Please help me with settings for AE7 for my current rig. I need to know what to set options/preferences for best performance and such- i.e. cache, memory allocation, scratch, so AE will run as fast as its potential on my machine.


Dual core PentiumD-930
3GB DDR2 667
5 Hard disks, 4 sata, 1 IDE totalling about 1TB
nVidia 7900GS 256MB PCI-E

Wow no one huh?

Bueller.....

Are your disks in any sort of RAID? I would set scratch disks to the fastest non-redundant drive. Cache I would leave at default settings, mem alloc should be as high as allowable. I'm not aware there are many settings to tune in AE..

Thanks for the chime in. No raid on this system. Thanks, I'll give those settings a go.

Hi Marco,
There are some tweaks you can do but most are dependent on your especific settings and configs.
I saw that you have 3Gb RAM, so, be aware that AE cant use the 3Gb unless you set the /3GB switch in the boot.ini file in your windows (windows 32 bits limits the memory usage to 2Gb doesnt matter how much ram you have installed).
Here you have an explanation on how to do that: http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/platform/server/PAE/PAEmem.mspx

Thanks a bunch, I have the /3GB switch on already, thankfully. I'll try those other settings.

Are your disks in any sort of RAID? I would set scratch disks to the fastest non-redundant drive. Cache I would leave at default settings, mem alloc should be as high as allowable. I'm not aware there are many settings to tune in AE..

Why should scratch disks not be set to a RAID drive (say RAID 0)?

I wonder that myself. hmmmm

After years of my own RAID vs NON-RAID setups, I decided that NON-RAID was best for me and the performance is not noticeable, especially on 10K raptor.

Yea, I can see that if you're running a Raptor. I run a Raptor for my system drive but have several 7200rpm drives in RAID 0 for my data drive(s) so I can have access to 1TB for video. I tend to have three-four projects going on at one time so I need larger storage than a Raptor gives.

I don't have any performance issues (save for some stuttering during video playback in Premiere - but I just solved that.) Now I'm wondering if there are some advantages to running a scratch on a non-RAID.

I know there ARE advantages to having a dedicated scratch drive, something I set up about 4 months ago, LOVE it.