I am about to order an HP Z800 with dual 6 core Xeons and a FX3800 with or without the Elemental Accelerator. Has anyone used the Elemental Accelerator?

Does its quality in rendering H.264 and MPEG2 at least equal Adobe Media Encoder's quality? (using 2 pass VBR)

Has it caused any problems?

Think its the same if not better but what editing package are you planning to use?

CS5 will have this feature built in http://www.dvinfo.net/forum/adobe-creative-suite/469617-cs5-x64-mercury-playback-engine.html

A couple of people on the Adobe forums have complained of some problems, but the biggest problems was the lack of performance. One asked his money back, another would be trying to get it back too.

With CS5 being launched in about two weeks and MPE included in CS5, I think you can easily do without EA.

As much as I appreciate what went into putting the Elemental accelerator in place and utilizing the NVIDIA GPU strength to gain some torque, my experience has been pretty mixed as far as the amount of advantage it gives you.

I believe there are some other threads at DVinfo that also address this...

Some users seem to experience great gains in encode time, but I have a feeling it does depend heavily on content as my personal results haven't been in line with what is typically "advertised", so to speak. I'm not sure that many people realize how much more effect on compression that motion and detail have with long GOP, variable bitrate codecs such as H.264 and AVCHD vs. some of the longer-in-the-tooth constant data rate, I-frame codecs such as DVCProHD, or even DV.

Personally, I would probably pass on the accelerator...at least at this point.

I'm sure there are gains to be had with it, it's simply a matter of whether or not the return on investment would be evident in those gains...

I'll be using CS4 and xdcam ex.

The main aspect that drew me to EA is being able to use 2 pass VBR whereas all other hardware accelerators only allow 1 pass VBR (Matrox Max & CompressHD, Leadtek/TMPGEnc/SpursEngine).

Another thread I will start is about Nucleo Pro 2 from Gridiron software for AE. C4D and some other apps, but if anyone reading this has experience with it, please let me know.