Hardware Requirements for Digital Printing Workstations

[choucove]

I have currently been working on research for a high-powered workstation to be used as a RIP center to run a digital printer in our office. We currently have a Mimaki JV5 digital printer, and this computer will be designed to run this printer. However, there has been talk of adding a new digital printer, perhaps even a flat-bed digital printer or just another JV5 digital printer.

Since I don't really have the expertise working with the digital printers or know a lot about their requirements and specifications, I wanted to ask before diving into unknown waters! What would be the general hardware requirement or ideal hardware specifications for running a JV5 digital printer with all different sizes of print jobs? What would be the general hardware requirement for running a larger, perhaps flat-bed digital printer? If we ended up running two digital printers from this workstation eventually, what might you suggest as a minimum hardware requirement for such tasks? This system really wouldn't be a design system for doing the actual designing, and wouldn't be a storage system as we already have a file server in place, it just needs to be able to do the printing.

The system I've currently been pricing is based on the Intel Core2Quad Q9300 or Core2Quad Q9450, and perhaps even go with a striped RAID array of two Seagate Cheetah 15k.5 73 GB serial attached SCSI hard drives on the LSI 00109 PCI-X SATA / SAS MegaRAID controller card with ASUS P5E Professional motherboard. Would this be adequate for running two digital printers? If the requirements for running the two digital printers is high enough, would it just be more efficient and reasonable to purchase two workstations, one for each printer, given the cost for each system?

I appreciate all of your experiences and advice!

 

[SignBurst PCs]

What RIP software are you using?

Multiple printers can be a challenge, depending on which software you are using. IDEAL hardware requirements vary for each software package. I know that they list "minimum" requirements, but they are usually not "ideal". We have built many custom RIP stations for our customers with several different RIP software packages. It seems that each RIP software package likes different hardware configurations.

 

[choucove]

I'm actually not 100% positive which software they use for printing, but I know it would have to either be FLEXI Expert, Adobe Photoshop CS3, or if they received it, there is also some printing software that comes with the printer when you purchase a JV5 series printer (usually.)

One of the big debates for me still is running a single Intel Core2Quad at around 3.0 Ghz, or going with two AMD Opteron Barcelona quad-cores at 2.2 Ghz each. The Intel system could be built on a pretty standard platform and would still have an added PCI-X serial attached SCSI controller and would have a faster clock speed. However, going with two AMD Opterons would have twice the processing cores (2 x 4 cores) on a high-class Tyan motherboard with integrated SAS controller. In reality they are about the same cost going either way since the Barcelona cores are so cheap right now. But, they are also very new, along with the Tyan motherboard to support them.

 

[synergy_jim]

advice

buy a mac....

run bootcamp.....

nuff said....

 

[choucove]

A mac in this situation would be way out of the question for two reasons. 1) Everything we've done is on PC and everyone prefers that (and since I'm the builder and I prefer it as well, it's all worked out fine that way.) and 2) Cost.

One of the designers at the office has a Mac at home that he uses, but even he has said not to get a Mac for this system just because everything they've done has always been on PC and always will be.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

I think that you are on the right track with the Intel solution. One system, built correctly will run several printers. The software question is relevant for the 32 Bit vs 64 Bit question.

As far as: "Buy a Mac" goes...

No 64 Bit CS4 for you Mac guys, only for Windows...

Wonder how fast Photoshop will run when it can use 32GB RAM (MAC will only be able to use 3GB)?

 

[Fuzzbuster]

Buy Onyx Production House for multiple printers and be DONE

Do it once!

When you get good with it you`ll understand why ANYONE running Multiple printers use it

From experience

...runing 5X printers with 2 seperate RIP stations

Best of luck

 

[synergy_jim]

I think that you are on the right track with the Intel solution. One system, built correctly will run several printers. The software question is relevant for the 32 Bit vs 64 Bit question.

As far as: "Buy a Mac" goes...

No 64 Bit CS4 for you Mac guys, only for Windows...

Wonder how fast Photoshop will run when it can use 32GB RAM (MAC will only be able to use 3GB)?

thats BS... I can run windows on my mac too.... plus adobe will just be a little late with the mac version of cs4

 

[B Snyder]

Check out IT Systems.
He is a merchant member here. I bought a computer from him for use with my VersaCamm and I've been very happy with his service and the computer performance.

 

[SignBurst PCs]

I like Onyx too. The 7.1 version is Vista 64 compatible and runs very well with mutiple printers. Just be sure they have the driver for your printer. That way you can run as much RAM as you want and can really put some muscle behid your RIP jobs.

Bootcamp.. smootcamp.. yeah, just what I want to do, jump back and forth. Where is the productivity in that?

Anyhoo... that is for another thread.

 

[Fuzzbuster]

I like Onyx too. The 7.1 version is Vista 64 compatible and runs very well with mutiple printers. Just be sure they have the driver for your printer. That way you can run as much RAM as you want and can really put some muscle behid your RIP jobs.

Bootcamp.. smootcamp.. yeah, just what I want to do, jump back and forth. Where is the productivity in that?

Anyhoo... that is for another thread.

Agreed

If your doing ANYKIND of color management and profile tweeking,with more than one printer, ProductionHouse is the only way to fly

 

[choucove]

Thank you all for your input and help! I will be letting the guys at the shop know about Onyx as a possible option in the future when we expand.

One thing I am worried about with running the Intel based system is maximum RAM in the future. For now, as we will be running only one digital printer from this workstation, and because of stability, we're going to be putting Windows XP Pro 32-bit only on the computer and maxing the memory with 4 GB installed. In the future, though, if we run two digital printers on this computer we'd want to put Windows XP Pro 64-bit and max it out with 8 GB installed. Is that enough feasibly to run two digital printers? Would there be a real noticeable difference running DDR2 800 non-ECC vs DDR2 667 ECC memory?

 

[cinemasign.grafix]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/04/09/toms_ultimate_ram_speed_tests/

 

[SignBurst PCs]

You should be fine with 32 Bit XP (and 4GB of DDR2) if you are only running two printers.

Three is the threshold that we have been seeing. That is where we are turing to Vista64 and Onyx. We ran into issues with Onyx 7.1 and XP64.

 

[choucove]

http://www.tomshardware.com/2008/04/09/toms_ultimate_ram_speed_tests/

I actually came across this at tomshardware a couple days ago and found it kind of interesting. I just wasn't too sure if this would also be the case since the DDR2 667 memory that would be used on the AMD platform would be ECC registered memory.

It doesn't appear the memory speed really makes that much of a notable speed difference, especially for costs, but the only ones I would be looking at anyways would be DDR2 667 ECC, or non-ECC DDR2 800 or DDR2 1066.

I've talked a little bit before about the graphics performance for a RIP center, but was still curious what most are comfortable with for their requirements. We have two workstations running with a PNY nVidia Quadro FX570 card and I've really come to like them. They are under $200 and have plenty of power for doing all their design work. What's the graphics load for running two digital printers? I figure most of the processing is done by the actual processor and not by the graphics card, so you wouldn't need a more powerful card for running multiple printers, correct?