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| By Chris Angelini | ||||
A long time ago, I learned that no matter how much I thought I knew about system building, there’d always be some piece of hardware or an application that would flat out stump me in front of a customer. Talk about being humbled. The easiest way to work around those embarrassing situations, I found, was to remind antsy SMBs that I’m a solution provider, and the right solution doesn’t always emerge instantaneously. There’s no possible way to have the answer to every problem the moment it pops up. Sometimes, the best you can promise is a quick Q&A with vendor tech support. About six months ago, I built a graphics workstation for a photographer. He was on top of technology, had a good idea what he wanted from a workstation, and yet still took my advice on a couple of different components. “The machine,” he said, “needs to be able to cut through Photoshop like a hot knife through butter.” He already owned a respectably-configured tier-one box, and so my challenge was clearly to demonstrate what I could do given the resources of a VAR. Fully configured, the new, custom workstation was impressive. A Core 2 Duo chip drove an ASUS 975X motherboard loaded with 4GB of memory and an ATI Radeon X1900-series graphics card. RAID-protected storage, Gigabit Ethernet, and a gorgeous 24” LCD the customer had already purchased rounded out his configuration nicely. Before I left his studio, I asked what he thought of the system’s look and feel. “This is one of the better-looking systems I’ve owned. And it feels faster than anything I’ve had before.” I was satisfied with a job well done and the photographer began installing his software on the clean operating system. My peace didn’t last long, unfortunately. I received a phone call the next day that Windows was only recognizing 3GB of the machine’s RAM and Adobe’s software was only seeing 1.7GB. Since the customer expected a substantial performance increase from the 4GB of memory, it was certainly easy to sympathize with his distress. Off I went on a mission to figure out why a 32-bit operating system wasn’t able to see its theoretical memory limit. The Windows problem, it turned out, was one I would have seen coming had I done a little digging. The 32-bit version of XP sets aside big chunks of its 32-bit address space for peripherals, including PCI and PCI Express components. Shave off anywhere from 256MB to 1GB of non-addressable memory right there. Unfortunately, that also meant I had to go back to the customer without a workaround. Instead, I gave him an URL to a Microsoft tech bulletin explaining his situation. On to the Adobe problem. As it turns out, when you install Photoshop on a 32-bit operating system, it’s able to access the first 2GB of RAM. Some of that 2GB chunk is utilized by the operating system, so you’re left with the 1.7GB that my customer was seeing. Drop Photoshop on a machine with a 64-bit OS and you’ll suddenly have access to 3GB of memory for image data. Not knowing about that limitation, published in Adobe’s archive of TechNotes, the photographer and I had jointly decided against the 64-bit version of XP in order to avoid the driver troubles previously chronicled in this column. Apparently, there was no way around it—the workstation I built with 4GB of memory was doomed to employ significantly less. “The system still runs well,” my customer eventually conceded. But his overall experience had been compromised. All in the Processing Avoiding hardware and software mismatches like mine is a snap if you do your homework first, instead of assuming a 32-bit OS will take advantage of the 4GB available to it. You should also carefully research the applications relevant to your customer. Resellers building multimedia workstations are dealing with a breadth of different titles, so it really pays to find out how that software actually uses hardware before you start buying parts. Take Adobe’s After Effects CS3 Professional, a $999 app used to create visual effects and motion graphics. Chock full of integration with Adobe’s other content creation solutions and ready to deliver almost any media type, After Effects projects can get incredibly large and processor-intensive. In fact, Adobe requires 1GB of RAM and recommends 2GB for HD content. Anything down to a Pentium 4 purportedly gets the job done. Believe me, you’ll want much more than that. Adobe added important functionality to After Effects in the latest CS3 version. Rather than forcing customers to render single frames across multiple processors, tighter threading now renders multiple frames over multiple processors, which lends a significant performance boost to a task that wasn’t always optimized for parallelism. If you’re selling Athlon 64 X2 and Core 2 Duo processors already, this is one title that promises to really showcase those chips. Create real value with a quad-core Xeon X3000 processor on a workstation, delivering true business-class multi-threading for the price of a 1P configuration. I also just got a copy of Pinnacle’s Studio Ultimate Version 11, the latest suite of video editing tools. Equipped with a green screen, able to encode Dolby Digital 5.1 soundtracks, and powerful enough to edit HDV/AVCHD content natively, Studio Ultimate is another one of those apps primed and ready to exploit the extra processing cycles proffered by multi-core chips. Did I mention Pinnacle’s latest is written to take advantage of Vista’s operating environment? Just be ready to pull out the big guns—Studio 11 requires a dual-core chip in order to run under Vista. Push the enthusiast-class software to its limit with high-definition footage and you’re looking at a minimum 2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo. Should you sell your video editing customers a lesser CPU, they’re going to be hard pressed for performance when the rubber meets the road. Most of the CPUs you’d sell today are multi-core. They should all support 64-bit modes as well. As more and more multimedia apps pick up threading, you can stop worrying about picking the wrong CPU and instead find the dual- or quad-core processor that’s most right. Managing Memory The memory situation gets a little trickier, as I found when working with the 32-bit version of XP and Adobe’s Photoshop. We hear over and over that multimedia software is notoriously RAM-hungry. If a 32-bit operating system tops out at 4GB, load the system down. But that’s a misnomer. Technically, a 32-bit environment can address up to 4GB of address space—that’s when you multiply everything out and do the bit to byte conversion. RAM fills up much of that space. However, memory-mapped add-in cards also populate addresses under the 4GB limit. The problem isn’t attributable to any version of Windows; it affects any x86 platform. In other words, upgrading to 32-bit Vista won’t help. Bottom line: When a customer is set on 32-bit, don’t even bother with 4GB. I’d rather install 2GB or 3GB of memory and spend the difference on a faster CPU. Forward thinkers looking for a way around the 4GB cap have one option: a 64-bit operating system. Microsoft’s Windows XP Professional x64 goes well beyond 32-bit limitations by supporting up to 128GB of physical memory. Of course, you’ll also need to ensure the motherboard, chipset, and BIOS you use can accommodate more than 4GB as well. Are there any immediate performance benefits to be had from making that leap? Hard to say. Whereas the speedup moving from the 32-bit edition of Windows Server 2003 to the 64-bit version has been well-documented, desktop benchmarks are decidedly less convincing outside the benefit of extra RAM. On the other hand, switching over to a 64-bit environment puts you face-to-face with some of the missing drivers and software incompatibilities still plaguing that newer technology. Also keep in mind that the multimedia software must run in a 64-bit mode in order to realize the benefit of extra memory. Not surprisingly, this presents another set of problems beyond the scope of Windows. Scott Byer, one of the architects behind Adobe’s Photoshop, recently posted to his blog an explanation of why the massively popular app is not available in 64-bit trim. “Sixty-four bit applications don’t magically get faster access to memory,” he wrote. “…[T]he number of situations in which an application being 64-bit is a performance win is very small.” There’s also massive cost tied to writing a 64-bit binary. So when many of these titles switch over to 64-bit, they’ll be leaving 32-bit behind completely. Obviously, the number of 64-bit platforms will need to outnumber the 32-bit boxes before that happens. In short, adding memory right now will only help your customers to a point. Most of the software is still 32-bit-only, even if there is a fairly robust infrastructure of 64-bit-capable hardware and operating systems. But for any number of reasons, the potential gains tied to going 64-bit on the desktop still seem to be limited. Today, building a 32-bit box with 3GB of memory would appear to be the best compromise. Adding the /3GB switch to your customer’s boot.ini will allow 32-bit applications running on the platform to use up to 3GB of memory instead of the usual two. Multimedia Storage A multimedia machine has unique storage requirements to which you need to be sensitive. Regardless of whether your customer uses a server for centralizing information, audio/video/photo processing is capacity-intensive. I’ve seen enthusiasts try to stream big projects over a network. It wasn’t pretty. Instead, focus on a solid local repository with arrangements for regular backup. Knowing that disk space is going to be an issue, SAS storage will undoubtedly be overkill for budget-conscious buyers. The high-end technology does make sense in demanding video editing environments where I/O takes priority. Better yet, deploy a mixed SAS/SATA environment, utilizing the performance benefits of SAS when content is being processed and the capacity advantages of SATA for storing it. Don’t use ordinary desktop SATA drives. Intended for eight-hour/five-day duty cycles, mainstream SATA isn’t cut out for the demands of a multimedia workstation, which might spend hours rendering the final cut of a home movie or business presentation. Instead, spring for nearline drives. Seagate’s Barracuda ES.2 series fits into the workstation role perfectly. The 7,200 RPM drives feature either SAS or SATA interfaces and capacities between 500GB and 1TB. A 1.2 million-hour MTBF and five-year limited warranty ensure your customer’s multimedia content won’t succumb to an untimely hardware failure. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t exercise diligent backup practices. My photographer customer uploads two to three gigabytes of image data from his camera equipment to his computer at a time, where it’s manipulated in Photoshop. From there, the files are sent to a proper storage server that gets backed up nightly. When a client visits the studio to look at proofs, he pulls the folder up across the network and outputs to a large LCD. AMCC’s 3ware Sidecar is a more affordable alternative. The external enclosure connects through a four-port SATA cable that facilitates 3 Gbps of throughput to each of four hard drives protected in a RAID 1, 5, or 10 array. A Little Reading Goes A Long Way There’s no doubt that system builders who’ve been in the game for a long time know what it takes to build a solid whitebox. Technology changes quickly though, and it’s easy to slip behind the curve, especially when you’re riding the cutting edge. We’ve heard plenty about the importance of 64-bit processing, threading, memory, and storage. But when it comes to implementation, the pieces don’t always fit together neatly. The memory isn’t stable in a particular motherboard. The integrated SAS controller isn’t 64-bit ready. The operating system can’t see all of the RAM. The overlying software sees even less. Been there, done that on all accounts. In each example, an hour of Google research turned up the answers I was looking for (and indeed, should have had prior to building). Get more information from your customers on what they’ll be running. Learn to check potential compatibility problems before ordering parts. And take a lesson from the tier-ones: Know what works well together and stick to that formula. |
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