In what will undoubtedly be a platform for new announcements from workstation exhibitors such as HP and Boxx at this year’s Siggraph in Boston, 1 Beyond will be taking the show floor with its new HD OctoFlex. Unlike many of the other workstations that are currently on the market, supporting only Windows Server 2003, the OctoFlex is an 8 processor professional system that supports Windows XP, allowing it to work with most of the pro video and graphics software now available.
“There’s a saying that ‘time is a video professional’s most precious commodity,'” says Terry Cullen, 1 Beyond’s Founder and CEO. “You’re either trying to make a deadline, become more efficient, be more productive and make more money. Whether you’re compositing, editing, doing animation, encoding or compression, you need as much power as you can possibly get. The new 1 Beyond HD OctoFlex system can do it all, faster. It gives users unmatched processing speed, which in turn fosters their creativity, increases productivity and shortens their projects’ turnaround time.”

According to Cullen, recent tests with the new OctoFlex, equipped with the Matrox Axio LE card, yielded favorable results. “We ran benchmarks against traditional workstations, against dual xeons, dual core opterons, and in just about every situation-editing, compositing, encoding, etc.-the OctoFlex had significantly improved efficiency.”

The HD OctoFlex is currently available at a price of $9,995 and is capable of handling uncompressed 2K and 4K applications, multiple layers of complex uncompressed real-time effects and high-resolution HD projects.

The newest member of 1 Beyond’s Pro HD Flex line of systems, OctoFlex is also fully customizable and is available as a tower, rack unit or double wide configuration.
“I think one of the main benefits is the price performance,” adds Cullen. “The OctoFlex is under 10K and it’s a turnkey, 8-processor system that supports Windows XP. It’s a real breakthrough.”