Flame 2009 Benchmarks on the new HP xw8600 System

flame-folder.pngWe’ve got one of the new Autodesk HP xw8600 systems fired up at the fxphd loft in Chicago. The new systems started shipping last month and we got it quickly up and running and paying the bills. But before we shut down our old IBM6217 system, we took the time to run our fxguide suite of benchmarks so we had something to which we could compare the new system. In our results, we’ve also included results from our old school original Onyx 2 system, which was running Inferno version 5.3. The new xw8600 was from 1.1 to over 2 times faster than the 6217 on our benchmark test.

The new systems ship with dual Quad Core Intel Xeon processors, a Quadro FX 5600 card with SDI daughter card, and a Lucid 88192 D/A converter. Gone is any need for a DVI ramp, as the broadcast monitor is fed directly from the FX5600 daughter card. The VTR feed (or dual 4:4:4) feed is fed from the AJA 2K OEM board breakout box.

For more details about the system, as well as surprising results that include the fact the Onyx2 still comes out on top on one of the tests, click through for the rest of the story.


Links are below for downloading pdf results as well as the actual batch setups we used to run the test (flint/flame 2009 required). There are two batch setups in the archive. The first will generate all the frames of coloured noise you will need to do the tests — run this setup first (the name of the setup says it all). The second setup includes all the tests loaded into a single batch setup. Turn on the Text Log to record the start and end times of the processes (make sure Status Webpage is NOT turned on).

Enjoy!

Download a pdf file listing the benchmark results.

Download a tar archive so that you can run your own benchmark tests.


batch.png

System Configuration:

2 Quad Core Xeon Processors (8 x Intel Xeon CPU X5460 @ 3.16GHz)
8GB RAM
Quadro FX 5600 Graphics card with SDI daughter board
Lucid 88192 D/A converter

Stone Direct XR Chassis – Stone command line test results:

[root@smoke log]# /usr/discreet/sw/tools/stone_test -r -R 0 -f HDTV
Partition /dev/swr00 capacity = 362346075 per disk, 2 data disks
frame = 6225920 bytes (1520 blocks) frame_interval = 760
4 concurrent I/O requests, 300 frames:
Head, forward : 768.77 MB/S 129.5 frames/sec

8 thoughts on “Flame 2009 Benchmarks on the new HP xw8600 System”

  1. Timely post. We’re upgrading our old Octane2 shortly so it’ll be interesting to compare the difference using your setups 🙂

    Cheers for that!

  2. I was wondering if we can use AJA XENA for Smoke / Flame instead of AJA OEM 2k. Will there be any driver support for linux for XENA?

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