Articles in: Hardware

Over the past several months CCS has built a number of workstations with Nvidia RTX 6000 Ada 48GB GPU. Compared to their predecessor, the RTX A6000, the RTX 6000 Ada has approximately double the number of processors and offers impressive performance gains – more cores, faster cores, significantly larger L2 cache and increased bandwidth. However…

Here’s the latest dual-socket Motherboard from GIGABYTE specifically designed for the new AMD EPYC 9004-series of ‘Genoa’ processors. Currently there’s only four of these Motherboards in existence and we’re fortunate to own them all. Since the new AMD Genoa processor is larger than its predecessors, we had to design & fabricate new custom aluminum water-blocks.…

While working on a system build we had some questions arise about the benefit of using Nvidia SLI NVlink and GPU utilization in systems using more than 2x GPU when running Unreal Engine. Fortunately we had a Xenowulf 4x RTX A6000 workstation sitting in the shop so we decided to see for ourselves. Nvidia’s NVLink…

How well does Apple’s new M1 Ultra Silcon Chip perform compared to systems with a dedicated GPU? We thought we’d find out… On the Apple website, we found the following graph & accompanying quote: “For the most graphics-intensive needs, like 3D rendering and complex image processing, M1 Ultra has a 64-core GPU — 8x the…

CCS recently added the new 2022 Mac Studio M1 Ultra to its rental inventory. The workstation features the new Apple M1 Ultra 20-Core all-in-one SoC (System on Chip). The M1 CPU utilizes 16x ‘hi-performance’ Cores & 4x ‘hi-efficiency’ Cores. Upon arrival we put one on the bench and start testing the M1 CPU performance. Here’s…

CCS recently acquired several Nvidia Quadro RTX A6000 GPU. With 48GB of VRAM and a hefty price tag of $5K it’s certainly not for everyone. They do however offer a host of significant improvements over the previous Turing architecture and are a great choice for projects involving massive datasets & workloads. We really like the…

THE BASICS Heat is the single most crippling byproduct of computing technology. Thermal fluctuation, performance throttling and system fatigue are all critical factors that restrict the potential of hi-performance professional computers. The default and usually the only factory option for professional-grade computer components is air cooling. It’s the cheapest, easiest solution requiring little engineering and…

Apple Mac Pro “Mega Grater” vs AMD Ryzen 9 In 2006, Apple Introduced the Mac Pro “Cheese-Grater”. In 2013 they released the “Trash-Can”. Now we have the 2019 Mac Pro “Mega-Grater” with entry-level configurations costing around $10,000.   Many professionals working in M&E love their Macs. And for good reason. The new Mac Pro is…

Nvidia released its latest 3000-series GPU last month – the RTX3080Ti. We got lucky and recently had the good fortune to acquire several of them. We had read a lot about the improved performance and naturally wanted to see how they performed on the bench compared to our existing RTX3080 and RTX3090 GPUs. The “Ti”…

Several weeks ago, we discussed PCIe Gen4 and the incredible performance benefits it offers. As we mentioned, although the software technology has existed for years, PCIe Gen4 hardware has only recently come available. This past week, we benched a full PCIe 4.0 AMD 32-Core Threadripper workstation and ran several performance tests. The TR32 uses an…

At Creative Computing Solutions we recently ran several Render tests using four of the most popular Render software apps: Blender, Octane, Redshift & V-Ray. As you may know, Blender and V-Ray offer CPU and GPU render while Octane and Redshift are GPU-based Render apps. For the CPU Render tests we used our line of AMD…

CUDA vs OpenGL   What is CUDA? CUDA was created by graphics card (GPU) manufacturer, Nvidia. In simple terms, CUDA allows programs to use the brains of the GPU as a sub-CPU. Your CPU passes certain tasks off to the CUDA enabled card. The GPU specializes in quickly calculating effects like lighting, movement and interaction.…

Last month CCS published the results of extensive in-house CPU & GPU ‘synthetic’ performance benchmark tests. Today we’re releasing the results from the first in a series of CPU & GPU Render tests. These tests will be geared towards providing ‘real-world’ workflow benchmarks. For this round, we focused on CPU Render using Cinebench R23, Corona…

CCS helps customers get the best performance from their workstations by providing a wide range of customized options. You can find all sorts of online test results from computer manufacturers and component suppliers. We thought we’d take advantage of our diverse CPU/GPU inventory and see what test results look like when we ran them in-house.…

It’s a simple fact that one single type of workstation configuration will not meet the needs for all software applications used for Media and Entertainment. Performance is based on a complex web of interactions associated with the application itself, the system configuration, the type of models being constructed, rendering complexities, data & storage paths and…

We started Creative Computing Solutions with the goal to give customers access to hi-performance computer workstations. One of the first things we did was to decide what our Inventory would look like. We knew that the inventory had to address the needs of Mac, Windows and Linux Users. It also needed to offer customers a…