RIP hardware upgrade

[jayhawksigns]

Primarily a question for anyone who has upgraded their computer than runs their RIP within the last year or two.

What are the specs of what you use to run and what do you run now?? And how much of a difference in rip time did you notice?

I know specs for computer have been talked about some before, but I don't know if its really been discussed how much of a difference you have noticed between an old rig and a new one. Wastach posted info a year or two ago about how much of a difference processor speed makes in rip times and I was just looking for other user feedback about their experiences.

Thanks.

[Byron]

Here is my 2 cents. I have run various rips on p4's running from 1.7 to 3.0 and frankly the speed increase was not worth the hardware cost and I build my own boxes. In the end it comes down to 3 factors (1)RAM and lots of it and (2)swap file room which means a big disk or better still a seperate disk for the swap file and (3) the operating system - I have dumped XP and gone back to 2K Pro because it is simple clean fast with less overhead and because i run both mac and pac it has appletalk built in which xp does not so i avoid any extra software costs.
Just my 2 cents hope it helps.

[Rick]

I drive three printers w Onyx ProductionHouse and to do that, I have a dual processor custom machine. It's a real time saver to let Onyx RIP two files for two different machines simulataneously, especially when they're big files, and for that you need two processors. I use Windows XP and you have to make sure hyper-threading is turned OFF.

-Rick

[slangsc]

Over the winter I upgraded to an AMD 4200+ 64X2 with 2GB Ram and a 250GB hard drive. It is my design station and rip station. XP reports it running at 2.21 Ghz. I'm only running one printer, but I can rip, and print, and continue my next design all at the same time.

[eye4clr]

For the last 4 years I've seen a new Onyx installation almost every week at my client's sites. Almost everyone runs dual processors and 2+Gb RAM. Once you get those basics down what is often overlooked is adding RAID zero paired drives for each physical printer. This makes a HUGE difference in overall behavior of Onyx since the bottleneck is not the processor or the RAM, it's writing the RIPped data to disk.

We drive 3 printers at full speed and get snappy responses from Onyx with 7 drives in our machine. 1 for the OS, and the other 6 as pairs of RAID 0 for each printer.

[cieje]

no fault tolerance though; so don't expect to keep sensitive files that you want to keep on a raid 0. could do a raid 5 if you need good fault tolerance. A solid state device would be ideal - they're coming way down in price... but just aren't big enough for these applications.

[eye4clr]

point well made!

Backup or suffer with RAID 0. Everything has its downside.

[jayhawksigns]

Originally Posted by cieje

A solid state device would be ideal - they're coming way down in price... but just aren't big enough for these applications.

It would be interesting though to see if they do make a difference at all. I had seen reviews of Gigabyte's i-Ram when it came out, and the speed the drive could reach was very nice.