Filip Zamorsky

BizonBOX 3 / Mac / Thunderbolt 3 / GPU Expander

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On 02/11/2016 at 9:13 PM, Filip Zamorsky said:

I would seriously test this box out before parting with $650, which seems a ridiculous price to pay for a case with a PSU, a PCIE slot and a bit of electronics.

Did you read the comments below the review? Some very good points made about how well this would work with GPU-hungry tasks. The Thunderbolt 3 interface has a theoretical maximum throughput of only a third of what a modern PCIE (16 lane) slot can deliver. This may make a big difference if you're using a graphics card that can really push the data through.

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1 hour ago, Tom Evans said:

Bruno, you are a lexicon of technical knowledge. Great to have you here!

Hi Tom, thanks for your kind words.

It's just that I hate seeing people getting ripped off.

Your comment about Apple's limitations is spot-on. Are we the only people that see the questionable decisions that tech companies (like Apple) are making, when they sacrifice functionality for style? I have visions of users having new Macbooks hooked up to external ports, external PCIE boxes, external hard drives etc, telling me how wonderful the new Mac laptops are. Sure they are, but you've had to add over $1000 dollars of extras! How is this still a laptop? -  ie, something you can put on your lap? Luckily, there are companies (like HP) who still understand how to design a laptop for professionals.

Edited by Bruno Mansi
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I would prefer the old good tower too. But what can we do? I am really sorry, but I can't work with Windows. 

"Thunderbolt 1 is up to 85-percent performance and Thunderbolt 2 is up to 97-percent performance." (GPU performance - not bad, I would say...)

Screen Shot 2016-11-04 at 07.25.25.png

This is a screenshot from their FAQ page:

Edited by Filip Zamorsky
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2 hours ago, Filip Zamorsky said:

I would prefer the old good tower too. But what can we do? I am really sorry, but I can't work with Windows. 

"Thunderbolt 1 is up to 85-percent performance and Thunderbolt 2 is up to 97-percent performance." (GPU performance - not bad, I would say...)

Screen Shot 2016-11-04 at 07.25.25.png

This is a screenshot from their FAQ page:

I don't really understand Bizon's answers to Dimitril's question.

If you're talking about pure Gigaflops/sec, graphics cards are over ten times faster than a modern CPU. If they're saying the processor must have a similar performance to the graphics card, are they implying that your GPU will only run at the  performance of your CPU? The whole point of offloading processing to the GPU is because they have thousands of cores all running in parallel, which is great for rendering complex graphics. A great visual example of this is at... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-P28LKWTzrI

In a typical example, a CPU will instruct the GPU to process a particular rendering task, and leave it to do it's work. The GPU would then access the main memory using DMA (direct memory access) to get the data, perform the computations, and then tell the CPU it was finished with the task. It can only do this as fast as the weakest link, so the PCIe slot and DMA need to be able to keep up with the demands of the parallel processing that goes on in a modern GPU - ie around 5000 Gflps/sec. 

 

Now, the question is this... when this transfer of data is happening over thunderbolt, how involved is the CPU? Ideally, it would hand over the task to something like a thunderbolt controller chip, which would handle the access to memory directly. In this 'best case' scenario, the interface can only transfer data at a maximum of 1/3 that a PCIe bus. However, If the CPU is more directly involved, you are only going to be able to transfer data as fast as the CPU can run (around 500Gflps/sec). The 'Processor performance must be comparable with graphics card' answer seems to imply that the CPU is more directly involved. This could be the case if there was additional driver software required to control the Bizon box.

The second answer doesn't make much sense to me. 97 percent performance of what? -  the CPU?

Finally, it's worth remembering that if you also intend to use your thunderbolt 3 to attach your media drive, this will also add to the bandwidth requirements of the port, so now your disk and graphics data are all going up & down this one cable. And don't even think about trying to piggy-back a second monitor!

As I said, get hold of a demo unit and try-before-you-buy!

 

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I remember I saw this video few months ago. This is the reason I have been waiting for new Mac just to see if they will kill Thunderbolt or no. There were such rumors that time.  New MacBook Pro has four Thunderbolt3 ports - it means, there is no reason to hook everything up on one single Thunderbolt port.

As I said before I would prefer to have good old tower with cooling instead of thin laptop. But as you can see in this video, the future is here already =)

 

Edited by Filip Zamorsky
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18 hours ago, Yerlan Tanayev said:

Last year I tested Bizon box card with MacPro Late 2013

Here pdf screenshots

What's happening with the Prores playback when you connect the GTX 980 Ti?

Playback looks fine (25fps) with the internal FirePros, but drops to 18fps with all GPUs connected, and a miserly 7.5fps with just the 980 Ti.

Seems as if the Bizon box is only helping with debayering.

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What's happening with the Prores playback when you connect the GTX 980 Ti?
Playback looks fine (25fps) with the internal FirePros, but drops to 18fps with all GPUs connected, and a miserly 7.5fps with just the 980 Ti.
Seems as if the Bizon box is only helping with debayering.
Sorry for too late answer) I didn't see. We send back their bizonbox. Now Davinci resolve upgraded to 14 and new encoding engine increased speed of render and playback. So I don't need e-GPU anymore on macpro.

Отправлено с моего PRA-LA1 через Tapatalk

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What stops anyone from a switch ?
I just went to win10 and man is it fast and fluid.
Sorry for late answer, because storage is xsan system and it works well only in OSX. Yes, I totally agree with you about resolve on win10.

Отправлено с моего PRA-LA1 через Tapatalk

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4 hours ago, Yerlan Tanayev said:

We send back their bizonbox. Now Davinci resolve upgraded to 14 and new encoding engine increased speed of render and playback. So I don't need e-GPU anymore on macpro.

Glad to see you had a happy ending.... and at such a low cost!

If you have any time to share any of your further experience/tests using the Bizonbox, I'm sure we'd all like to hear about them.

Edited by Bruno Mansi
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