The people using this app, do you need a mother of a graphics card? Does the app work fine with a moderate graphics card?

My rig has an i7 CPU, fast hard drives and 3gb memory. I'm getting freeze crashes regularly, the memory's tests fine so I suspect the 9600GT graphics card being faulty.

I'll replace it, just wanting to know if you folks think I really should buy a proper games card.

cheers Billy

The people using this app, do you need a mother of a graphics card? Does the app work fine with a moderate graphics card?

My rig has an i7 CPU, fast hard drives and 3gb memory. I'm getting freeze crashes regularly, the memory's tests fine so I suspect the 9600GT graphics card being faulty.

I'll replace it, just wanting to know if you folks think I really should buy a proper games card.

cheers Billy

Vegas doesn't use the graphics card at all other than to do basic displaying. So a hot graphics card doesn't do anything. If you use other applications outside of Vegas, or plugins like Magic Bullet that can leverage the graphics card, then get a nice one. I got the NVidia Quadro FX4800 in my new editing machine, but it's ... pricey. :)

-P

William, try this if you're using the 32 bit version of Vegas. It harnesses the power of certain NVidia graphics cards for better preview.

DIVIDE FRAME: Software solutions for the broadcast industry (http://www.divideframe.com/?p=gpudecoder)

With an i7 you wouldn't have any problem editing AVCHD in real time with Vegas. You don't need anything more than you already got. I am assuming you use more than 2 GBs of RAM though.

Eugenia might be right, I don't know.

I have an i7 set at 3.3Ghz with 12 gigs of ram and I couldn't get one line of AVCHC to play properly in Vegas. The video files were on on a raid 0 hard drive configuration. Admittedly I was using multicam, but the other lines of video were HD, not avchd.

Your experience may differ Eugenia, but my short run with AVCHD on an i7 wasn't fun.

There's 3gb of ram with an MSI EX58 board. The computer runs fast as anything for hours, then crash freezes, where only hitting reset gets it to respond.

I suspect the GT9600 graphics card, as it takes 20 seconds to post, but always has done that for a year or so. That is the only used part in the rig. Includes a 520 watt Corsair power supply. If I change the graphics card for a 3650 ATI card, it should need less power also, in case that's the problem.

If I change the graphics card for a 3650 ATI card, it should need less power also, in case that's the problem.

There is a LOT more support for Nvidia on PCs. More for ATI on Macs.

I have an i7 set at 3.3Ghz with 12 gigs of ram and I couldn't get one line of AVCHC to play properly in Vegas....

Your experience may differ Eugenia, but my short run with AVCHD wasn't fun.

I know plenty of people with i7 machines that can't do AVCHD effectively. It's no cure all.

You know what William? I bet it's your power supply. Of course I don't know, I can't know. But I tell you what, I have a 750 watt power supply, and was having random issues. I added a second power supply (550 watts) and the issues were gone. (Yes I have a large case).

550 watts might be enough on paper for your PC, but the intermittent issue sounds like a power supply issue to me. Freezes and crashes are common with inadequate PSU. Of course there are other causes, but its happened to me.

If you have a spot for another PSU throw in a second 500w unit and see what happens. Run only the hard drives and DVD burner, floppy, etc on it.

I don't know how many hard drives you have, burners, etc, and I don't know if you're underpowered, but you have the symptoms.

My issues with Vegas and AVCHD footage in version 9 has been fixed with the purchase of Neoscene,No more sluggish playback issues, I can edit multi cam videos easily in Vegas without the frustration of waiting for my footage to catch up and sync after switching between the camera files as well as adding any transitions or corrections...My i7 core setup has never performed better....

I bet it's your power supply. But I tell you what, I have a 750 watt power supply, and was having random issues. I added a second power supply (550 watts) and the issues were gone. (Yes I have a large case).

550 watts might be enough on paper for your PC, but the intermittent issue sounds like a power supply issue to me. Freezes and crashes are common with inadequate PSU. Of course there are other causes, but its happened to me.

I don't know how many hard drives you have, burners, etc, and I don't know if you're underpowered, but you have the symptoms.

It's a Corsair 520watt job. I could replace it with a 650watt unit, which is appreciably higher.

The rig has 2 sata hard disks, a GT9600 graphics card and a blu-ray burner. So there's not loads of kit, but yes, I am thinking seriously that I've put an inadequate psu in there.

William, the below PSU calculator is a handy tool. Some people would tell you the newegg calculator is designed to get you to buy a bigger supply. That may, or may not be true, I don't know. I do know that each external drive you run and each add-in card you run adds to the power requirement of your rig.

For example, I run 10 internal drives, three of them are 10k drives. I also run 3 external drives. Plus external and internal burners. These things all add up.

You want more, not less power, than required. Better to have too much than too little, as you need plenty of headroom. My old Dell had a completely inadequate PSU and it took me a long time to realize the PSU was the cause of lots of strange behaviours that couldn't be explained otherwise. After you reinstall windows mulitple times and replace video cards several times you finally catch on. Anyway, a good PSU will last you and can move with you into your next build.


Newegg - Power Supply Calculator (http://educations.newegg.com/tool/psucalc/index.html)

Newegg quotes me a 520watt unit - just what I've got! I'll upgrade anyhow to 650watt and see if it helps.

cheers.

Thanks for the post. I was also thinking about these issues.

Greg

Edmonton DJ (http://www.puttinonthehitz.ca)

Vegas doesn't use the graphics card; the CPU is much more important. This is why Vegas is such an attractive option for me when editing on a laptop.

I do have a powerful video card, yes (a 9800GTX+) but I mainly use it for Badaboom encoding for archival purposes. (I.e., I'm done with the project, I don't want it taking up tons of space on my hard drive, but I don't want to throw my raw footage away - say, 8mbps of h.264 is good enough.)

I'm actually pretty pleased with how Vegas allows you to lower the quality on the timeline so that I just edit in "preview quality," preview stills as "best" and render in "best quality."

The problem of crash freezes persisted in apps outside of Vegas.

The 650watt PSU made no difference at all. An ATI graphics card made no difference either.
The trouble is it's a friend's computer who has nil experience in running them.
I've got it back here and I've upgradeded the bios and am running at fail-safe bios settings.

I'll double the ram to 6gb - no idea if Windows XP Pro 32bit will see any extra ram at all.

If I can see any instabilty in windows, I'll see if MSI can help - it's an X58 Pro board.

William,

I wish I had read your posts earlier...

The problems you describe could be hardware related but don't leave out the software... A few suggestions..

- The i7 runs hot and the signs you describe may be heat related, particularly if the problems occur after the system has been running for awhile during high intensity work. Go to download hardware monitor: CPUID (http://www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php) Run that program and take a look at your system temps while idle, and also under load.

- All 32-bit OS's (Xp, Vista, etc) will only see a maximum of just under 4Gb of memory on a computer.

- Not all power supplies are created equally. I happen to run the same Corsair 520 watt PS in my i7 system and I've not had a single freeze/crash since I built the system. I'm also running it at 3.0Ghz as well. That's a good unit. If you're running something like Jeff, you definately need more power, but the vast majority of systems are fine on 450-550 watts of power with a good PS.

- You're a prime candidate for a format and reinstall. If you can verify that your CPU is not overheating, and you believe your RAM is ok. Then sometimes you just need to wipe the slate clean and start over. Why not go for Windows 7 64-bit? All reports are this OS will be extremely stable and fast. I'm running the RC version on one of my computers and I'm impressed.

Jon

I had the same problem with a Xeon Processor where the whole thing just kept freezing. It turned out to be a loose CPU Fan. Amazing the trouble that caused!

I ran Prime95 and it ran fine until a windows update restarted the computer overnight, after over 12 hours of success. Windows update is now disabled!!

I tried to render the 5 minute HDV and AVCHD files into a 5 minute movie, and it crashed after 95% of the movie, citing a problem of low virtual memory - so I've increased that to 4000mb from 2000mb.

The 3x2gb memory turned up, so that's in - and now it has completed a few versions of AVCHD movie clips, with a range of transitions in between each clip - and not crashed since.

So I take it the problem has been down to lack of memory or virtual memory.

I'll get it through a 24 hour spell of Prime95 anyhow and knock out some longer movies, but it now appears stable and working.

Thanks everybody.

I had the same problem with a Xeon Processor where the whole thing just kept freezing. It turned out to be a loose CPU Fan. Amazing the trouble that caused!

I had a similar problem. The fan was not loose but I only had a bit of the heat transfer gel on the cpu heatsink. For the first 2 weeks after I built my i7 920 it was crashing almost daily.

I bought really good heat transfer gel and upgraded my cpu fan. Very few problems with crashing since then. I have 6gb of Ram, this is just enough for Vegas 9 64 to edit AVCHD in real time, but even so I sometimes have a bit of lag sync issues when a preview clip starts playing. Very few other problems. At some point I will upgrade to 12 gb of RAM which should be plenty. In my experience 9 64 works much better than either 8 or 9/32 in terms of both speed and crashing. I believe that a 32 bit system doesn't utilize more than 3 gb of RAM, or is it 6. Someone else can comment on that.

It's 3GB, and only 2 or so of that for programs without some trickery.