just built a new machine for cs3 prod studio. quad core 6850, 4 gig ram, xp sp2, 150 raptor boot, 2 500 wd re2 in raid 0 for data...get the picture, all good stuff. however I'm noticing very long rendering times as well as sluggishness overall in pp cs3. I'm using the onboard raid and audio on my asus p5k. now this is my real first project with prospect. Tried using prospect months ago and couldnt get past all the bugs to actually see the performance of it. Now its works great but very slow.

now I have a 15min video with very minimal editing, just a few dissolves basically, and it is taking over 3 hours to render out the hd avi. this same type of thing on my other pc with aspect takes 10minutes. but I do have an areca sata I'm using on that one as well as a sb x-fi elite. Also when editing the pc seemed to lag when I performed edits. and when I'd play a clip it would start then the sound cuts out for 5 secs or so then comes back on. So what should I look for 1st? Is it using the onboard stuff causing this or is prospect that much bigger/powerful that this is the rendering times associated with it? or I'm I just missing some tweaks that need to be set on a new install?

32-bit float rendering is significantly slower for that additional quality. You can turn off 32-bit float, and go with 8-bit RGB for projects that don't that extra 10% quality. Try reducing the number of buffer used for playback to the minimum, that might help you audio card. If go with an AJA Xena, the audio is hardware locked to each video frame, that is the best solution.