What's wrong with my workstation graphics card and why is it slower than my notebook?

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BoydPro

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Feb 11, 2013
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I realize that this is a loaded question, but I'm about at my wits end and I'm starting to think that no manufacturers really know what they're making because they have been no help. I know this is involved, but please bear with me. It's ultimately only two questions.

I'm an audio engineer and have always built my own machines ever since buying my first one and tearing it apart. I've recently been in the position to put together a new home workstation and a mobile rig.

Home Workstation: (issues)
ASRock Fatal1ty X79 Champion
Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E 6-Core 3.2GHz
Galaxy 66NPH7DN6ZVZ GeForce GTX 660 GC 2GB
MOTU PCIe-424 Audio Interface Card
8x (32GB) G.SKILL Ripjaws X 4GB 240-Pin DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) F3-12800CL9S-4GBXL
SAMSUNG 840 EVO MZ-7TE500BW 2.5" 500GB SATA III TLC SSD (program drive)
2x Seagate ST4000DM000 4TB Desktop HDD (backup drives)
3x Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 2TB HDD (Data drives)
WD RE4 WD1003FBYX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB SATA 3.0Gb/s Enterprise Drive (work drive)
LG BD-RE Bluray/DVD burner
Windows 8.1 Pro

-Issue #1: Over the past year or so I've had, and continue to have several issues with the workstation as far as not sleeping, crashing when put to sleep, crashing on wake, long boot times, not working with the motherboards ultra fast boot feature, etc. So I figured it's either the GTX 660 or the Champion, right? I've since exchanged the GTX 660 twice, and the Champion once, and the symptoms remain identical. So, I decide to continue to troubleshoot with parts from my wife's office computer:

Office Computer: (works perfectly)
Asus M3A78-CM
AMD Phenom 9600 Quad core
ATI Radeon Sapphire HD 3650
4GB RAM
Samsung 128GB SSD
Windows 7

Long story as short as possible: The Workstation seems to work perfectly with the old Radeon 3650 card in it (aside from ultra fast boot), and the GTX 660 card seems to work perfectly in the Office Computer. Of course ASRock and Galaxy both continue to insist that their products are perfectly compatible with one another.

-Question #1: So, is the solution as simple as unloading (selling) the GTX 660 and getting a different graphics card for the Workstation, or could it still be the motherboard, or something else entirely? If it is the GTX 660, does it need to be a more specific replacement? Does it need to be ATI/AMD, etc?
Which leads me to my next question...

-Issue #2: This is the kicker. Though I'm an audio guy, I often have to sync sound to picture and therefore do plenty of video file format converting. I understand that gaming cards are not really designed for these types of tasks, and I am not a gamer, but it was the right price and I figured it would be more than capable for my needs. I know what you're thinking 'Dude. you bought a gaming motherboard too!' but it was purely because of the features, ports, slots, etc.
I use NERO Recode 2014 edition. (I know it isn't "pro" but it suites my needs fine) It has a feature to use your graphics hardware to accelerate the process if available. So, I ran a bunch of tests using the exact same three video files and conversion settings between the three different computers, including the Mobile Rig.

Mobile Rig: (works perfectly)
HP Envy Touchsmart m7-j020dx (HPE4S19UAR) Notebook
Intel Core i7 4700MQ (2.40GHz)
Intel HD Graphics 4600 (integrated with the processor)
8GB Memory
OCZ Vector Series VTR1-25SAT3-256G 2.5" 256GB SATA III MLC (Program Drive)
1TB 5400RPM HDD
17.3" Touchscreen
Windows 8.1

In the end, the Office Computer was no contest (no surprise), but the Mobile Rig consistently converted the files a whopping 40% faster than the Workstation with the GTX 660! Needless to say, I did not see that coming. Again, I understand that gaming cards aren't meant for these tasks, but I doubt that Intel's integrated graphics is either. ..or is it? I can't see Intel just throwing in some pro level graphics architecture on their chip, but what do I know? My research told me that a gaming card should be more than adequate.

-Question #2: If the Workstation graphics card is, in fact, the root of all this evil, what kind of card should I be looking at in the $200-$250 range that will get me the most file converting speed and performance for the money?

Thanks for reading. Any help is greatly appreciated.

Jason
 
Solution
Eximo
Some USB 3.0 controllers are also known to cause issues with startup/shutdown and hibernation. Check for driver updates and/or unplug USB 3.0 devices before shutting down.

i7-4700MQ is a Haswell chip, it has the latest architecture and Intel added a lot of things to speed up encoding, rendering, and compression. Check if your software can use the AVX2 instruction set or others (Intel added a lot this go around)

600 series of graphics cards are purposely crippled by Nvidia to differentiate them from the workstation class cards. A cheap quadro K2000 or perhaps even less would be a huge upgrade on that front. Switching to AMD would also work fairly well. An older GTX570 or 580 would probably do better as well. Sadly only fairly expensive...
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cirdecus

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Sounds like software honestly, probably with the nvidia drivers. There are a few things you could try. You could try updating to the latest beta drivers OR actually stepping back to archived drivers slowly until you find one that works well.

To look into the startup delay, open run, msconfig and go to the startup tab and remove unnecessary things that are taking a while when booting. Windows 8.1 actually has a feature that shows how much each program affects your startup time. I know you have win 7, but I think you can download some shareware to do the same.

I'd also download Coretemp to keep an eye on your temperatures as you run tests on your main champion/660 computer. If heat is rising near 90C on either the CPU or the Graphics card, they could be throttling down.

I'd also go into control panel, power options, advanced, and uncheck USB power savings and anything else that you don't need. This can cause problems with certain USB connected devices.

Lastly,

Just wipe and reinstall windows 7 to eliminate any accumulated software issues since the first build.

Hope this helps.
 
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Eximo

Eximo

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Some USB 3.0 controllers are also known to cause issues with startup/shutdown and hibernation. Check for driver updates and/or unplug USB 3.0 devices before shutting down.

i7-4700MQ is a Haswell chip, it has the latest architecture and Intel added a lot of things to speed up encoding, rendering, and compression. Check if your software can use the AVX2 instruction set or others (Intel added a lot this go around)

600 series of graphics cards are purposely crippled by Nvidia to differentiate them from the workstation class cards. A cheap quadro K2000 or perhaps even less would be a huge upgrade on that front. Switching to AMD would also work fairly well. An older GTX570 or 580 would probably do better as well. Sadly only fairly expensive choices like the Titan, Tesla, and Quadros are good for doing "work"
 
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BoydPro

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cirdecus: The workstation system is running Win 8.1 pro. -The latest two NVIDIA driver versions make the acceleration option in nero recode unavailable, so the third one back worked. I then went four more versions back with no change. (still had sleep issues, etc.) Should I go farther?

I'm somewhat familiar with those features in 8.1, but the boot speed difference I was experiencing was just the graphics cards themselves. The system booted noticeably faster with the radeon 3650 installed than with the GTX 660. Maybe just the bios during post, but I would expect everything to be faster with the GTX 660 between these cards.

-The system is liquid and never gets above 60c. -I have a backup original system image I've been using, but I'm going to try wiping and installing just 8.1 to troubleshoot some more.

Eximo: I didn't realize that was a haswell chip. Nice, but it still shouldn't out pace this workstation, should it?
-Nero Recode does acknowledge the avx2 instruction. Could that be the soul performance difference. If so, that's pretty huge. Huge enough for me to unload this system and build a 2011-v3 box.
-I read somewhere else recently about Cuda not being fully realized in the 600 series or something like that? What a crock! -The cheapest k2000 I could find was $350, but there was a PNY VCQK620-PB Quadro K620 2GB with the same cuda count for $170. Would this be an improved option for what I'm doing? Or is it worth the money to go k2000? Also, how do you feel about the firepro series of cards. It sounds like most prefer to stay under the NVIDIA umbrella, but why exactly?

Thanks for the responses!
 
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Eximo

Eximo

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In terms of Haswell, it could be, it is a major improvement to a lot of applications to have the processor hard wired to do certain tasks.

GTX600 series CUDA implementation is not good, indeed. K620 would probably be fine, that will have all the single and double precision goodies turned on in the driver, and you get ECC memory. At work we are pretty much stuck with NVidia because of our software suites, so haven't had the opportunity to use a recent Firepro. Some vendors basically only support NVidia cards. It has been that way for the last ten years at this company. Benefit with the pro cards is that you can call them up and complain, and they do stuff about it.

The other counterpoint is you really don't need a Firepro, AMD does nothing to cripple their gaming cards for doing work, they just optimize and improve for Firepro and offer enterprise support on the drivers like Nvidia.

Really the cost difference is about certification and support, at the heart they are the same GPUs.
 
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BoydPro

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So, if I understand correctly, I could potentially just as well buy a newer Radeon card and be just as happy, or wold you definitely stick to the workstation cards?
 
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Jeffin90620

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Different graphics cards perform tasks better than others. While gaming cards are superior for 3D Rendering (even in production environments such as AutoCAD), workstation cards have been shown to be better in tasks involving video editing.

Take a look at this article and see that, in some cases (AutoCAD 2D, for instance), an $88 graphics card will perform as well as a $2,000 workstation card, but several of the benchmarks tests indicate that you should move away from a gaming card.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-workstation-graphics-card,3493.html

Personally, I'm torn between a GTX 970 and a Quadro K2200, because I just don't know which will work best with TurboCAD (mechanical CAD software that has 3D and Photorealistic rendering capabilities).


Good luck,

Jeff
 
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BoydPro

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This is so unbelievable to me! It WAS the f@#&ing USB 3.0 controller drivers! I'm gonna run this down in the hopes of this helping others, but I still can't believe it.

I basically blew this post from Eximo off at first (the USB 3 part anyway) "Yeah, USB. Whatever" I've been constantly checking BIOS settings and ASRock for the latest drivers through this whole ordeal thinking it was an issue they just hadn't addressed yet, and everyone knows that the manufacturers drivers are the only ones to use, right?

It was a clients older USB audio interface (M-Audio Fast Track Ultra) that got me to go deeper. I have 4 USB 2.0 ports on this machine and all the rest are USB 3.0 (12 in all). I initially plugged the FastTrack into several USB 3.0 ports getting nothing but garbled robotic audio out of it. Then after quadruple checking the audio drivers, settings, restarting the computer, etc I tried a USB 2.0 port and it worked perfectly, which only frustrated me further with this machine.

Long story longer, I ultimately ended up going into device manager, expanded the Universal Serial Bus controller tab, and proceeded to "auto update" the driver on every item. Most of them responded that the correct driver was already installed (which is pretty much all I've ever gotten from this process), but then I came to the item "Texas Instruments XHCI Controller" and windows started installing something which changed the item name to "Texas Instruments USB 3.0 eXtensible Host Controller - 0096 (Microsoft)" and suddenly everything worked. Not only the audio interface (I tried it in every port), but seemingly everything. It goes to sleep. It wakes up. It shuts down way faster.... I couldn't believe it. It's been like this for 3 or 4 days now anyway. Time will tell, but it seems to be the cure. -Almost 2 years with this. I feel like such a noob. :pt1cable:

Thank you Eximo! You are the genius of all geniuses! I am but a jester in your kingdom, a spec of sand in your galaxy. I and the world are indebted to you for saving me from going insane and killing everyone. -Good stuff!
 
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BoydPro

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Just another quick note to answer a question before it's asked: No. I never suspected the USB 3.0 ports before the USB Audio Interface came along. Transfer speeds to external HDs were a tiny bit slower than I had expected (also improved by the new drivers), but everything I had plugged into them to this point had always "worked".
 
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