Mac Pro vs. xServe

In an xServer, a user cannot have more tha three PCI cards.
If one is a GPU and one is a Capture Card, there is no slot left for a Fibre Channel card.
In an xServe however, the drives are SaS 15,000 RPM capable with a controller card as effective as the Fibre channel controller on an xServe RAID.
Therefore, if I as a user were to configure an xServe with a System drive and then Stripe two SaS drives to create my media drive, wouldn't I be able to match the performance of a Mac Pro hooked to an xServer RAID.

I have been giving this thought but I was curious to other people's results with this. I can't loose Video input through a capture card but I also cannot give up a fast GPU. I would although prefer a small single rack with xServes in it than a bunch of racks with bulky Mac Pros in them.

Pound for Pound, do the xServes match up to the Mac Pros? Are the xServes more powerful or reliable?

What are the results?

I dont have access to any xserve or any SAS drives at the moment - i cant offer any advice.

xserves do work but have poorly performing graphics cards.

I am always thinking of Xserves when it comes to permanent installations which require rather Pixelmad output than graphic output.
The Xserves are designed to run really 24/7 - that will make them more reliable in the long run. And they do nicely fit into 19" racks...

This is an old thread I published over a year ago before any of us started using Mtron SSDs or the AIC codec. I was dealing with clients who needed to run HD on their systems for multiple layers.

My hope was to steal the idea from a pandora's box where everything is rack-mount in a small rack that also had the SCSI drive array. It was my thought at the time to mount 5 xServes and one xServe raid into a rack so that at any given time I could have up to 4 catalysts running with an active spare.

Now that TH2G and DH2G work, I normally get 4 outputs per CAT and since I can stack content on as many SSDs as I want, I don't need the xServe Raid anymore and have abandoned the idea of using xServes.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by OlliR

I am always thinking of Xserves when it comes to permanent installations which require rather Pixelmad output than graphic output.
The Xserves are designed to run really 24/7 - that will make them more reliable in the long run. And they do nicely fit into 19" racks...

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I agree with you Olli. However, until a better GPU can fit in an xServe, their worthless to me for Catalyst.