Pandoras Box User Forum

TL;DR:
Build a good gaming computer. SSDs, NVMe or PCI based storage medias are a must-have for using image sequences, HAP or uncompressed content.

Disclaimer
This topic depends a lot on experience that one made with their setup. We would love to hear from you what works and what can be used in production. Post below and do a little formatting for easier reading.

Summary
Because we do all the testing on our hardware and we can not cover all products on the marktet it is advisable to use similar hardware as we do. This guide contains some experience that we made when testing various hardware. You can use a system that is nothing like the one that we suggest and still have a well performing hardware. Sometimes drivers are buggy and the hardware itself is good. This can lead to problems.
It all boils down to the performance requirements that you have vs the money you want to spend.

CPU

• we use intel CPUs
• Intel i5, i7 and XEONs are a good choice
• AMD CPUs can also be used

GPU

• we use Nvidia GPUs, currently mostly the Quadro M4000 and P4000 models
• All decent Nvidia GPUs will do
• When choosing a GeForce model prefer the 60+ editions (OK: 1080, 1060, 970, 960... - MAYBE TOO WEAK: 1050, 950, 920)
• make sure the performance for Quadro cards is good, a k2000 might not perform as good as a M4000 or M6000
• avoid Nvidia NVS cards, they are meant for big displays that do not require the performance a real time media server needs
• AMD/ATI GPUs also work
• for EDID management use Nvidia Quadro or ATI FirePro cards

Storage

• use SSDs or PCI based storage solutions when using image sequences, HAP or uncompressed content
• you can use a RAID to combine multiple discs together to one large storage or to add redundancy

For single or dual output systems i have quite a lot of good experience with the following:

intel i7 3770
Nvidia Geforce GTX 670
Resolutions up to 1920x1080 works flawless.

Intel core 2 quad Q9550
Nvidia GeForce GTX 960
resolutions up to 1920x1200 have been used in previous shows without any problems.

intel i7 4700hq
Nvidia GeForce GTX 860M
For backup i have used a laptop which also works fine on a single output.

Hello!

thank you for your contribution. Can you also tell us how many videos you were able to play and what codec you were using? (edit your post)

Regards
Dennis