Reasons:

There are several factors of necessity and computer market events that lead us to believe we could build a machine out of PC parts. Here’s what we’re thinking.

Necessity:

1. Several [PAM] Installations need to be in place at once – sometimes 3 at a time in various corners of the world- we needed machines to meet our forth coming touring schedule in the next two years.
2. Quad G5’s are very expensive @ $3400 a unit – with out modifications.
3. Quad G5’s are big, bully, and extremely heavy (almost 50 lbs). In short they are not fun to run around with at airports and very expensive to ship.
4. Most G5 Mac parts are hard to come by – power supplies are near impossible to get, and you can forget about replacing the video card, processor and motherboard in the event of a major hardware failure. We couldn’t have a break down in the field with a G5, it would be an almost unrecoverable event. The Show must go on – always and Perpetually. 

Market Forces and Events:

1. Cycling74 has done a magnificent job on porting Max/MSP Jitter to the Win XP platform. It’s ready and it’s only going to get better as the code base is optimized and 64-bit versions hit the market.
2. Cyling74 has daftly embraced OpenGL and has a vast library of Jitter objects that allow video to be processed by the GPU instead of the traditional CPU intensive processes. We can’t understate the importance of this turn of events, processing video in OpenGL space is nothing short of revolutionary. In short it is the future of video processing.
3. Due to the gaming market explosion both ATI and Nvida Graphic Cards have exceeded More’s Law. Graphic Processing horsepower is undergoing a revolution and for the most part Mac owners have been left on the side lines being offered a morsel every now and then from a smorgasbord of rich offerings that PC owners enjoy every day. This Good for PC owners but VERY BAD for Mac owners. We can’t understand why Apple has not done anything about it. That being said, we can say without reservation the G5 does make up for the short comings of it’s attached GPU in CPU power, convenience, fit and finish, ease of use and maintenance and reliability.
4. Both Intel and AMD are in death match to build the best processors and offer them up at very affordable prices, along with trying to slay each other their both aiming to take down the PPC G5 chip. This is good.
5. PC can be built to almost any size and weight. Think [PAM] in a suitcase ?
6. PC parts are very affordable and abundant – one can walk into a chain store and have the parts in-hand in minutes flat. It’s just a matter of time until one can buy a PC @ 7-11.
7. The fat lady never sings for a PC (although she’s always warming up in the wings from a reliability standpoint). They can be infinitely tweaked, mod-ed, hacked and upgraded.

Theory, Challenge and Outlook:

We love Macintosh to death and think the Quad G5 and OS X are simply breath taking. We asked and nobody was willing to buy or give us a few Quad G5’s. We can’t afford to buy 3 Quad G5’s to tour and ship around the world.  We can build the equivalent of a Quad G5 on a PC for less than 50% the cost of a Quad G5.

Risk takers are the ones who succeed in life.  We’re artists and risk takers and willing to stand victorious or go down in flames trying. [PAM] is a huge experiment in technology, community, art, commerce, communications we are “Perpetually Beta” but more importantly we are cash poor despite being so rich in the aforementioned areas.

We and PC’s we’re ready to do this ! WE HAD TO DO THIS TO KEEP THE SHOW GOING.

Project: Build a [PAM] PC:

For brevities sake this will be short. After much research we buitl a super fast PC that beats out the Quad G5 in most performace test.  It’s not as astheicaly beautiful as a G5 but is runs our installation with a lots of CPU/GPU breathing room. Here’s a parts and cost list.

1. Intel Pentium D 950 – Dual Core 3.4Ghz - $ 380
2. Intel 945GTPL Motherboard - $130
3. ATI – X1900 GT – 256mb graphics card - $450
4. Cooler Master Caviler desktop case & 480 watt power supply - $130
5. Buffalo DDR2 667 1 gig ram X2 - $260
6. 250 GB - Seagate Barracuda SATA HD - $99
7. Cooler Master Typhoon CPU heatpipte and fan - $60
8. Cooler Master Northbridge Chipset Fan/Heast sink - $40
9. CompUSA Firewire 400/800 PCI card - $40

Project total $ 1589

Putting it all Together:

We have to say this is the hard part of the project. It took almost a week, 1 blown Pentium and 1 blown power supply and endless trips to J&R, CompUSA and StonePC in Queens to get everything right and working.

In the course of week we exchanged the following parts because they broke or we needed different or improved performance.

1. Original Case sucked so bad – the fit and finish was unacceptable and none of the components fit right. We’re not naming names.
2. Original graphics card - the ATI X1900XTX was awesome but it didn’t fit the right way in our first PC (the Shuttle XPC) this was another reason to build from scratch. BTW the Shuttle XPC is awesome and we’ll be building another one soon. More on the XPC latter.
3. Pentium D 950 – our original CPU underperformed very badly – it may have been defective or we may have fried it in the 90+ degree NYC weather, we’re not sure. Regardless, we couldn't cool it properly with the stock Intel CPU fan and it ran at 109 Celsius .  After replacing it our operating temp was at 80 degrees Celsius better but still not good.
4. FANS & Heat sinks - because the D950  ran so hot we had to buy extra heat sinks and fans, we wanted to go liquid cooled but couldn't find a small enough package to fit our needs, also the cooling system needed to work 24/7, liquid coolers can be difficult. We're at 67 degrees now which is still a little hot.
   
5. SunTech power supply – blew/shorted after we dialed in all the parts. StonePC replaced without question – we’ve raised an eyebrow and will buy a better Anteck or Cooler Master as a backup.

In short, building a PC from scratch is tricky business, it’s time consuming, frustrating and nerve racking. Heat is a huge factor, it kills performance, building from scratch is risky as opposed to buying a bare bones kit where the manufacture has paired up a power and cooling system to run efficiently. Such is the case as our Shuttle XPC 83G5 is a  PC moder’s dream when compared to our [PAM] PC, because everything fits and works as it should. This is never a problem when buying a Macintosh, in short, they are optimized to death. In our opinion it’s worth the extra price of a Mac if you’re will to pay for convenience. We really do miss them already and  are very tired after finishing the [PAM] PC.

Installing software was the easy part once everything worked. We install Windows XP in less than 45 minutes and Max/MSP Jitter installs in seconds flat. Note: after several performance tests we also need to install the Java Runtime Environment (JRE) and the latest .NET libraries to get the PC up to snuff.

Testing and Benchmarking:

Over the course of the project we need to run numerous bench marks to evaluate the [PAM] PC to see if it was performing as it should and also compare it to the Quad G-5. We can’t understate how useful and necessary this is when setting out to build a PC. Right way we started with the example patches provided in Max/MSP and Jitter to test CPU and GPU processing power. We also used Maxon’s Cinebench to get some raw platform independent scores that give us an indicator on how our [PAM] PC was doing compared to other computers.

Here’s the list of computers we’ve benchmarked:

1) Quad G-5 2.5Ghz/ 2 gig ram / NVIDIA  GeForce 6600 256mb
2) [PAM] Intel Pentium D 950 (Dual)  3.4Ghz / 2 gig ram / ATI X1900GT 256 mb -(Built by [PAM])
3) Shuttle XPC 83G5 / Pentium 4  HT 3.4Ghz / 2 gig ram / ATI X600 256 mb -(Built by [PAM])
4) Dual G-5 2.0Ghz / 2 gig ram / NVIDIA GeForce FX 5200 64mb
5) Mac Book Pro Duo Core 1.8Ghz / 2 Gig Ram/ ATI X1600 -128mb
6) Powerbook  G-4 1.5 Ghz / 1.5 gig ram / ATI  360 Mobility 64mb
7) Dual G4 800Mhz / 768 gig ram / NVIDIA GeForce 64 mb


We should be clear that these test or simple benchmarks and not real world tests nor are they vastly scientific in approach. The conditions and environments we’re these machines we’re tested along with OS set-ups and hardware differ vastly. They are for ball park comparisons only.

Here’s our Cinebench results:

 
Here’s our Max./MSP Jitter Tests Results:

All example patches and media can be found in the full installs of Max/MSP Jitter. In most cases we transversed the /Applications/MaxMSP 4.X/patches/media folder in alphabetical order using all the QT media when testing multi-channel video patches.

The Power Book Pro is a huge surprise and approaches near workstation class performance but it not quite ready for real world /front line installations as it’s software is just beginning to live up to it’s potential.

Cycling74’s Universal Binary in beta will hold some huge performance gains for both PPC and Intel Macs.

The Quad G5 is still king when raw cpu is concerned but could be improved upon vastly if there was a better selection of video cards available to Mac owners. We we’re able to get our hands on a Quad G5 with the NVIDIA GeForce 7800 GT from TekServe of NYC but unfortunately it was only for the course of our Scope NYC 2006 show so we couldn’t bench mark it. Needless to say, it was remarkable but almost impossible to get even for TeckServe due to supply chain problems that Apple is known for.

In the meantime, we are sending our results to Cycling74, Apple, Intel, and ATI along with a bunch of questions. You should contact us as well if you have questions.

Oh, one last bench mark we’d like to share and it shocks us to even see it running is our main [PAM] Jitter patch which does many things but more importantly it streams 16 videos at full resolution 720X480 /PhotoJPEG /15fps  at once....or at least the current version because we have huge head room now !

[PAM] Jitter installation patch frame rates:

[PAM] PC Pentium D950 = 100 Frames per second
Quad G5 = 60 Frames per second.

SO HOW DO YOU LIKE THOSE APPLES ?

We love Max/MSP Jitter, it's hands down one of the most powerful and versatile media applications around. We think the Jitter cat is cute as well.

Make sure to give Cyling74's Universal Binary for Max/MSP Jitter 4.6/1.6 a shot, it looks very promising with huge performance gains in certain areas.

OpenGL is what makes it all happen. For a better understanding of what OpenGL is visit their web site.

Now that Max/MSP Jitter is using OpenGL libraries one can leverage the power of their GPU to make up for the short comings of their CPU.

But are workstation glass graphics cards like the FireGL and QuadroFX really necessary? Read this article at Tom's Hardware to gain a better understanding of which graphics card is right for you.

By far the best graphics card of it's class is the X1900 series part of the X1K line. Mac G5 owners can only dream. However...

The Power Book Pro weighs in with workstation class performance with it's Duo Core CPU and ATI X1600 GPU.

From Apple's web site.:
"The X1600 can push data through 12 pixel shader pipelines and five vertex processors on the 16-lane PCI Express bus interface with eight times the bandwidth of a PowerBook G4 ."

At $3400 and nearly 50 lbs with a case that's both beautiful and bulky the Quad G5 is still king in raw CPU power. Hey, it's got twice as many cpu's but our Pentium /ATI machine can dance graphics circles around it and costs 1/2 as less.

From apples web site.:

G5 Size and weight

    * Height: 20.1 inches (51.1 cm)
    * Width: 8.1 inches (20.6 cm)
    * Depth: 18.7 inches (47.5 cm)
    * Weight (standard configurations): 44.5 to 48.8 pounds (20.2 to 22.1 kg) (6)

Keep in mind that the PPC line and OS X is all 64 bit versus Win/Intel's 32-bit architecture. Things will all change as Intel is already shipping 64-bit ready CPU's and Mother Boards.

Windows Vista -2007 ?

We're not sure what VIIV is, where to find it or how to use it, but we know it makes our Intel chips run better?

Intel is soon to take over the computing world. We like the Pentium D chips but they run way too hot.

Hey where's AMD is this article ?