Building a RIP station for ONYX - Seeking computer specs feedback

[Kemble]

As the title states.

I'm looking to build a RIP station that will ONLY have ONYX on it. It will run 1 printer and 1 cutter (for now). I'm looking for information on what computer specs are the most essential to run ONYX the fastest. Obviously time is money, so I want to spend the $ up front to make our RIP station to be as fast as possible when ripping files for print. Can you guys provide me with feedback on what is the most important computer specs on building a super fast RIP station would be? I'm already planning on connecting it to our NAS via 10G fiber ethernet. Thanks !!

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

Match rips to cores plus 2-4 cores for app and windows, and get the fastest cores you can get 4.5ghz+. Each core should be matched to 2-4gbs of memory and only use NVME drives. Onyx is not an optimized MultiThreaded RIP and it doesn't used Graphics Card Cores so don't go overboard on graphics cards or cores.

 

[ikarasu]

Doesn't onyx use more threads the moremrips you have?

We have 12 rips, and a 7950x.... Can rip 100 files in minutes, it's nice.


How are your files being stored? On the network, or on the computer?
If on the network I'd go for a 2.5gb card / network of possible.

Name is good, ram is good.... Fast cpu is probably the main thing to look at. If you rip a lot, or have a lot of rip licenses, the more cores the better... Otherwise it doesn't matter much how many cores you have unless its a multi use station.

Go on onyx and look up the specs... Then double them and you'll be safe.

 

[Kemble]

That's the thing. I tried looking up the specs of what ONYX Thrive needs on their website but was not successful, hence asking here. I send ONYX an email as well, no response from them yet.

But from the sound of it, looks like if I just go crazy on everything minus the GPU I'll be in good shape.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

That's the thing. I tried looking up the specs of what ONYX Thrive needs on their website but was not successful, hence asking here. I send ONYX an email as well, no response from them yet.

But from the sound of it, looks like if I just go crazy on everything minus the GPU I'll be in good shape.

We have a 5.5ghz i9 and it only uses 1 thread per RIP. The faster your thread, the faster you can process files. So 12 RIPs can use 12 threads at a time and up to 4gbs RAM per core. Your Storage drive matters more than core count in most ONYX setups.

You want to see fast, try Caldera with Parallel Processing using an A4000 graphics card.

 

[victor bogdanov]

If I was building a Onyx RIP PC right now I would go with a 7900X3D with 32 gigs ram and NVME PCIe SSD.

Right now I'm using a Ryzen 7 5800x in my rip pc and rarely wait on RIP.

Can easily build for under 1k or if you live near microcenter you can pick up a ready to go microcenter brand prebuilt for pretty much same price as building yourself.

I would say 99% of my files RIP in under a minute, 52" x 120" panels mostly.

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

The trick with ONYX is the engine rips the files to TIFF for most machines, input your files as TIFF and it flies. We rip whole rolls in under a minute using one rip

 

[White Haus]

The trick with ONYX is the engine rips the files to TIFF for most machines, input your files as TIFF and it flies. We rip whole rolls in under a minute using one rip

Not to get too side-tracked here, but how does that work with color management and/or cutlines if you're mostly loading TIFF files instead of PDFs?

 

[Christian @ 2CT Media]

So the issue becomes cut lines and white ink/custom ink.

Color management is fine as TIFF is a color managed file type.

There is a way to speed up PDFs too but I'm still testing the exact methods as it seems to be hit and miss with Onyx.

 

[Kemble]

What about Flexi as a RIP station? I'm not married to ONYX, I've currently got Flexi Complete on another work station and have never used it for printing. What specs are important for running a RIP station running Flexi? Same as ONYX or do they process things differently?

 

[Solventinkjet]

What about Flexi as a RIP station? I'm not married to ONYX, I've currently got Flexi Complete on another work station and have never used it for printing. What specs are important for running a RIP station running Flexi? Same as ONYX or do they process things differently?

Processing in RIPs is all going to be similar due to the nature of the process. It can't be parallelized which is why graphics cards and multi threading doesn't help other than when you're RIPing multiple jobs at once. So most RIPs are going to be similar although some are better at doing multiple jobs with multi threading support. Flexi is one of the big 3 RIPs so you can't go wrong with it. It's all down to what one you find easier to use in your situation. Contact Flexi and they will give you an evaluation license. Try it out and see how you like it.