Under the Hood: HP Z820 Workstation
Here we take a look under the hood of HP's new flagship workstation, the HP Z820, and examine both its design and performance advantages as a top-of-the-line system for video editing, graphics, effects, and other postproduction tasks.
Performance in Testing
If you've used the Z800 workstation in the past, you'll find this first example by Streaming Media's Jan Ozer quite interesting. Jan found that, for users who perform multiple tasks simultaneously on their workstation, such as editing content and running a Blu-ray Disc authoring session in the background, the benefits of the Z820 are very noticeable. As a quick reminder, the machine we're using is a hex-core machine configured by Videoguys.com specifically for video editing and production. In other words, your mileage may vary.
For editing RED 4K content, for instance, the Z820 performed 44% faster than the older Z800 series workstation (Figure 5, below). For AVC-Intra content, the results are even better: a 54% decrease in time required to push through equivalent content.
Figure 5. The new Z820 vs. the older, similarly configured, Z800 model.
In addition, see our second example: When it comes to outputting streaming media formats, the Z820 delivers. When working with Adobe Media Encoder, the Z820 shaves almost 40% off transcoding time (Figure 6, below).
Figure 6. Encoding time comparisons, Z800 vs. Z820.
Projects that used to take more than an hour to transcode are done in less than 40 minutes--a significant performance boost, even for short-form renders.
For more information about HP products, contact this video’s sponsor, Videoguys.com, at 800-323-2325.
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