RED Camera Users Might Want to Look at HP's 820 Tower

Sometimes, it takes special equipment to perform certain tasks, equipment that a PC builder might not have. HP decided to make up for the problem by teaming up with another.

The partnership we are going to show you today is one that Hewlett-Packard made with RED, for the use of the latter's optical drives and video accelerators. For those that aren't familiar with the hardware, the RED Rocket “provides real time, full quality playback, onto a 1080/2K/4K monitor or projector via DVI and HD-SDI through REDCINE-X.” Basically, it is a PCI Express add-in board that accelerates transcoding and playback of R3D files, in real-time. HP's 820 Tower RED edition will have one or more such adapters inside, right off the bat, in addition to a pair of REDMag readers.

That means that the machine will cost more than most people can afford. A high-end PC is already expensive, but the figures are guaranteed to go off the charts after the upgrades, considering that a single Red Rocket costs $4,750 / 3 764.76 Euro. HP and RED will showcase the HP 820 Tower RED edition at the Adobe CS6 roadshow, touring the US until June 30th. The starting price will be $10,000 / 7925 Euro (selling through ProMax and Tekserve, among others). For those who want an example configuration, the workstation has two liquid-cooler Intel Xeon processors, making the maximum possible core number 16. Memory-wise, up to 32 GB of DDR3 RAM (random access memory) are available.

What's more, an NVIDIA Quadro 5000 graphics card was chosen (this is, after all, a professional system for image and video editing). Other features include a 2.5-inch 10K SAS boot drive, a 300 GB primary storage unit and every other component and port people expect to see. All the hardware will be crammed inside a black tower case. As for software, RED promises that a “tuned” version of Adobe's Creative Suite 6 will be installed on the system.

Posted in: Hardware, Preview