Help Needed Improving my PP4 Benchmark Results

Adam Gold · December 7th, 2009, 06:42 PM

Harm--

I haven't upgraded to CS4 yet, and might not ever (even though it's sitting on my desk now, still in shrink-wrap); I've been scared off by so many of the issues others report, including diminishing support by Cineform for the functions I need and the reported glitch in multicam (which I haven't heard has been cleared up by the latest update). I've got CS3 working the way I want it for the most part and my only motivation for upgrading had been to utilize the better memory management of CS4, but with the recent talk of CS5 possibly being true 64-bit, I may just wait.

John--

The registry key should be easy to find just by using the "Find" function in regedit. Hope it works for you. I'd been unsure about whether it made sense at the time to post so much detail, but hopefully it will prove helpful.

John Hewat · December 7th, 2009, 06:51 PM

Ok... I don't know if this is good or not.

As per the first attachment, it looks as though it's already set to zero... Have I got the right one?

Searching just for AHCI produces a whole other tree as per the second attachment, though I have no idea of its relevance...

There's also a LEGACY MSAHCI section which has a "NextInstance" valuse set to 1, a whole msahci section that I don't understand... Do you remember off hand which one you had to change?

Harm,

that does make sense to me. My girlfriend is a maths teacher - she'd shoot me for not realising that instantly!

Adam Gold · December 7th, 2009, 07:09 PM

Oh, man, this is way above my pay grade....

John Hewat · December 7th, 2009, 07:14 PM

Sorry - don't mean to hassle you; and I'm very appreciative.

I'll back up the registry and trial and error through it.

Worst comes to worst, I'll reinstall Windows with everything plugged in. Though I have to say, I imagine everything was plugged in when Win7 was installed, as I had:

1. System drive
2,3,4: RAID 0.
5. Blu Ray Burner
6. E-Sata

All being read and understood.

But maybe having since disabled AHCI in the BIOS has done this...

John Hewat · December 7th, 2009, 07:58 PM

Ok I changed a value in the registry, went back to BIOS, enabled AHCI, booted, got BSOD.

Went back to BIOS, Disabled AHCI, booted.... Blue Screen!!!

So I think that whatever I did in the registry has blown my chances of a successful boot regardless of the configuration...

Maybe it's time to go back to zero and install Windows7 again...

Out of curiosity, regarding the Highpoint RAID card, it's been recommended to me both ways when it comes to installing the driver:

1. Wait until install of Windows, then install driver.
2. Load driver during Win7 install.

I tried to do option 2 the other day on a spare HDD but after loading the driver and asking Win7 to install to my system disc, it says that it is not an appropriate volume to install to.

Is that because I have loaded the RAID driver but the intended system disc is not attached to the RAID controller?

Harm Millaard · December 7th, 2009, 08:30 PM

John,

There is no need to install the Highpoint driver as the first action when installing Win7. That is only required if you want to boot from the raid which makes no sense to me. This would be different if you were to use a 4 disk raid10 like Steve does, but in your case, forget it. Just install Win7. When installing Win7 do not worry about the Highpoint not having the correct drivers. First get your DVD and BR recognized. If that has succeeded, you can install the Highpoint driver and if that breaks the DVD/BR devices, at least you know where to look.

I took your question to heart and have updated the spreadsheet with legends. Look here:

Adam Gold · December 7th, 2009, 10:04 PM

See, I knew this would happen. I broke your machine....

I'd follow Harm's advice. The whole AHCI before OS thing I think has to do with MOBO SATA ports only, and shouldn't be related to your controller card, I think.

John Hewat · December 7th, 2009, 10:30 PM

Haha, that's great Harm - explains it perfectly!

Steve,

You definietly didn't break my machine! I am very grateful for the help! I am kind of relieved that I can just go back to zero. My only frustration is that on that drive I had a list of all the services that I could afford to cull and still have total necessary functionality.

NB: Interestingly, culling those services produced amazing speed increases in all day to day operations on the computer... but... as far as the PP4 BM... no gain whatsoever for the processor intensive tasks...

All right, time to go back to zero!

After this, I promise to take it easy on my mahines so that you guys can have some time off! I owe you more than I can ever repay!

Adam Gold · December 8th, 2009, 01:25 AM

Hm... maybe it IS time for a Mac, after all.....

Nah.

John Hewat · December 8th, 2009, 02:19 AM

Haha, gee I hope not. I don't want to learn all this stuff again.

Although things like this tempt me:

This may amuse you. As I installed Win7 on the editing machine with AHCI enabled, it took aaaaaages. Like, an hour plus, compared to the usual 15 - 20 minute install. Never the less, all goes fine right up until the Enter a User name and Computer Name screen, at which point the screen flashed repeatedly, maybe 5 times a second over and over forever, preventing me from typing anything, because with every refresh, the cursor position reset to the center of the screen. I couldn't do anything!

So, I had to press reset. Luckily, upon boot, it took me to the "Setting up your computer" screen as though the reset had never happened.

As for the drives... All of them there except the HD DVD/Blu Ray Combo drive and the Highpoint RAID drives...

First of all, I have an IDE DVD Drive which is fine and from which I installed Win7.

As far as SATA though:

1. C:\ system HDD
2. D:\ hot swappable HDD
3. E:\ internal back up HDD
4. F:\ E-Sata back up HDD
5. J:\ SATA Blu-Ray Drive

But...

6. Blu-Ray/HD DVD Combo... not shown in Disk Management but is in Device Manager as "This device cannot start"... Any ideas?

Highpoint RAID isn't there yet either but I'll install the drivers and I'm sure it will appear.

EDIT: First thing that happened after using Windows the first time: Windows took about 1 minute to tell me it had downloaded updates and needed to restart. I clicked RESTART NOW. It shut down, booted up, got to the Starting Windows screen, with the brightly lit Windows logo on the screen... and sat there... and sat there... and sat there... five minutes went by... and it sat there... and I almost pressed reset.

But finally, it started Windows... and there was my Blu-Ray/HD DVD drive - there was my 2.7TB RAID 0!

It just worked!!!!

I am so happy I could kiss you guys!

I'm now about to go about fine-tuning it as per Harm's guide on the Adobe forums.

EDIT: Ok, initially I thought these long waits on the Starting Windows screen were because of significant updates to the system... but it looks like I'm stuck with them. Every time I reboot, no matter the reason, even if I just click Restart straight after booting... it takes five minutes plus to get into Windows from that screen - at least! It just sits there saying "Starting Windows" for ages. It's interesting that, as I said earlier, the same thing happened with the installation. It took ages, where usually, installing Win7 is a pretty snappy process.

Ok, so the looooong boot problem seems to be caused by all the discs being plugged in. I remove them prior to boot, boot up takes seconds.

The trouble is... if I do it that way and then try to add them once Windows has loaded... too bad. This is strange, since SATA is supposed to be hot-swappable. Weirder still is that the ones I leave plugged in for boot-up, when I unplug them whilst running Windows, it can take up to a minute for their icon to disappear from My Computer - and in fact it's still clickable for that whole time!

So my next challenge is how to treat each of these drives in the BIOS. Do I enable them (not all of them appear) so that an ! appears next to them?

Harm Millaard · December 8th, 2009, 04:23 AM

John,

Try this as well:

# Go to Windows command line with administrative rights
# Type:
vssadmin list shadowstorage to see the current allocation.
# To change it, use:
# vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]
# I recommend using 1% of your boot drive, so for a 500GB drive I would set the maxsize to 5GB, and keep it the same even on larger drives:
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=5GB

Maybe this will also help.

John Hewat · December 8th, 2009, 04:34 AM

Will do. What does it do exactly?

Also, I did it fine for C drive. D drive gave me grief. And I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to put this shadow storage on each individual drive or all of them on c drive. I'm not sure if I follow correctly.

Harm Millaard · December 8th, 2009, 05:47 AM

Shadowstorage is used to store system restore points. It is pretty large by default, but usually you only need a couple of restore points if at all, so this wastes quite some space on your disk. By reducing it to 5GB you have enough space to store around 5 different restore points before the oldest one is being overwritten by a new one.

Likely only your C drive has shadowstorage allocated. Not your D drive and you don't need to allocate room on the D drive.

For further info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...8WS.10%29.aspx

Adam Gold · December 8th, 2009, 12:15 PM

This is sort of off-the-wall and probably isn't the issue, but you might go into your BIOS on startup and look at the boot order. Sometimes things get mucked up and the system spends ages looking for Windows on every drive but the correct one. I actually had this problem with an external USB drive that somehow got inserted into the Boot order.

Steve Kalle · December 9th, 2009, 12:20 AM

John, I don't know how you are keeping it together. I would have thrown my pc out the window by now, or maybe even....bought a Mac.

Here are some thoughts:
Have you run MemTest overnight? Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool

Have you checked your power supply?

Have you tried the HD DVD/BR drive on ports 1-4 or another working PC?

Here are some ideas:
Get an external 5.25" USB enclosure for the HD DVD/BR drive
Get a simple PCI Sata card for a couple of the drives

On a different topic:
John, what power supply are you using and does it have only a single 8-pin CPU power cable? If so, how did you get around this? (I ask because I just read that using Molex-to-8pin CPU power cables in a dual-CPU pc can be bad for the CPU)

December 7th, 2009, 06:42 PM	#46
Adam Gold Inner Circle Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Woodinville, WA USA Posts: 3,467	Harm-- I haven't upgraded to CS4 yet, and might not ever (even though it's sitting on my desk now, still in shrink-wrap); I've been scared off by so many of the issues others report, including diminishing support by Cineform for the functions I need and the reported glitch in multicam (which I haven't heard has been cleared up by the latest update). I've got CS3 working the way I want it for the most part and my only motivation for upgrading had been to utilize the better memory management of CS4, but with the recent talk of CS5 possibly being true 64-bit, I may just wait. John-- The registry key should be easy to find just by using the "Find" function in regedit. Hope it works for you. I'd been unsure about whether it made sense at the time to post so much detail, but hopefully it will prove helpful. __________________ "It can only be attributable to human error... This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error."

December 7th, 2009, 06:51 PM	#47
John Hewat Major Player Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Melbourne, AUSTRALIA Posts: 735	Ok... I don't know if this is good or not. As per the first attachment, it looks as though it's already set to zero... Have I got the right one? Searching just for AHCI produces a whole other tree as per the second attachment, though I have no idea of its relevance... There's also a LEGACY MSAHCI section which has a "NextInstance" valuse set to 1, a whole msahci section that I don't understand... Do you remember off hand which one you had to change? Harm, that does make sense to me. My girlfriend is a maths teacher - she'd shoot me for not realising that instantly! Attached Thumbnails __________________ John Hewat Mammoth Media Productions

December 7th, 2009, 07:09 PM	#48
Adam Gold Inner Circle Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Woodinville, WA USA Posts: 3,467	Oh, man, this is way above my pay grade.... __________________ "It can only be attributable to human error... This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error."

December 7th, 2009, 07:14 PM	#49
John Hewat Major Player Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Melbourne, AUSTRALIA Posts: 735	Sorry - don't mean to hassle you; and I'm very appreciative. I'll back up the registry and trial and error through it. Worst comes to worst, I'll reinstall Windows with everything plugged in. Though I have to say, I imagine everything was plugged in when Win7 was installed, as I had: 1. System drive 2,3,4: RAID 0. 5. Blu Ray Burner 6. E-Sata All being read and understood. But maybe having since disabled AHCI in the BIOS has done this... __________________ John Hewat Mammoth Media Productions

December 7th, 2009, 07:58 PM	#50
John Hewat Major Player Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Melbourne, AUSTRALIA Posts: 735	Ok I changed a value in the registry, went back to BIOS, enabled AHCI, booted, got BSOD. Went back to BIOS, Disabled AHCI, booted.... Blue Screen!!! So I think that whatever I did in the registry has blown my chances of a successful boot regardless of the configuration... Maybe it's time to go back to zero and install Windows7 again... Out of curiosity, regarding the Highpoint RAID card, it's been recommended to me both ways when it comes to installing the driver: 1. Wait until install of Windows, then install driver. 2. Load driver during Win7 install. I tried to do option 2 the other day on a spare HDD but after loading the driver and asking Win7 to install to my system disc, it says that it is not an appropriate volume to install to. Is that because I have loaded the RAID driver but the intended system disc is not attached to the RAID controller? __________________ John Hewat Mammoth Media Productions

December 7th, 2009, 08:30 PM	#51
Harm Millaard Trustee Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Rotterdam, Netherlands Posts: 1,832	John, There is no need to install the Highpoint driver as the first action when installing Win7. That is only required if you want to boot from the raid which makes no sense to me. This would be different if you were to use a 4 disk raid10 like Steve does, but in your case, forget it. Just install Win7. When installing Win7 do not worry about the Highpoint not having the correct drivers. First get your DVD and BR recognized. If that has succeeded, you can install the Highpoint driver and if that breaks the DVD/BR devices, at least you know where to look. I took your question to heart and have updated the spreadsheet with legends. Look here: Attached Thumbnails

December 7th, 2009, 10:04 PM	#52
Adam Gold Inner Circle Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Woodinville, WA USA Posts: 3,467	See, I knew this would happen. I broke your machine.... I'd follow Harm's advice. The whole AHCI before OS thing I think has to do with MOBO SATA ports only, and shouldn't be related to your controller card, I think. __________________ "It can only be attributable to human error... This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error."

December 7th, 2009, 10:30 PM	#53
John Hewat Major Player Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Melbourne, AUSTRALIA Posts: 735	Haha, that's great Harm - explains it perfectly! Steve, You definietly didn't break my machine! I am very grateful for the help! I am kind of relieved that I can just go back to zero. My only frustration is that on that drive I had a list of all the services that I could afford to cull and still have total necessary functionality. NB: Interestingly, culling those services produced amazing speed increases in all day to day operations on the computer... but... as far as the PP4 BM... no gain whatsoever for the processor intensive tasks... All right, time to go back to zero! After this, I promise to take it easy on my mahines so that you guys can have some time off! I owe you more than I can ever repay! __________________ John Hewat Mammoth Media Productions

December 8th, 2009, 01:25 AM	#54
Adam Gold Inner Circle Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Woodinville, WA USA Posts: 3,467	Hm... maybe it IS time for a Mac, after all..... Nah. __________________ "It can only be attributable to human error... This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error."

December 8th, 2009, 02:19 AM	#55
John Hewat Major Player Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Melbourne, AUSTRALIA Posts: 735	Haha, gee I hope not. I don't want to learn all this stuff again. Although things like this tempt me: This may amuse you. As I installed Win7 on the editing machine with AHCI enabled, it took aaaaaages. Like, an hour plus, compared to the usual 15 - 20 minute install. Never the less, all goes fine right up until the Enter a User name and Computer Name screen, at which point the screen flashed repeatedly, maybe 5 times a second over and over forever, preventing me from typing anything, because with every refresh, the cursor position reset to the center of the screen. I couldn't do anything! So, I had to press reset. Luckily, upon boot, it took me to the "Setting up your computer" screen as though the reset had never happened. As for the drives... All of them there except the HD DVD/Blu Ray Combo drive and the Highpoint RAID drives... First of all, I have an IDE DVD Drive which is fine and from which I installed Win7. As far as SATA though: 1. C:\ system HDD 2. D:\ hot swappable HDD 3. E:\ internal back up HDD 4. F:\ E-Sata back up HDD 5. J:\ SATA Blu-Ray Drive But... 6. Blu-Ray/HD DVD Combo... not shown in Disk Management but is in Device Manager as "This device cannot start"... Any ideas? Highpoint RAID isn't there yet either but I'll install the drivers and I'm sure it will appear. EDIT: First thing that happened after using Windows the first time: Windows took about 1 minute to tell me it had downloaded updates and needed to restart. I clicked RESTART NOW. It shut down, booted up, got to the Starting Windows screen, with the brightly lit Windows logo on the screen... and sat there... and sat there... and sat there... five minutes went by... and it sat there... and I almost pressed reset. But finally, it started Windows... and there was my Blu-Ray/HD DVD drive - there was my 2.7TB RAID 0! It just worked!!!! I am so happy I could kiss you guys! I'm now about to go about fine-tuning it as per Harm's guide on the Adobe forums. EDIT: Ok, initially I thought these long waits on the Starting Windows screen were because of significant updates to the system... but it looks like I'm stuck with them. Every time I reboot, no matter the reason, even if I just click Restart straight after booting... it takes five minutes plus to get into Windows from that screen - at least! It just sits there saying "Starting Windows" for ages. It's interesting that, as I said earlier, the same thing happened with the installation. It took ages, where usually, installing Win7 is a pretty snappy process. Ok, so the looooong boot problem seems to be caused by all the discs being plugged in. I remove them prior to boot, boot up takes seconds. The trouble is... if I do it that way and then try to add them once Windows has loaded... too bad. This is strange, since SATA is supposed to be hot-swappable. Weirder still is that the ones I leave plugged in for boot-up, when I unplug them whilst running Windows, it can take up to a minute for their icon to disappear from My Computer - and in fact it's still clickable for that whole time! So my next challenge is how to treat each of these drives in the BIOS. Do I enable them (not all of them appear) so that an ! appears next to them? __________________ John Hewat Mammoth Media Productions Last edited by John Hewat; December 8th, 2009 at 04:24 AM.

December 8th, 2009, 04:23 AM	#56
Harm Millaard Trustee Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Rotterdam, Netherlands Posts: 1,832	John, Try this as well: # Go to Windows command line with administrative rights # Type: vssadmin list shadowstorage to see the current allocation. # To change it, use: # vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size] # I recommend using 1% of your boot drive, so for a 500GB drive I would set the maxsize to 5GB, and keep it the same even on larger drives: vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=5GB Maybe this will also help.

December 8th, 2009, 04:34 AM	#57
John Hewat Major Player Join Date: Dec 2005 Location: Melbourne, AUSTRALIA Posts: 735	Will do. What does it do exactly? Also, I did it fine for C drive. D drive gave me grief. And I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to put this shadow storage on each individual drive or all of them on c drive. I'm not sure if I follow correctly. __________________ John Hewat Mammoth Media Productions

December 8th, 2009, 05:47 AM	#58
Harm Millaard Trustee Join Date: Aug 2006 Location: Rotterdam, Netherlands Posts: 1,832	Shadowstorage is used to store system restore points. It is pretty large by default, but usually you only need a couple of restore points if at all, so this wastes quite some space on your disk. By reducing it to 5GB you have enough space to store around 5 different restore points before the oldest one is being overwritten by a new one. Likely only your C drive has shadowstorage allocated. Not your D drive and you don't need to allocate room on the D drive. For further info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...8WS.10%29.aspx

December 8th, 2009, 12:15 PM	#59
Adam Gold Inner Circle Join Date: Jan 2007 Location: Woodinville, WA USA Posts: 3,467	This is sort of off-the-wall and probably isn't the issue, but you might go into your BIOS on startup and look at the boot order. Sometimes things get mucked up and the system spends ages looking for Windows on every drive but the correct one. I actually had this problem with an external USB drive that somehow got inserted into the Boot order. __________________ "It can only be attributable to human error... This sort of thing has cropped up before, and it has always been due to human error."

December 9th, 2009, 12:20 AM	#60
Steve Kalle Trustee Join Date: Aug 2009 Location: Chicago, IL Posts: 1,554	John, I don't know how you are keeping it together. I would have thrown my pc out the window by now, or maybe even....bought a Mac. Here are some thoughts: Have you run MemTest overnight? Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool Have you checked your power supply? Have you tried the HD DVD/BR drive on ports 1-4 or another working PC? Here are some ideas: Get an external 5.25" USB enclosure for the HD DVD/BR drive Get a simple PCI Sata card for a couple of the drives On a different topic: John, what power supply are you using and does it have only a single 8-pin CPU power cable? If so, how did you get around this? (I ask because I just read that using Molex-to-8pin CPU power cables in a dual-CPU pc can be bad for the CPU)