Hi guys,

I'm thinking about upgrading our current machines from x99 motherboards to a dual socket C612 computer.

Although I could get our systems more or less stable with our current hardware, I still feel we're a bit on the edge of what x99 can handle.

Since we want to move up the game and add in more camera's, some instant replays, and perhaps a 4k cam for virtual zooms and pan/tilting, i think we also better upgrade our hardware.

In the 4k livestream of the fun time liveshow, Martin explained they moved to z170 with a plx chip in order to keep up with the high bandwidth demands of 4k video. This had to do with the limited bandwidth of dmi 2.0, vs dmi 3.0 on the z170.

Now, since we recently upgraded, i find it a bit sad to dump our 2011v3 10 core xeons, and think I might have found a solution:

If we buy a Asus z10pe-d8 WS, we can put the 2 xeons of our current systems together in one, and build a super 20 core machine!

Theoretically it sounds tempting: with a double processor, we might also get acces to double the lanes, and double the bandwidth.

So if right now we can do 10 sdi HD inputs, and local recording, we should be able to handle a multicorder or instant replay, a 4k camera and some extra hd sdi inputs on top of it, right?

Or am i overlooking something here?

We ended up not upgrading, because we don't know if the same problem x99 has would be present in c612. Those kinds of experiments are a bit too expensive to handle, so we're now waiting for x299 in order to make an upgrade :)

x99 is not the super platform it should theoretically be: there are some memory problems with this platform, which cause vmix (and other video mixing programs probably too) not to work as expected.

Audio dropouts, meager performance, unstable systems,.. There are some users reporting here they don't have problems with the platform, but none of them is actually pushing x99 even near it's theoretical limit as far as I know.

Martin will soon test the platform with videocards which handle memory different, so all hope is not lost, but especially with 16 sources, I would personally look elsewhere :)

In fact: when we bought 2 brand new x99 systems to do the Tomorrowland captation (huge production) and invited forum user Matthijs to join us, he was amazed by how bad x99 performed, compared to his older and cheaper setup which costed a lot less.

I have no idea what chipset would be the best to get 16 HD inputs working. I think it would be some sort of combination of an older 40 lanes setup and a high end videocard such as the 1080TI. If I were you, I'd experiment with second hand ebay processors and motherboards, and see which ones perform the best. There's a big chance you can get a better result with a 500$ second hand server, compared to a 2000$ X99 machine :)