

Also, what kind of upgrade path would I have with the s2885? How high is the Opteron series expected to go in terms of clock-speed, and will I be able to drop-in future iterations of AMD's 64bit processors, or will those require new boards?

And what should I keep in mind when I go shopping for a case and power supply for this board? I'm looking at quiet power supplies right now (I need a near-silent system) but I'm not too sure how much power this kind of dual-Opteron setup will draw.

 

[render]

I am interested in getting bang for the buck though

Everybody knows xeon/p4 is better for video editing/encoding. You asked bang for the buck, so here it is.

CPU: Dual xeon 2.8 ghz
MB: DP533 or S2665
RAM: Regular PC2100 512MB x 4 (total 2gb)
Power: Antec Truepower 550w EPS
PCI-X raid card

 

[Toymaker]

Originally posted by: Peter
Sorry, this uses the usual Promise RAID controller - on the 32-bit 33 MHz PCI bus. Toy soldier, that one.

It also has sata raid off the southbridge. Two Maxtor 120 Gig (240 total)sata 8MB cache drives in raid 0 for $120.00 each. That would be a good start.

 

[Peter]

Vincent, the onboard audio is not a high end solution, it's just your usual chipset integrated sound engine w/ onboard codec. Now those codecs are six-channel and SPDIF capable meanwhile. You can safely ignore it and still use your USB thing - you can even use both at the same time. (And besides, those onboard audio solutions cost only a few dollars ... believe me, on the bottom line of THIS system, you won't notice.)