GTX 780.. bottlenecking w/o SSD?

[Ranovic]

I've put together a rig with Intel i7 3.6 GHz, GTX 780 and 16GB ram... my hard drive on the other hand is a WD 2TB 6 Gb/s, great for storage but not the fasted block in the shop. This is also a Hackintosh rig, so a Raid is not possible. Everything runs relatively smoothly, but it does have it's limitations, multiple screens with multiple layers and effects etc.

Is the computer bottlenecking with w/o SSD? Also, what is the relationship in speed between GPU and HDD?

I'd say the GPU is doing all the work on the effects, multiple layers and resolution. A hard drive reads the file so it's main job is to have it to the screen asap. I suppose the more layers you have going the more taxing on the HDD, aside from loading projects and starting programs I think layers is a SSD HDD's major benefit. Thoughts?

[philmcrackin]

RAID is possible on a Hackintosh, dunno how difficult it is but it is indeed possible. Yes the bottleneck is from not having an SSD, are you running WD Black or Green hard drives? The green hard drives are not going to give you as good as performance as the black ones.

Why don't you share some more information about your setup? e.g. What composition resolution are you running at? How many screens/layers are you running? What codec are your videos encoded in? DXV?

How come you're using a Hackintosh? Are you using Quartz Composer?

[LXConcepts]

I'm running a similar set up on my new servers (3930k, 32gb ram, gtx 780) although I have both SSDs (crucial 1 tb) and HDDs (some off the shelf 1tb high speed HDD...it's just for programs and/or storage).

Media content off the HDD will slow down slightly (frame rate drops to about 40-50fps) once my resolution gets relatively high (comps bigger than say, 5760x3240), but there's absolutely no slowing off the SSD

mind you, I'm generally not running effects with large comps like that, it's all prerendered formatted content on at most 2 layers

I'd assume my performance would be different if I were running a ton of internal effects and whatnot and multiple layers of video

[Ranovic]

When setting up the Hackintosh, I ran into an issue with my mobo requiring the HDD to be in AHCI mode to function. Because of this choosing IDE and setting up a raid, was not an option. This was over a year ago so my memory is rusty as to exactly why.

You bring a good point though, not sure why I'm running it in mac. Windows would be much easier, and video card driver support is better for OCing and such. I'm a motion graphic designer, so I guess I'm just more naturally comfortable with the mac side of things. Although Quartz Composer does sound interesting, live animated graphics seems legit.

It's the a WD Black, and I haven't encoded the files into DXV yet. I'd like to display at least 2 screens at 1080p with at least 2 layers with an optimal frame rate of >30

I'm thinking the thing to do is get a 128GB-256GB SSD and drop that in on the Win8 side, easier setup and option for plugins. If it really helps then I need to get it