1. Does CS5 only use the CUDA of supported CUDA Cards? Only Premiere. CUDA support in AE is dependent on specific plug-ins using these features. AE itself relies on conventional OpenGL features, not CUDA. 2. Does SLI or multi graphic card tech, help CS5 speed at all? No. SLI is more or less a gaming feature utterly irrelevant for most professional apps. Even most 3D programs, which are much more dependent on OpenGL than AE ever is, do not support it. 3. Is it useful to get a Tesla next to a Quadro 5800 or is it not seen by CS5? You can only have one primary graphics card for acceleration features. Tesla GPGPUs are handled completrely different and are not seen by normal apps unless you compile them with the respective NVidia libraries. 4. What Intel processor is best suited for After Effects rendering: iX or Xeon architecture? Depends on what you prefer: Quicker interactive updates whiel working or faster final rendering using multiprocessing. Though, to be fair, the difference is not that great. Xeons work just as well ffor editing (pick the W series types) as do coreXi for multiprocessing renders. 5. Does Adobe really use only 3 Gb per core, meaning you should not buy more than 3Gb per CPU core? Or is it per THREAD and should I get more RAM? You are operating on outdated info. That only applies to 32bit versions of AE, not the 64bit CS5. 6. Speed or number: Is it better to focus on very high total core speed, or to optimal RAM distribution by getting as many cores as possible? Speed! Several features are not MP enabled and the efficiency of multithreading in plug-ins varies. You could have a ton of course and then use your favorite, single-threaded plug-in and all that poewer goes to waste. 7. Can a Matrox MXO2 Rack unit, cooperate with the Nvidia CUDA power or could both accelerations/technologies hinder eachother? Most likely not. Same problem as with your Tesla proposoal: Only one can rule. That aside, simple bandwidth considerations with your PCI bus would probably make it pointless, even if it worked. 8. Is it best to get Nvidia SDI connectivity or is there a save alternative? I doubt it would be the "best", as it is merely meant for previewing, not signal processing, playout and capture as is required in a studio. It may deliver the picture, but no TC control and all that. figure a BMD or AJA card into your equation. 9. Can iX CPU's be dual No. As designed by intel... Guess why there is a considerable price difference between coreXi and Xeons... 10. What is the fastest 6 core Xeon that can be dual? Ask that your hardware reseller. They werre just released/ announced a few days ago, so they may not even be available yet. 11. Does CS5 need a good scratch disk: is it wise to get a SSD just for scratch or is it overkill? SSDs as scratch disks are just plain stupid. unless you get the super-expensive models, write speed is awful. They only make good boot disks, if that is relevant. AE uses a dedicated disk cache which best is handled with fast SATA disks or even a small RAID setup. 12. Some say the Nvidia 5800 is not the fastest card around; it has 240 cuda cores and some gtx cards have far more than that. What is the story? And, does it matter? Unless you have program code that exceeds the number of CUDA commands that can be processed in one clock cycle, you'll never know the difference. Which is a way of saying that it will be pretty much irrelevant in most cases. For premiere and AE, anyway. Just like with CPUs, more cores does not automatically mean more processing power in a given app. Mylenium
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