Final Cut Pro X FCPX Graphic Card performance

[Going Bald]

Okay thanks for the heads up!

The rig is comprised of the following and I have added the amount of power draw as well...

The '?' in parenthesis is because I could not find a definitive value from the manufacturer and instead had to look for general figures via user forums..

If you go to the PSU manufacturer websites or to the Newegg site there is a PSU calculator you can use. Drop-down pick-your-part menus for board, CPU, GFX cards, HDD, etc that has a built in minimum for things like case fans. Just put in your parts and how many drives, etc. and hit the calculate button. Then buy the closest next larger available supply or a little larger for some expansion headroom if you want.

 

[B-San]

^ Thanks!

I went to the Corsair website - which provided the following link http://www.corsairmemory.com/psufinder/default.aspx

.. but it's been failing to load when I've tried to access it .

 

[Going Bald]

^ Thanks!

I went to the Corsair website - which provided the following link http://www.corsairmemory.com/psufinder/default.aspx

.. but it's been failing to load when I've tried to access it .

try http://images10.newegg.com/BizIntell/tool/psucalc/index.html

 

[B-San]

^ Many thanks for the link, but it appears the R280x is not listed.

Out of the following options, would you have an idea which is the closest to that card as far as power consumption is concerned?



I selected the 5770 since that was the card which it had been compared to in earlier posts..

For what it's worth, the total wattage from when I included the 5770 in my selections came out to 379...

..and according to this link on Hardware Compare the HD5770 draws a max of 108 Watts while the Radeon R9 280X draws 250 (which is spot on with Rwillet's estimation).

Adding the difference to the total that the Newegg's recommended PSU calculator came up with would bring it up to 521, which would require me to replace the PSU with a 600W unit.

Or I could look into getting a Radeon R7 260X, which would allow me to use the existing PSU, but would there be any additional problems getting it to run correctly - as opposed to going with a 280X?

My gut is telling me to go with the more powerful card and upgrade the PSU.

Any additional thought or advice would be much appreciated... thanks again!

 

[B-San]

Amazon had manufacturer refurb MSI 280X's for $259 the other day. My BruceX score with a single 280X was 34 seconds compared to 48 seconds I was getting with two 650ti's. The only difficulty getting it to work was to have my hackintosh boot from the EFi partition.

Hmmm... my friend has been using his rig for a couple months and I might not want to deal with any potential headaches from messing with it in any way - other than plopping a video card in there (and possibly changing out the PSU if needed).... is setting the Hackintosh to boot from the EFI partition a difficult or particularly risky procedure?


Maybe I should just go with an Asus 5770, keep the existing PSU intact and call it a day?

I mean if my guy wanted to go all out, I don't think he would have gone with an i5 anyway...

 

[rwillett]

Your logic seems appropriate here. You've listed the items and seen what power they draw. One thing I would be aware of is that you need to look at max power draw rather than average power draw. I think the 250W (for example) of the R280x is at maximum power rather than average power.

The fact you have a i5 rather than an i7 also means thats the machine is not a full on machine and that keeping things in balance is the right way to go. A R280x is about the same GPU power as two 5770s and consumes more power than a single 5770 but far less than 2 x 5770. Its more efficient but still is a big baby

A single 5770 is OK for video editing, it's not a Banzai card, two makes it better, but then you;re back where you started from. The other advantage is that its cheap, look on fleaBay and see if you can get one for $50 or less. They're not really mining cards so the fans haven't been abused.

The other thing to think about doing is dumping the water cooling and putting in a decent and quiet CPU cooler. I use the Noctura and they're very, very good. Not cheap, but don't use much power and almost silent.

I have not looked at the booting from EFI so other people will have to comment on that aspect. I wouldn't know much about the R260x either so you need to investigate that as well. Would be interested in the answer myself

Rob,

 

[B-San]

Yeah I ended up getting one on eBay for $65. It was described as "working pull from custom-built system. Professionally applied Arctic Silver Ceramique 2 thermal compound & plastic shroud removed. Runs 29 degrees cooler than stock! Used VERY little. 100% functional".

I figure this way I can keep all the existing components in the rig, slap in the card and call it a day....

I was going to attempt to get HDMI audio going, but having to deal with the possibility of needing to implement framebuffer edits is a little too far out of my comfort zone..

The Noctua coolers are great, but the Antec was about half the price at the time - and my guy was definitely wanting to keep the budget as low as possible.

I am however, going to be putting together another rig tomorrow featuring a Z87X DH3 and may be using a Noctua cooler for that... As far as the GPU, I'll be using a trusty-old GTX 570, since I use Premiere instead of Final Cut.

If I'm feeling adventurous at a later date, I might be inclined to try an AMD card in the rig as well - since I heard it's possible to run both Nvidia and AMD cards in the same machine? Sounds too good to be true tho

It would be cool to have an all-in one machine that was a jack of all apps haha.

Thanks again for all your feedback - it's been extremely helpful!

 

[rwillett]

It's a very bad idea to run different type of graphics cards (e.g. ATI and nVidia and Intel) in the same machine. A number of people have tried this and got poor results.

I actually did this earlier in the week and tried to use an onboard graphics card (Intel 4600) and 5770 at the same time. My FCP X benchmark was significantly slower (31 secs vs 50 secs).

So, sorry, would not recommend this at all. Find a GPU architecture and stick to it.

I use a Z87X-UD3H and am quite happy with it, I'd be interested in seeing it with 32GB of RAM. How much RAM you intending to use?

No idea about HDMI, not an option for my system :0

All the best, you sound like you're getting there.

Rob

 

[B-San]

Yeah I figured as much with regards to using 2 different GPU architectures in the same system.. GTX570 it is.. at least the Open CL performance of that card isn't as bad as the more recent gen Nvidia cards..

Regarding RAM, I was planning on going with 16GB for the build I'm doing today, but I have extra sticks laying around, so I'll be more than happy to throw another 16GB in there after everything is up and running..

I've heard there have been issues with 3H boards when running 32GB of RAM, so I will definitely keep you posted as to how that goes!

 

[B-San]

So the 5770 arrived and I got it installed...

First thing I noticed is that the cursor was able to go a little bit beyond the physical boundary of the screen - which was a somewhat disconcerting.

I then went to check 'About this Mac' > 'More Info' > 'Displays' and found that a VGA monitor was listed, even though I only have a single DVI monitor hooked up. Additionally, the HDMI port showed up as VGA and was outputting a resolution of 800. Lastly, I found the card's fan to be running at a high speed.

Thanks to the search tool provided by this site, I was able to find that these issues were somewhat common, and the following post aided me greatly in implementing a solution:

5770 with DVI and displayport or hdmi working for anyone?

As a result, I found my AMDRadeonAccelerator.kext to be missing an instance of '0x68b81002' in the string under 'IOPCIMatch'

I also edited my org.chameleon.Boot.plist by adding:
<key>AtiConfig</key>
... and pasting the following underneath:
<string>Juniper</string>

If anybody can let me know if that is the correct solution for getting my card to work best with Final Cut, that would be much appreciated!

My only remaining issue is that the GPU is labeled as an ATI Radeon HD 5000 when it should be a 5770.

I've read this may have an adverse affect on the DVD player as well as certain programs such as After Effects. I can live with that since this build is supposed to be for Final Cut - but it would be nice to have things ironed out since this build is for a good friend..

I was hoping this would be a simple drop-in-and-play situation, but my gut told me that would never happen lol

Any other suggestions for a AMD newb?