Hi all
I’ll be building a machine mainly intended for playback of 10x 1080p video files (probably HAPQ) via SDI. Some headroom is desired in case we’ll want to use live video input, generative shaders, etc.
Current plan is
Supermicro MBD-H13SRA-TF
AMD Threadripper 9960X + Silverstone XED120 WS air cooler
2x Micron 24 GB DDR5 5600MHz ECC RDIMM
Gigabyte Radeon AI PRO R9700 32GB
2x Micron 9550 PRO 3.84 TB NVMe GEN5 U.2 (RAID1) + CBL-MCIO-1240U2Y-E U.2 cable
3x Blackmagic DeckLink 8K Pro G2 (plus a sync generator)
Silverstone RM45-360 rack case
Corsair HX1200i PSU
3x Nocuta NF-A12x25 G2 PWM case fans
PTS AluFly 6U Full Size flyrack + Arcticase 1964 hard case
Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC
I’m trying to figure out if the fanless Radeon R9700S could work here, it’s designed for 3U/4U rack machines with front-to-back airflow like what I’m planning, but I’m not sure how much airflow it needs, i.e. if low noise Nocutas as intake fans are enough.
I know Nvidia is a more popular choice, but the R9700 has quite a lot of VRAM for the price, and I’m also interested in experimenting with Linux on this machine (dual boot) and take it the AMD drivers are better there.
With the outrageous RAM and GPU cost these days, this setup is stretching the budget a bit, hence “only” 48GB RAM, but I’m guessing that should be enough for video file playback?
U.2 storage in RAID1 might be slight overkill, but I don’t 100% trust flash storage so I want that part as safe as possible.
Anything obvious I’m missing here? Any feedback is very welcome, I’d want to avoid expensive planning mistakes here