Hi,

I want to configure a Media Composer 3.5 workstation running on a Dell workstation.

Officialy, Dell T5400 with Nvidia NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700 is required.

Now Dell ships T5500 workstations, with 768MB Nvidia Quadro FX3800 video card.

Is the T5500 / FX3800 also supported?

In order to have better performance:

  a) Does a good graphic card allow to not have the the "Mojo" device?

  b) If I need the Mojo device, will it work on a IEEE 1394b firewire card?

  c) What is most important?

                - Lot of processors + core?

                - top speed of the processor ?

                - higher bus memory speed?

                -  double graphic card ?

                - disk speed ( does scsi / sas gives an edge ? )

How does each of these components impact the performance of the computations in Media Composer?

Typically I would like to know if it's better to go for 2 2.4Ghz Xeons VS a single 3.2 GHZ Xeon ( these are 4 core processors ) ?

Does a secondary graphic card make a difference?

Currently we have mojo device on HP workstation. What kind of computation does the Mojo device? Is it possible to make the same things on MC 3.5 without the Mojo device?

Thank you for your help.

Did you go with the T5500?  If so, good or bad experience?

The Mojo SDI is really for monitoring (SD only) and getting analog sources into MC.  You will need the 1394B card to work with the Mojo SDI.  You can run MC 3.5 without any hardware, you will just not be able to monitor video on an NTSC monitor. 

you can monitor SD via firewire