workstation motherboard recommendations

[alizee]

My friends and I are starting a film production company and I'm going to be building a workstation for editing video on Avid Xpress Pro HD. I'd like to build a dual opteron system, and I don't know much about the market. Other apps that we might be using, but on a more limited basis, are Combustion, After Effects, ProTools, and Maya. We will be running Windows.

As of right now, my plan is to get a motherboard with two sockets and buy one dual core cpu and have the ability to add one later because our budget isn't really big enough to buy two right now. These mobo's work with only one of the sockets populated, right?

What chipsets should I be looking at? We want PCIe x16 video and at least one, preferably two, PCIe x4 slots for RAID controllers. I don't think we would benefit from an SLI setup (except for Maya, eh?), so potentially we don't need two x16 connectors, but if the connector is there, we can use it as an extra x4 slot, right?

Speaking of RAID, is it faster to use the built in raid on the motherboard, or is it faster to use an add in card? The only RAIDs we will be using are RAID 0 and 1. We will probably be using almost exclusively SATA drives, not SCSI.

Other features we need, built in SATA, Firewire, USB 2.0, Gigabit LAN. PCI-X would also be nice, since I already have a PCI-X RAID controller, but if it doesn't have it it doesn't matter. Stability is important, as is power consumption. This board looks to have all the featuures I want, but is missing a second cpu socket: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813186055

I would probably want an Extended ATX form factor board, but if there's something else I'm definitely game, but rack server boards don't have PCIe x16, right?

If there's some features that I should be looking at that I missed, please point them out.

Thanks a lot.

 

[chaosfire]

bump

 

[SketchMaster]

I'm not the most educated in this but I'm going to give my .02 to give you a better idea of what you should be looking at.

First off, Asus and TYAN are two good makers for AMD sever boards. Asus is cheaper while TYAN gets more into the high-end. I'm sure someone will go into more detail for you.

Now, as far as 940 Vs. 939. I'll try going into this without making a fool of myself or opeing a can-o-worms

If you go 939 you can get set up with an X2 for less money. The CPU, RAM and Motherboard will be cheaper but you will not have as many options for upgrading down the line.

If you go dual 940 you will pay alot more but get better stability and more options for upgrading. You could get set up with one Dual core and then latter one when you have the money/need you can get a 2nd. Only thing about 940 is the ECC ram. It cost a but load and really doesn't do much for this kind of work since you are just dealing with video.

With your video card for maya you should be looking at Quadro or FireGL. They are made for rendering and will give you better image quality. And I'm not sure but I don't think SLI will do much good for work station rendering. I'm probly wrong though.

You could get a mid-high end card for starting out but you should really be looking at work station cards.

Hope this helps.

And forgive my god awful spelling/grammar.

 

[SketchMaster]

Bump.

 

[jakesdad]

SLI at the moment does little for actual rendering - that's a processor intensive thing. A good OpenGL card will help for solid shaded views though. ECC memory is actually a good thing for long term memory intensive processing which is what a workstation is geared for and why it's important to have.

BTW, the audiophile in me hopes to God you're not into overprocessing/limiting and compressing the crap out of a final mix just to get it louder than it needs to be - I hate that in modern CDs more than anything. It seems like people who use ProTools can't stop hitting that L2 limiter plug-in.

It's hard to look for a workstation board at Newegg because they really are limited in their selection. It's best to look at the motherboard manufacturers website directly such as Tyan, Asus, and MSI. They have so many more than what Newegg stocks. Which also means that you'll have to check the retailers the manufacturer suggests. Or just plug the model number of the board you like and google it to see where else they may be found.

For an AMD based dual socket board, you may know that your only option is the dual 940 socket. There are no dual 939 boards so you can't try the Athon X2. But there are dual core 200 series Opterons now. It's the 200 series Opty you'll be looking for to run in a dual processor configuration anyway - dual-core or not.

 

[alizee]

Thanks for the help.

Does MSI make good workstation motherboards? I saw one that I like the looks of, and it's standard ATX rather than eATX. Does it look OK?
http://www.msicomputer.com/product/p_spec.asp?model=K8N_Master2-FAR&class=mb

What we are planning on pairing with it are two Opteron 270s and either a Matrox Parhelia APVe or a QuadroFX 540 PVE.

On further thought, we're not really looking into running Maya, if and when we need to we're going to buy a second box.

 

[ND40oz]

From my understanding, the way the msi board is setup with the memory banks, you don't have 2 sets of memory banks, one bank per processor, so you won't get the memory bandwidth that you would expect with dual opterons.