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Workstation config for a 7200 x 5400 video wall

S

seadrag0n

Member
We are planning to have a video wall in our office made up of 70 Christie MicroTiles in a 10 x 7 configuration with a total resolution of 7200 x 5400 pixels and a hardware vendor has quoted following configuration to drive the video wall:

3.7GHZ INTEL XEON E5 1630 V4 QUAD CORE
4X 16GB 2400 MHZ DDR4 : 64GB
4X 960GB SSD : 4TB
NVIDIA QUADRO M6000 / 24GB GDDR5 / DP 1.2 (4), DVI-I (1)
INTENSITY SHUTTLE PRO 4K

The price quoted for above configuration is around $19,000 USD.

The video wall will be mainly used to play 4K or higher res videos. I have some questions:
  1. Is the Quadro really required or we can make do with a Pascal GTX Titan?
  2. The above configuration including other components(MB, power supply etc.) costs 19,000 USD?
  3. Is the 64GB of ram really when the most intensive task is just to play high res videos?

I don't have much knowledge on how video walls work so I am just curious about the above config 🙂
 
That whole system is ridiculous expensive. You could run TITAN X Pascal SLI on most modern workstations much cheaper.
 
If all this is doing is displaying 4K video on a display with your quoted resolution, even a single Titan seems like overkill, just like everything else on that quote. 4x SSD's just to display video? LOLWUT? Now, if you're doing rendering and transcoding, that changes things a bit.

Edit, just looked through the specs on Christie's website. If you're running multiple ECU's, then you need to make sure you've got enough ports but beyond that you're basically just running a media center box on an ultra high res screen which makes their recommended specs laughably over done.

Edit 2: Looks like you're looking at 4 ECU's? So just about any card with 4 HDMI/DP out should work.

Edit 3: Look at the specs for the controller they sell: https://www.christiedigital.com/en-...ll-controllers/TVC-1700-video-wall-controller. Single Quad Core, 8Gb RAM, and unspecified 512Mb video cards. So, yeah, pretty much anything will work.
 
Last edited:
XavierMace said:
If all this is doing is displaying 4K video on a display with your quoted resolution, even a single Titan seems like overkill, just like everything else on that quote. 4x SSD's just to display video? LOLWUT? Now, if you're doing rendering and transcoding, that changes things a bit.

Edit, just looked through the specs on Christie's website. If you're running multiple ECU's, then you need to make sure you've got enough ports but beyond that you're basically just running a media center box on an ultra high res screen which makes their recommended specs laughably over done.

Edit 2: Looks like you're looking at 4 ECU's? So just about any card with 4 HDMI/DP out should work.

Edit 3: Look at the specs for the controller they sell: https://www.christiedigital.com/en-...ll-controllers/TVC-1700-video-wall-controller. Single Quad Core, 8Gb RAM, and unspecified 512Mb video cards. So, yeah, pretty much anything will work.
Click to expand...

Thanks for your reply, really appreciate it.
  1. The vendor is looking at 4 ECU's for the video wall, so a Titan or a GTX 1080 should be enough right?
  2. There will be no rendering or transcoding happening on the machine at all.
I will ask the vendor to give complete specs of the machine with individual prices.
 
Is this machine recording/capturing video (there's a capture card on your spec list) or ANYTHING else or are you literally just going to be double clicking on a pre-recorded video file and playing it on infinite loop? That vendors quote makes me feel like we have to be missing something. If all it's doing is playing video files and outputting them to what is effectively 4x high res displays, even a 1080 is overkill. You can run a 4K screen off an onboard Intel HD4600. For a single card solution a Quadro K1200 has 4x mini display port connectors (each supporting 3840x2160 @ 60 Hz with 30-bit color) and is $280 on NewEgg. There's probably even cheaper options than that. Add 4 mini-display port to DVI cables (because it looks like those ECU's are DVI only) and you should be set. Think about it this way. You aren't needing any sort of 3D processing or acceleration, just something that can output 38.8 million pixels at 60Hz. I'm running 3x 1080p/60 screens (so 6.8M pixels) off the onboard Intel HD5500 on my work laptop and that's a basic sub $1k business laptop.

To be 100% honest, I would call Christie's to make sure we aren't missing something and if we aren't, find yourself a new vendor. Because based on what I'm seeing you could build a suitable controller system for well under $1,000 which makes your vendors $19k quote insulting. Unless they can provide a damn good explanation of why they quoted you something that high, I'd look for a vendor that isn't trying to rip you off.
 
As others have said, pretty much any current desktop with the right video outputs will be up to the task. spend $3000 total on two systems so you have a spare in place and don't look derpy with a $$$$ video wall down because your PC died.
 
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