John M
New Member
Greetings everyone! I came to this site in quite a roundabout way and I thought I'd tell you a bit of my story.
After over ten years in the IT field, I decided to open a typical "mom & pop" kind of computer store this past March. It's a small town where if the part you needed wasn't at Office Max you had to order it online from NewEgg and wait a few days. There were few choices when it came to service & support so I was ready to fill the need.
Once the building was rented my next stop was the local sign store to order the main sign and some magnetics for my truck. While there I worked out a deal to fix their PC, a standard off-the-shelf Athlon-powered HP. I cleaned it up, upgraded it to an Athlon 4000 and a gig of DDR, and they were back
on the road. As fate would have it, they were relocating their shop -- two doors down from my new location.
They added a monster Roland that prints & cuts and were soon putting it to good use. The old computer, however, was less enthusiastic about the new workload. Large banners and wraps quickly taxed it to the limit and I got the call about a totally new setup. This began my first foray into the world of sign design hardware. I had no idea how technically demanding the industry was!
I've built and maintained servers (database, email, etc.) at the enterprise level, anywhere from x86-based to HP L-class servers. I've built massive gaming PCs. I've run networks with over a thousand nodes. This was the first case I'd had where file sizes routinely topped 5 and 6 *gigs* in size. These were 300 dpi images (if the printer does it, why skimp?) that were "only" 500-600 megs when in CDR format but when exported as an EPS the files were massive. An example file they showed me took almost an hour to export as an EPS. After that they had to wait again while VersaWorks opened the file.
Enter the new machine: a Core2Duo-based system overclocked to 3.0 gHz (on air cooling), an Asus workstation motherboard, 3 gigs of DDR2 800 (2x 1GB, 2x 512MB to maintain dual channel), a Western Digital Raptor boot drive (OS and programs) and an LSI Logic 64 bit PCI-X RAID controller running four Western Digital 500GB drives in RAID0. We're talking 200 mb/sec sustained hard drive transfer. SuperPi 1M benchmark in 19.5 seconds. In real world terms? That file that took 55 minutes to export as a 6+ GB EPS file now takes 3 minutes. Editing huge files in Corel or Photoshop is seamless.
This is a true "plug and play" system. This isn't the kind of system that was "benchmark only" overclocked - it runs 100% stable day in and day out under heavy loads. After all, their entire business relies on this machine. It's been in service now for about six months with zero issues. Total cost: about $2200, including XP Pro.
Once I saw what this sign shop experienced, I just knew others had to be in the same position. I'm sure there are plenty of people who design their own mega-computers. But, as we all know, there are just as many more who need to be able to purchase a ready-built workstation so they can keep working on signs. That's where we come in. After all, I knew not to make my own signs :Big Laugh Sure, we're a small company but just like you guys: if we didn't think we did a better job than "the other guys" we wouldn't have opened our doors!
Over the next few days I'll post some sample builds, benchmarks, and anything else you might find useful. I look forward to some pretty interesting discussions too, and not just about hardware. For example, I'm really curious about DPI choices on large jobs - I'll post a topic about it later on in the appropriate section.
In the meantime, feel free to post questions, PM, or email me with whatever you'd like. I look forward to being here for a long time, as well as learning a great deal more than I ever expected about the sign business. I'll also refer the folks at the sign shop here to this website so they can also join the community.
After over ten years in the IT field, I decided to open a typical "mom & pop" kind of computer store this past March. It's a small town where if the part you needed wasn't at Office Max you had to order it online from NewEgg and wait a few days. There were few choices when it came to service & support so I was ready to fill the need.
Once the building was rented my next stop was the local sign store to order the main sign and some magnetics for my truck. While there I worked out a deal to fix their PC, a standard off-the-shelf Athlon-powered HP. I cleaned it up, upgraded it to an Athlon 4000 and a gig of DDR, and they were back
on the road. As fate would have it, they were relocating their shop -- two doors down from my new location.
They added a monster Roland that prints & cuts and were soon putting it to good use. The old computer, however, was less enthusiastic about the new workload. Large banners and wraps quickly taxed it to the limit and I got the call about a totally new setup. This began my first foray into the world of sign design hardware. I had no idea how technically demanding the industry was!
I've built and maintained servers (database, email, etc.) at the enterprise level, anywhere from x86-based to HP L-class servers. I've built massive gaming PCs. I've run networks with over a thousand nodes. This was the first case I'd had where file sizes routinely topped 5 and 6 *gigs* in size. These were 300 dpi images (if the printer does it, why skimp?) that were "only" 500-600 megs when in CDR format but when exported as an EPS the files were massive. An example file they showed me took almost an hour to export as an EPS. After that they had to wait again while VersaWorks opened the file.
Enter the new machine: a Core2Duo-based system overclocked to 3.0 gHz (on air cooling), an Asus workstation motherboard, 3 gigs of DDR2 800 (2x 1GB, 2x 512MB to maintain dual channel), a Western Digital Raptor boot drive (OS and programs) and an LSI Logic 64 bit PCI-X RAID controller running four Western Digital 500GB drives in RAID0. We're talking 200 mb/sec sustained hard drive transfer. SuperPi 1M benchmark in 19.5 seconds. In real world terms? That file that took 55 minutes to export as a 6+ GB EPS file now takes 3 minutes. Editing huge files in Corel or Photoshop is seamless.
This is a true "plug and play" system. This isn't the kind of system that was "benchmark only" overclocked - it runs 100% stable day in and day out under heavy loads. After all, their entire business relies on this machine. It's been in service now for about six months with zero issues. Total cost: about $2200, including XP Pro.
Once I saw what this sign shop experienced, I just knew others had to be in the same position. I'm sure there are plenty of people who design their own mega-computers. But, as we all know, there are just as many more who need to be able to purchase a ready-built workstation so they can keep working on signs. That's where we come in. After all, I knew not to make my own signs :Big Laugh Sure, we're a small company but just like you guys: if we didn't think we did a better job than "the other guys" we wouldn't have opened our doors!
Over the next few days I'll post some sample builds, benchmarks, and anything else you might find useful. I look forward to some pretty interesting discussions too, and not just about hardware. For example, I'm really curious about DPI choices on large jobs - I'll post a topic about it later on in the appropriate section.
In the meantime, feel free to post questions, PM, or email me with whatever you'd like. I look forward to being here for a long time, as well as learning a great deal more than I ever expected about the sign business. I'll also refer the folks at the sign shop here to this website so they can also join the community.
