AMD Threadripper 1950x: 10-bit video card and 64GB 3200mhz ram on Asus Rog Zenith Extreme X399 MB

[Hoggy]

Well, let's just say that my ship has finally come in and I'm in the market for a new SuperComputer. I hadn't thought I'd ever be able to afford another machine (and I pretty much mean EVER), let alone an absolute BEAST - so I'm now quite out of the loop on these matters.

I've hit a couple of sticky points in my research into these things, so far, that I've been having a bit of trouble finding the answers to, so I'd thought I'd ask here - since part of the reason for this beast is to run LR (& maybe some PS) on.

After being bitten several times, and currently, on incompatibility issues between LR and AMD graphics cards, I kind of want to steer away from those, unfortunately. Now I'm coming to find that there could be a difference between 'video' cards and 'graphics' cards ?? I was first looking into the (many?) manufacturers of "11GB GTX 1080 Ti", but some reports suggest that it may not be capable of 10-bit output.. So now I'm looking into an "8GB Nvidia Qaudro P4000".
First, is it true about the GTX and 10-bit? And if so, would it also help somehow if I got the GTX along side of it, with only ONE monitor [right now]? Can two 'graphics' cards be used for one monitor?? I guess they call that SLI/Cross-fire???
Second, would having two cards help LR (or even PS) performance in ANY amount/way?

The monitor I'm currently planning on - hopefully it does TRUE 10-bit:

• ASUS PA329Q 32" 4K/UHD 3840x2160 IPS HDMI Eye Care ProArt Monitor

Note that I'm not into gaming, but may be open to a couple games here and there - notably D&D type, non-multi-player, if such games still exist.​

Another issue is with the memory and quad-channel usage - or speediest configuration. I seem to remember from the past where certain memory configurations in certain slots on certain motherboards could be more optimal than others. The place where I'm likely buying from only offer 64GB as 8x8GB 3200Mhz G.Skill modules. Though to keep memory upgrade options more feasible, I'd like to give them a call to see if they could preferably do 4x16GB modules - thereby leaving 4 slots open for a future upgrade path. BUT, would doing that reduce any added benefit over the 8 module configuration - like not enable quad-channel or more of a bottleneck somehow?


OH, and I guess a 3rd curiosity I'm wondering about... I'm currently planning on getting two 1TB Samsung NvMe 960 drives - 1 Pro, and 1 EVO. Would doing it that way help reduce any 'bottlenecks', for lack of a better term in this speedy scenario - as in 1 drive OS&LR, and the other LR catalog & cache?

Although come to think of it just now... Maybe the LR catalog & cache might be better off on the ever-so-slightly faster 960-Pro. ?? Hmmm...​

MANY thanks for any guidance and advice in these matters. It seems I'm playing a HUGE game of catch-me-up here. Never did I think I'd be able to get a dream machine like this.

 

[Cerianthus]

Lightroom itself is not 10 bit, the calculations within are in raw and thus 14 bit or so, but the screen output is 8 bit.

 

[Hoggy]

Hopefully it will be, soon. But PS is right now, and I may get more into PS now that I could afford the storage space for the bigger [tiff/psd] files.

 

[Hal P Anderson]

I think you'd be fine with 4x16. Here's what Wikipedia has to say about quad channel:

The architecture can be used only when all four memory modules (or a multiple of four) are identical in capacity and speed, and are placed in quad-channel slots.

And they still make single-player D&D-type games.

 

[tspear]

I have a 8GB 1060 GTX, it outputs in 10bit according to BenQ when I called them to verify some stuff.
This is a dual monitor setup, the new BenQ 30in wide gamut 4K (320 something model). And some old 2K monitor I use for email, movies or other tasks.
I use Lr on the BenQ monitor only.

I used PC Part Picker Pick parts. Build your PC. Compare and share. - PCPartPicker to pick the hardware.

lastly, Lr will not use that much memory. Unless you use Ps a fair amount, I would ditch the extra memory and stay with 32GB.

Tim

 

[PhilBurton]

Well, let's just say that my ship has finally come in and I'm in the market for a new SuperComputer. I hadn't thought I'd ever be able to afford another machine (and I pretty much mean EVER), let alone an absolute BEAST - so I'm now quite out of the loop on these matters.

Congrats.

I've hit a couple of sticky points in my research into these things, so far, that I've been having a bit of trouble finding the answers to, so I'd thought I'd ask here - since part of the reason for this beast is to run LR (& maybe some PS) on.

After being bitten several times, and currently, on incompatibility issues between LR and AMD graphics cards, I kind of want to steer away from those, unfortunately. Now I'm coming to find that there could be a difference between 'video' cards and 'graphics' cards ?? I was first looking into the (many?) manufacturers of "11GB GTX 1080 Ti", but some reports suggest that it may not be capable of 10-bit output.. So now I'm looking into an "8GB Nvidia Qaudro P4000".
First, is it true about the GTX and 10-bit? And if so, would it also help somehow if I got the GTX along side of it, with only ONE monitor [right now]? Can two 'graphics' cards be used for one monitor?? I guess they call that SLI/Cross-fire???
Second, would having two cards help LR (or even PS) performance in ANY amount/way?

The monitor I'm currently planning on - hopefully it does TRUE 10-bit:

• ASUS PA329Q 32" 4K/UHD 3840x2160 IPS HDMI Eye Care ProArt Monitor

Note that I'm not into gaming, but may be open to a couple games here and there - notably D&D type, non-multi-player, if such games still exist.​

Another issue is with the memory and quad-channel usage - or speediest configuration. I seem to remember from the past where certain memory configurations in certain slots on certain motherboards could be more optimal than others. The place where I'm likely buying from only offer 64GB as 8x8GB 3200Mhz G.Skill modules. Though to keep memory upgrade options more feasible, I'd like to give them a call to see if they could preferably do 4x16GB modules - thereby leaving 4 slots open for a future upgrade path. BUT, would doing that reduce any added benefit over the 8 module configuration - like not enable quad-channel or more of a bottleneck somehow?

A great website and forum for all these questions is Windows 10 Forums. Another one, a bit more hardware oriented, is www.hardforum.com.

You haven't said anything about which brand of motherboard or which chipset. My suggestion is to pay the small premium for ASUS brand boards. They aren't perfect, but they do a great job with BIOS updates, even after the board is no longer current in the market. Their repair service is not the best, but I have gotten two boards repaired through them over the years and both boards are still in service, years after the repairs. My wife's system uses an eight year old ASUS board, enough power for her needs.

OH, and I guess a 3rd curiosity I'm wondering about... I'm currently planning on getting two 1TB Samsung NvMe 960 drives - 1 Pro, and 1 EVO. Would doing it that way help reduce any 'bottlenecks', for lack of a better term in this speedy scenario - as in 1 drive OS&LR, and the other LR catalog & cache?

Although come to think of it just now... Maybe the LR catalog & cache might be better off on the ever-so-slightly faster 960-Pro. ?? Hmmm.
​

Best practice is Windows + programs on C drive, the first physical drive. You will probably not need more than 256 GB for that partition. Create a D (Data) partition on the same drive for DATA, including Lightroom catalog, caches, etc.

Are you sure you need two NvME 960 1 TB drives? Why not spend that money for the second SDD for say 6 or even 8 TB spinning HDDs. Go with Hitachi, the most reliable. Whatever you do, DO NOT USE Seagate. Friends don't let friends use Seagate drives. No kidding.

MANY thanks for any guidance and advice in these matters. It seems I'm playing a HUGE game of catch-me-up here. Never did I think I'd be able to get a dream machine like this.

 

[Hoggy]

I have a 8GB 1060 GTX, it outputs in 10bit according to BenQ when I called them to verify some stuff.

There seem to be a lot of references to, at least the 1080, not supporting 'normal' 10-bit.. So I'm not sure who has misinformation or not anymore. Take for example, this quickly re-googled thread that came up.. On https://forums.geforce.com/default/topic/937635/gtx-1080-10-bit-4k-ready-/?offset=4
"
You get HDR and 4K with a 1080. 10-bit per color is still on Quadros only. There were registery hacks in the past to enable it on Geforce cards but I don't know enough about a 1080 to say it'll still work.
.....
Not quite correct - the situation is a little more complex. 10-bit is available on all modern nVidia cards, but in fulscreen DirectX only.
.....
I got 100% true answer for Your question. The 10bit aka deep color can be only achieved in application control way, that mean You cant change it in nvidia control panel, You can use it only if the Application have bulit in 10bit feature because the GTX series do not support 10bit in normal way like the quadro graphic.
Example of the 10bit application is Alien Isolation where You can turn on Deep Color.
The same with HDR and example of the first(only for now) game with HDR is Shadow Warrior 2
"

lastly, Lr will not use that much memory. Unless you use Ps a fair amount, I would ditch the extra memory and stay with 32GB.

That is one of the things I'm still debating somewhat, but unlike the drives portion, I'm a tad more sure that I'll go with the 64GB. Not only will [hopeful] future LR versions' ram-usage likely get bigger in time and with higher-mp cameras, but it'll afford more use of PS for me to experiment with. Plus not to mention the possibility of having many, MANY programs open at the same time - not the least of which is Firefox, which I know can suck up obscene amounts of ram. On top of the fact that if I'm going to use 4 of 8 slots for ram, to enable the quad-channel usage, I'd rather just max those out right now. Then as times goes by and 64GB starts looking paltry 'again', I can fill the other 4 to max out it's 128GB to maybe 'speed up' the system. (Yes, in time, that WILL likely happen eventually. )

You haven't said anything about which brand of motherboard or which chipset.

It's in the title.

My suggestion is to pay the small premium for ASUS brand boards. They aren't perfect, but they do a great job with BIOS updates, even after the board is no longer current in the market.

Yep, that's one of the reasons I'm going with the ASUS Rog Zenith Extreme X399. Plus it seems like the best one out right now, bar none. I saw about easy upgrades, on top of the number of features within it - which I'm sure I'll eventually understand them all (or many), in time. Now to hear that they are good with BIOS updates for older hardware, that's a bonus! I've had one too many machines where the BIOS quickly goes abandoned-ware.

Best practice is Windows + programs on C drive, the first physical drive. You will probably not need more than 256 GB for that partition. Create a D (Data) partition on the same drive for DATA, including Lightroom catalog, caches, etc.

Are you sure you need two NvME 960 1 TB drives? Why not spend that money for the second SDD for say 6 or even 8 TB spinning HDDs. Go with Hitachi, the most reliable. Whatever you do, DO NOT USE Seagate. Friends don't let friends use Seagate drives. No kidding.

(I'll have to keep that in mind about Seagate, for the future. Unfortunately, I just looked at what my current 4TB external is - it's a Seagate. )

This is the area where I'm debating myself the most. I'm pretty sure the Pro 1TB, but not sure about the second - or even Pro vs. EVO for a second. Then again, I'm also debating on using a 512GB Pro for OS, and a 1TB Pro for secondary - housing the LR catalog and 'latest' images on the secondary and having the cam-raw cache on either primary or secondary. I already have slotted down the only 8TB spinner HDD they had listed - a Toshiba.
(BTW, the site I'm likely going to be ordering from is eCollegePC.com - it seems like it'll come out the cheapest there, even over DIY.. Not to mention the hassles and headaches of dealing with my first liquid-cooled PC build. My only worry then, is how noisy it might end up being.)

But would having a second NvME allow for a sort-of 'striping' type of functionality, but without risking losing the whole lot if one should fail? ...In which case I'm thinking whatever size a 2nd should be ought to be a PRO? But not getting two huge sizes right now may allow time for prices to drop dramatically by the time a larger one might become more useful - and that motherboard has room for 2 more M.2 NvME drives, in addition to a possible 2 about to be used right now. (I think it has 4 total M.2 NvME, if I'm not mistaken.)

I've learned to live EXTREMELY cheaply by not having any income for so many years now. So it will be 2nd nature for me to continue to do so (just ever slightly less so now ), thereby allowing for a large percentage of my income going forward, to be 'discretionary' type income. So recouping the difference rather quickly in time shouldn't be as hard, theoretically -- IF I can stop myself from going crazy with flavoring orders for my other enriching hobby - e-cig juice making.. Which can be harder to do than one might think! (BUT, I do still have the cheapness bug in me, so I'll still likely wait until the sales they offer on the holidays. )
....So that's why I can kind of go 'balls-to-the-wall' on a supercomputer. But I'm still furthest from a millionaire, so still want to keep it at least somewhat reigned in so I can invest more in things like long-term CD's.

I'll have to check out those websites - especially the hardware one.

 

[tspear]

I went with a 512GB M.2 NVM SSD for drive C.
For drive D, I went with two 3TB 10k rpm drives which I mirrored in Windows.
Windows, Apps and Lr catalog on C. Images and other data on D.

After previews built, I never see a delay in Lr going to drive D.

Tim

Sent from my LG-TP260 using Tapatalk

 

[PhilBurton]

Hoggy,

Just a few more points.

First. I looked at the C: partition on my laptop. 180 GB total (out of 512 GB). 120 GB for Windows 10 Pro + lots of programs and a 33 GB swapfile.sys. My programs include most of MS Office 2013 Pro, Lightroom 6 (of course!), plus CS 6 64 bit versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign (not that I use all these.) Plus Adobe Acrobat Pro, plus various utilties and misc. "stuff." My point is that dedicating an entire 1 TB SSD just for Windows and programs is kind of overkill. Of course, this is just a data point, and I'm sure other people might have more space used. However, by the time you might need anything approaching 1 TB for Windows and programs, SSDs will be a whole lot cheaper, faster, and possibly more durable. SSDs can fail over time. That happened to me already, without any warning of course.

Same with graphics cards. Unless you intend to do lots of Photoshop, 10-bit video is only a future investment now. It's not just the graphics card. It's also an expensive monitor. So far, Lightroom is only 8-bit depth, and there is no indication that 10-bit support is forthcoming in the near future. By the time, if/when Lightroom has 10-bit support, you might be replacing your current graphics card with something faster/better/etc.

Memory on the other hand, I can see why you're investing in 64 GB now, instead of say 32 GB. Just bear in mind that N years from now, you might not be able to purchase more of the exact model RAM sticks you are buying now.

In general, "investing in the future" doesn't pay, unless it's an issue of choosing hardware you need now that gives you a "growth path." But if you can't use the hardware now, several years from now, there will be faster/better/maybe even cheaper hardware.

Purely personal note, kind of unrelated. When I was in college (university), we had IBM mainframes with all of 1 MB of RAM, and maybe 3-4 disk "packs" of 100 MB each. (For the grey hairs who are also IT, I'm talking about a 370/158 running MVS.)

 

[Hoggy]

Yeah, the primary is probably going to be 512GB Pro.. It's always been my MO to use a smaller boot drive anyways. The 2nd will be Pro, but either 512 or 1TB. I've been watching prices on several 512 & 1TB standard SSD's for the last 3 years or more - and I've discovered they really haven't gone down in that time according to the price watching that amazon does for saved items. On top of that, considering that it might be harder to change that afterwards due to the water cooling in there, I might still just go for the 1TB size over the 512 for the secondary. However another advantage to overprovisioning on that secondary, failure aside, is increased lifespan as the wear leveling moves things around. But that water cooling kind of puts a damper on things though cause I have no idea how easy it will be to get to the necessary slots after it's in there (one is even behind a panel on the MB) - I suppose I'll email them about that.

As far as a monitor.. After having been using a measly 17" laptop, I definitely want bigger now! And it must be 4k and of course Adobe RGB. I saw mention that 27" might be too small for 4k, so 32" should be more like it. So that Asus seems to be much more in line with that. The fact that it does 10bit is more of a bonus than anything. So to drive that, I'm just going with the Quadro P4000 8GB. As far as worrying about getting a GTX 1080 Ti in addition to that for some unrealized speed advantage.. I'll just wait until it might really be useful later on when prices should have gone down immensely for that. And those slots should be easy to get to.

One of the biggest reasons I haven't gotten too serious about learning Photoshop is that I wouldn't be able to afford more storage for those huge file sizes. And that's where the 10 bit part may come in handy. Besides, the GTX 1080 Ti was more expensive than the Quadro on their site.


I did email EcollegePC about the memory issue and also about faster speeds, and here's what they said about that: (They only offer one 64 GB option.)
"
On the faster memory the only option we have available that we know works is the Flare X and right now we can only get it in 8GB sticks at 3200Mhz. For the faster memory to work on these boards it needs to have a CAS rating of 14 which is also very expensive memory. We have not tried anything faster than 3200Mhz yet.
"

So, that combined with the matching sets you mention, and which I was concerned about as well.. I'll just stick with the set of 8 that they know works well. After all, all they do is build PC's - so they should know better about what works well with that combo. By the time 64GB starts looking paltry, memory prices will have hopefully gone down for me to max out that MB at it's 128GB - if a whole new machine isn't in order by that time.

.... When I go for high-spec machines, I typically get well more than 10 years out of them. Heck, I'd still have my circa 2000 tower if it wouldn't have been more of a hassle to deal with during a move. It had gotten relegated to file & print server, but still.. :laugh:

 

[PhilBurton]

But that water cooling kind of puts a damper on things though cause I have no idea how easy it will be to get to the necessary slots after it's in there (one is even behind a panel on the MB) - I suppose I'll email them about that.

If I remember right from the website, yoiu have a heatsink for the CPU which is water-cooled, instead of being air-cooled. That shouldn't block access to memory slots.

As far as a monitor.. After having been using a measly 17" laptop, I definitely want bigger now! And it must be 4k and of course Adobe RGB. I saw mention that 27" might be too small for 4k, so 32" should be more like it. So that Asus seems to be much more in line with that. The fact that it does 10bit is more of a bonus than anything. So to drive that, I'm just going with the Quadro P4000 8GB. As far as worrying about getting a GTX 1080 Ti in addition to that for some unrealized speed advantage.. I'll just wait until it might really be useful later on when prices should have gone down immensely for that. And those slots should be easy to get to.

Two concerns here. With a 4K monitor, you need a beefy video card to drive the monitor. Also, did the website people say how the two unlike cards would work together to drive the monitor?

One of the biggest reasons I haven't gotten too serious about learning Photoshop is that I wouldn't be able to afford more storage for those huge file sizes. And that's where the 10 bit part may come in handy. Besides, the GTX 1080 Ti was more expensive than the Quadro on their site.

10-bit refers to the color depth of each primary color channel. Not really related to file size for PSDs.


Phil

 

[Hoggy]

Two concerns here. With a 4K monitor, you need a beefy video card to drive the monitor. Also, did the website people say how the two unlike cards would work together to drive the monitor?

I had to double check to be sure, but according to NVIDIA Quadro P4000 Review | StorageReview.com - Storage Reviews it should even be able to do four 4K displays at 120Hz - or four 5K or 8K at 'lower' 60Hz refresh rates.
"

• GPU Memory: 8GB GDDR5
• Memory Interface: 256-bit
• Memory Bandwidth: Up to 243 GB/s
• NVIDIA CUDA Cores: 1792
• Display Resolution 4x 4096x2160 @ 120Hz 4x 5120x2880 @ 60Hz Graphics APIs Shader Model 5.1, OpenGL 4.54 , DirectX 12.05 , Vulkan 1.04
• Compute APIs: CUDA, DirectCompute, OpenCL

"

As far as the 2 different cards working together - I have no idea, as this whole area of SLI/cross-fire is very very foreign to me. I've only ever heard of more than one card working together. The specifics to that still evade me. I might want to email them about that though. But according to the frame-rates posted at the above site, it should even enable 4K games. I don't game, but this system could enable them occasionally.. But I wouldn't really be into the shoot-em-ups anyways (I don't think), where I always hear gamers talking about needing 'high frame rates'.

10-bit refers to the color depth of each primary color channel. Not really related to file size for PSDs.

Oh, i know.. They would just domino each other: more storage -> Photoshop -> 10 bit. I suppose kinda like the 'fast system -> bigger monitor -> 4K -> beefy video card -> games' scenario.