NVIDIA Maximus and Premiere Pro CS5.52

The Genesis Project by Dennis Radeke

With the advent of version 5.52 of Premiere Pro, Adobe offered support for what NVIDIA calls Maximus on the PC platform. Maximus in essence is a Quadro card combined with a Tesla card. Okay, what’s a Tesla card? Basically, it’s a Quadro card without the display outputs – essentially, a headless GPU processing powerhouse.

I wanted to take what I had done with the NVIDIA Quadro card comparison and apply the same tests to the Maximus card set I have. Read on, to learn the results.

My previous blog entry is here – give it a read if you haven’t gone through it yet. To review, I have a HP Z800 that is a couple of years old but still pretty solid all the way around. For my Maximus test, I took the comparatively lowly Quadro 2000 and matched it up with the Tesla C2075.

If you’ve looked at the Tesla C2075, you’ll notice that it seems like the Quadro 6000. Well, that’s because it is. 448 cores and 6GB of memory, meow! There are however, two downsides as I see it. First is price: While prices on this delicious card are dropping, it is still going to cost you something north of $2,000 as of this writing. In my opinion, that precludes a lot of potential Premiere Pro customers. You need to either have a lot of expendable cash or have a real need for it (more on that in a bit).

The second problem is a little more basic. You need to have a big computer power supply to drive this card. I wanted to try the Quadro 4000 + C2075, but I didn’t have two separate molex adapters to hook up both of them. Even if I did, I wasn’t entirely sure that the power supply in the Z800 would be entirely happy with me if I did. If you’re considering a Maximus configuration, be sure to know what your computer’s power supply is capable of. read more...