NEW Production Workstation

Posted on April 21, 2008
Filed Under Design |

The ideal solution to lengthy project delays

A complex lesson learned during the build of my new production machine making me realize how little I actually know about the building of computers or hardware in general.  The entire weekend from Friday about 1PM until late Sunday evening I spent building the machine to replace my tired old production work station. The process may be interesting enough for some readers facing the challenges I had with projects being drawn out sometimes months because the tools for the trade were just simply out dated and not up to the challenge of high end production.  So herein before I get my Monday morning started I’ll share the details with you at this early hour.

The first objective, a new local linux box for testing.

My old machine, a dual CPU AMD 1.8 Ghz was plenty fast for many things but not at all current or ideal for things like Adobe Dreamweaver, Flash Pro or Photoshop CS3.  So rather than toss it to ebay for $100 I spent Saturday converting it to a linux server to test apps and websites on before they go production. It was simple really, the installation and configuration of CentOS with the necessary server software to run a local linux box on my network, so it gets only casual mention in this series of events.  The real challenge was the build of the work station.

Lengthy project delays became a serious problem.

One thing that has nearly crucified me time and time again is the lengthy time frame it has taken me to complete MANY dozens of projects of the hundreds I’ve undertaken over the past three and a half years.  A lofty chunk of these delays was due to over booking projects or multitasking which really isn’t a bad thing if you have the infrastructure to handle such a daunting schedule.  Teaching Photoshop at the College the first 3 hours of my day leaves time for freelance projects usually from about 11AM until about 11PM daily (which seems to be my average schedule).  Over stacking or over booking projects is common with designers, especially those in freelance given the nature of the business. But such practice can be dangerous and costly if you are not experienced or well versed in how to juggle projects with a little finess.  Hardware does in fact matter and even though you have all your finest procedures down to an effective set of steps, things bottle neck with outdated and troublesome equipment as I’ve experienced.

Can a person really claim that better computers can help with production time with design? YES! Experience has shown me that people who are able to produce high levels of output and production in the design business either have a well placed standardized procedure for turnkey production or a serious inventory of resources which usually includes an impressive production work station.  Naturally there are other factors in successful design procedures that I’ve left out only because my post is really geared toward the individual designer and not design firm involving many individuals.  Because of this, proper design systems then tends to look like the solution I built with the help of Shane Gibby at Click Once Computers.

The graphics work station, a PC platform.

When I set out to solve this nasty history of lengthy delays in project completion I had strongly considered the transition to a Macintosh noted for its reliability and impressive super computer like characteristics.  I work with the Macintosh at the college three times a week and the speed and reliability of a Mac is difficult to compete with as many would tend to agree. However two key limitations in that platform motivated me to stick with the PC for my specific need. 

The importance of graphics horsepower can not be underestimated in our business and although a Mac certainly has this down to a science the PC can be build to rival a Mac in this area leaving the balance of the required features all pointing to the PC for my concern.  Hard drive space, graphics power, speed and ram were all top priority with peripheral components as secondary considerations.

Here is what we came up with for my new work station.

The CPU needed to be ideal for graphics and video related production and a dual process was my original plan until I discovered the very impressive criteria of the AMD Phenom X4 9850 Quad Core Processor.  More cache per CPU than the competitors coupled with true quad core chip structure the hyper transport feature provides separate pipes for data, a major motivator for me.

The 800MHZ front side bus speed of the DDR2 memory sticks  was sure to provide substantial performance improvements over my existing older 2GB setup. Now when considering this I had to decide if I was going to install Windows Vista in order to take advantage of the 4GB I installed or stick with XPSP3 Pro which would only see 3.5GB of the total available.  Most would agree that XP would run much faster given the current setup but we had to be sure.

Trial and error is sometimes the best teacher so having spent Saturday installing Vista, it took only a few hours of testing and examination to quickly motivate me to re format the drive and simply go back to XP which I knew would run circles around Vista in terms of speed.  So I took the half a gig loss with XP for the compounded increase in speed when compared to Windows Vista.

Next was the drive space.  One thing my old machine was infamous for was rebooting during the save of large files like Photoshop files or video tutorials from Camtasia studio.  There were times that this reboot during the save to the hard drive would deliver a blue screen of death as the NTFS system file would be corrupted forcing me on more than a half dozen occasions to recover data and start over.  Frustrating and costly these delays have forced some projects to literally go into certain death overtime as my systems lack of quality RAM and drive space just beat me up with tragic performance issues.  Hard Drive and redundant backup would be essential.

The net results looks like this;

  • AMD Phenom X4 9850 Quad Core Processor 2.50 GHz / 4MB Cache running up to 2000MHz FSB
  • ASUS M2N SLI Deluxe2 Mainboard
  • Thermaltake 140MM ORB CPU cooling fan
  • The "Ultra Black Box" 1000 watt full tower case with slide in hot swap drive bays, 2 120MM Case Fans and a spank of room for components.
  • 3 SATA 160 GB HD’s 2 of which are on RAID 0. ( I chose the 160GB only because I don’t trust high density drives for mission critical data storage having had many high volume drives crash to frequently )
  • 2 EIDE 160 GB HD’s migrated from my old box
  • 1 Multi media card reader for USB and other types of data cards like those in my digital cameras.
  • 1 DVD-CD-RW Drive
  • 1 DVD Blue Ray
  • 2 Married Visiontek Radeon HD 3870 X2 Video Card - 1GB GDDR3, PCI Express ( With SLI you can put two of these together with an SLI card bridge.)
  • 1 21" flat screen trinintron monitor which will soon be upgraded to 2 View Sonic 24" DVI flat panel LCD monitors (on back order)
  • 4 GB 800MHz FSB DDR2 EPP RAM ( 3.5 actual with Windows XP )
  • CL Audigy Pro 4 Sound module with the Sanson C01U USB condenser microphone ( podcasting naturally ) I added a 31" boom stand for the mic and a professional model PF1 pop stopper and a 60" X 54" acoustic box to keep external sounds out.
  • 1 WACOM ArtZ-2 12×12 art pad (migrated from my old system)
  • 1 Epson pre press printer with Ultra Chrome 7 ink features and Kodak’s Matchprint roll feeder. I use this when I get hired to create print materials and need to produce a match print for examination. This system costs 1/10th the cost my Fargo Dye Sublimation printers and can easily match its quality under most conditions.

When done my new system will feature dual monitors, all my printers on a network hub, and the Sony digital video production box for producing video for real estate clients. 

There you have it, my new motive for this Monday morning in getting all my outstanding projects caught up and completed. Eager to get rolling, I’ll be back later today to post the release of all my plugins and modules.

 

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2 Comments so far
  1. SEOWolf April 21, 2008 10:56 am

    Great read Jared.

    Sounds like your new system will scream (thinking to myself: Jared’s new box is powerful enough it should come with a kick starter).

    It should help with productions and schedules.

    Cheers,

    ~SEOWolf

  2. Rent New Tampa April 21, 2008 8:14 pm

    Sounds like a pretty powerful system. You did not mention the partitioning setup or how you configured the virtual memory… hopefully, with all of those HDD’s, you made sure the virtual memory being used by XP is on something other then the main HDD for the operating system. This is a common mistake many make. If you have more then one drive, it is ALWAYS better to have the virtual memory on the second drive, on a separate partition at the beginning of the disk, this way both can be spinning at the same time while crunching a very large file. In fact, I would recommend having your production files on a third drive, giving the OS three different drives all with independent functions.


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