and here is the version with 4 inbuilt NVMe pay. skip the shitty Highpoint.
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Workstation: HP Z820 Workstation Not Specified
CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2687W 0 @ 3.10GHz, 32 active CPU(s)
RAM: 515381 Meg of RAM
Graphics: Quadro RTX 4000 Driver: 535.161.07
OS: Rocky Linux release 9.3 (Blue Onyx) - 64bit OS
Kernel: 5.14.0-362.8.1.el9_3.x86_64 DKUversion 19.0.0-PR197.2
Config: DKUversion 19.0.0-PR197.2
ive gotta say apart from all the security nonsense and smb issues with signing and whatnot on the mac side…
the mac studios (we have 3) are all rock solid, had some issues with software support like parsec and whatnot beign a bit unstable but thats pretty much all fixed now.
found some edid emulator dongles for remote users to use
i have pretty much 0 wasted IT-overhead from them, parsec is great for remote users.
they run 24/7 as they waste so little power compared to the big boy machines we have , those are nothing but trouble, cpus dying, ram dying, watercooling, fans dying , there is always something stupid.
Bought most of them refurbished directly from apple, like 8K€ for a full build with decent internal storage.
So far best computers ive ever bought and Insay this as someone that usually runs flame on anything but supported machines, from sketchy laptop builds to gaming machines ive done and used it all mostly for “fun”.
cor the scale we are at the studios where a great business decision, the biggest missing piece right now for us are
-
proper karma XPU support for metal
-
parsec 4:4:4 / 10bit HDR
otherwise, nuke, flame, resolve, lucid, adobe, blah , houdini . everything works well and arguably better than on wandoze.
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And you can fit 2 of the Mac Studios in a 3RU rack, so if you did want to rack them you can fit a lot more in than most PC forms. There are of course 1RU PC options, but the most powerful card you can throw in them is an ADA RTX4000. Oh, and you can get a cheaper UPS as the power draw is so much less.
Flip side though is if you want 25GbE or SDI monitoring then you end up with a whole lot of peripherals to deal with.
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hell yes.
16GbitE is included wmvis thunderbolt ethernet at least 
(i know I know)
Who knows though, NVIDIA may produce a Grace CPU for M&E which would make Apple Silicon look a bit underpowered in comparison, and Linux would no doubt be the O/S of choice to drive it as that’s what is being used in the NVIDIA Supercomputers. If software such as Flame could take advantage of it. Oh, and if the price comes down by an incredible amount.
Though the new PC ARM chips are likely to be built for Windows according to Reuters.
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So after a few more hours of elbow grease I’ve got Flame 2025 running stable on this system.
It was the NVidia driver all along. I found later that every time it got stuck on something, the next line in the log file was a video mode change (i.e. the driver wouldn’t activate the new mode).
At first I tried a myriad of ways of manually installing the NVidia driver to have more control. I tried elrepo, I tried directly from the NVidia repos. But it was just variations of the same problem. And it was different version of the 550 driver for RHel 9.
Eventually I came across this note:
So I gave up on Rocky 9.3… Instead I installed the ISO from 2024 which I knew worked well on the system, but then installed DKU 19 and Flame 2025. That combo is supposedly supported based on the system requirements and works fine for me. End of drama cycle.
Rock 9.3 apparently has a lot of issues with NVidia driver stability based on the sheer number of forum posts trying to deal with it. A lot seems to have to do with pairing of specific kernel versions with driver version, and that link breaking if there is any kernel update (see here and here).
Incidentally, DKU 19 for Rocky 8.7 ships with the 535 driver of NVidia which is much better behaved.
Anyway, moving on, back to billing work.
Footnote 1: This is where it was disappointing that ADSK washed their hands so fast of the ‘this is not a supported config’. The only thing on that system that wasn’t in their support matrix was the motherboard and on-board I/O. All the other items, in particular the A5000 is in the matrix. They missed an opportunity to learn about the fragility of the NVidia driver that may be impacting other systems as well, including some variations of HP, Dell, and Levono systems. Such is the world.
Footnote 2: In case it’s of use for anyone. If you have trouble with the video drivers in Rocky and get locked out of boot, it’s useful to know how to force Grub into text mode after the fact.
- Halt the boot once the Grub selection screen appears by hitting cursor up or down
- Enter ‘e’ to edit the Grub commands (it appears that you only get to select, but they’re all editable, and you can add options)
- At the end of the main kernel line add ‘systemd.unit=multi-user.target’
- Hit F10 to continue the boot.
With that Rocky will boot, but bypass the switch to the NVidia driver and give you a shell login from where you can then debug the rest of the system.
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