At the end of last year I purchased some gear for tax purposes for my business. I have a mid 2012 MacPro 12 core with 64GB ram and a PCIX SSD drive in slot 2, a GTX 680 card, BMSDI card in slot 3 and the Nitris HBA in slot 4. After having some suggestions on L2 I ended up purchasing two TitanX vid cards with the intention of putting them in an Agent X expansion chassis. So far I've been unable to contact Whipping Post regarding the Agent X expansion chassis. I've left two messages in early January but haven't heard back.
I'm pretty sure the Titan X cards are PC versions. Given they are going to live in an expansion chassis and used by Resolve, Adobe etc... for my processing horsepower I planned to leave the GTX-680 as the GUI driver in the main MacPro Tower. I've also been told the TitanX requires 10.9 and I'm currently running 10.8.5 with several different startup drives. I'm thinking it's better to keep the GTX-680 so it will be compatible with the older startup drives that aren't 10.9 OSs. Anybody have any idea if I set up an expansion chassis with the TitanXs and need to startup off a 10.8.5 drive will the TitanX cards just be ignored?
The next hurdle will be what to do with my PCI-X SSD card for my startup drive. It has great speed over a regular SSD hooked up to the normal SATA buss but I'm pretty sure the slot 2 16 lane connection will be taken up by the HBA for the expansion chassis so I'm wondering if I can put the PCI-x SSD into Slot 3 which I think is 4 lanes. I'd assume it would be slower but I'd think that would still perform as well if not better than a regular SSD on the sata 2 buss in the macpro tower. Curious if anyone has any thoughts along these lines. If I can ever get a hold of Whipping Post I hope I can get some answers.
With all these things in play. I think it might be time to put on my big boy pants and move to a PC at least for Resolve, Fusion and other stuff. I know in general there is more bang for the buck but I've been so mac centric for the last 7 years my PC chops have gone by the way side. Also I hate all the little issues when bouncing from Avid mac to pc when it comes to fonts and their positioning and the ProRes hassles on the PC side. Again it's been a while but I did start on PC symphony so maybe my concerns aren't as problematic as I'm imagining. Bottom line the Agent X or similar expansion chassis is around $3,500.00 and that could be put into the kitty for a PC that would readily accept the TitanX cards and given I have a NitrisDX that I can keep on the mac system I can install my DNxIO on the PC as I've never wanted to take down my system and lose universal mastering. Heck it's possible that the HBA card for the DNxIO is compatible with the NitrisDX because it's the newer version of the box I could even swap it over to the PC if I needed universal mastering. A KVM setup and I could pick and choose which computer depending on the task at hand. My gut says this is probably a better path than the expansion chassis but I'd appreciate any thoughts or suggestions others might have.
John Moore Barking Trout Productions Studio City, CA bigfish@pacbell.net
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Posted by: John Moore <bigfish@pacbell.net>
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this is the Avid-L2
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