Want to render video on my server

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Dannytek

New Member
Sep 12, 2019
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Hi

I’ve been given a HP DL360e Gen 8 server and I’m hoping to use as a rendering machine for a program called Davinchi Resolve,

I want to edit on my pc but send it to the server for rendering, but I’m unsure about the graphics card aspect, are there any special video cards for servers such as on I have.

I have a DL360e and it’s dual Xeon, 96gb ram and 6 or 8 600gb 15k sas drives.

thanks in advance for your help
 

WANg

Well-Known Member
Jun 10, 2018
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New York, NY
Blackmagic's DaVinci Resolve?
Ah yeah. Big presence at NABShow Vegas every year - usually considered somewhat between Adobe Premiere and Avid Pro Tools (which I prefer, but stupid-steep pricetag).

Are you using the free version of Resolve, or the commercial version (roughly 300 per server)?

I don't generally like running remote rendering on pizza boxes (rackmount 1U servers) since most of the software that wants OpenCL/CUDA acceleration would want a dedicated GPU (like an nVidia GTX/RTX or a Radeon Vega), and pizza boxes tends to have dimensioning problems fitting a beefy video card (which does accelerate certain tasks, and having nvEnc helps with speeding up exports and previews), since they'll need to live horizontally via the riser, and you are constrainted by the thickness of the server. The cards that I see are either double width (so they take up 2 slots), slightly longer than full length or have weird height to fit a honking big heatsink/fan setup. Most have fans that throws the air onto the top of the pizza box where there's no flow path (if you are lucky there are ventilating grates, but not always). For those tasks it's usually a pedestal server or a beefy desktop, preferably one with quiet cooling.

Keep in mind that the Xeon E5v2s used in the Proliant G8 line is based on the Ivy bridge EP, which is at least 4 generations behind state-of-the-art. Unless you have an older-but-decent low form factor card (like a GTX960 or GTX1050 with a slim fan setup) that you can have for cheap, I would not invest too much onto it.