Money is no object editing PC

[John Hewat]

EDIT: I had been rambling in this post for hours about my Magic Bullet woes... and I finally cured them. I did have to update my nVidia drivers to the current ones, which unfortunately disable the Full Screen Video option when working in a Cineform Prospect HD project.

I was getting Blue Screen of Death when using Looks, but now it's gone...

[John Hewat]

A couple of questions for advice:

1.
First thing I did when I got it was open it up to find the DIMMS installed in the wrong spots. They'd filled 1A, 1B, 2A & 2B instead of spreading them over 1A, 2A, 3A & 4A.

I rang them and they apologized and told me to correct it. So I did.

QUESTION: Have I done the right thing?

In System, it says that I have 2.75GB and After Effects sees 2GB.

2.
At one stage, after the blue screen of death, the computer booted and told me it had found new hardware and needed to restart. I didn't know what to do. I clicked OK and it restart and when it booted, there was now a mysterious "E:" Drive of 465GB (one of the 500GB Samsungs) and the "D:" Drive (what was previously the 2TB RAID 0) is now unformatted!!!!

QUESTION: How is this possible if the 4 x 500GB Samsungs are supposed to be in RAID 0 in the BIOS?? And how the heck do I fix this?

3.
The HD Audio Program keeps telling me that a Jack has been plugged and unplugged, but it isn't! I haven't plugged or unplugged anything!!!! It's extremely annoying!

QUESTION: Could this be a loose wire within the case?

[Harm Millaard]

1. Yes. 1A, 2A, 3A and 4A is correct. See page 2-6 in the manual.

2. You may have to boot into the BIOS and set up you raid0 array again. Why this happened I do not know. Be sure that you have the latest drivers available.

3. Check page 2-23 in the manual for the right connections.

[Mike McCarthy]

On a totally different note, I figured I would post the configuration I finally purchased here:
XW8400, Dual X5365 Xeons (3.0Ghz), 8GB RAM, Quadro 4600
Disks will be a combination of Raptor OS, 4x500GB Raid5, 2xSAS 15k 300GB Raid0, and possibly a 1TB in the future, if I make my Raid5 external.

Cost me under $5k not counting the 30"LCD I bought a while back, based on a unit from HP's refurbished site.

I plan to benchmark it in a number of Apps in the near future, and also compare XP32 to XP64.

[John Hewat]

Originally Posted by Harm Millaard

1. Yes. 1A, 2A, 3A and 4A is correct. See page 2-6 in the manual.

Excellent! Thank you so much for looking it up for me!

2. You may have to boot into the BIOS and set up you raid0 array again. Why this happened I do not know. Be sure that you have the latest drivers available.

RAID was disabled in the BIOS. The technician said that one of the Blue Screens of Death could have caused it but didn't say how.

Anyway, I enabled it and changed the controller from Intel to Adaptec, as per the technician's instructions (is this a good move or bad) and the RAID appears to be working fine now.

I've attached a screenshot of the Adaptec Storage Manager in Windows and would love if you could tell me if all of the settings are correct.

ALSO: I understand that the best configuration for storage is to have Windows and CS3 installed on the System Drive and to use the RAID 0 for footage storage and creating the rendered files, yes? Is it also better to have the project file saved on the RAID or is that insignificant?

And the Media Cache Database? Where should that be? It defaults to My Documents\Adobe\Common...

[John Hewat]

Originally Posted by Mike McCarthy

I plan to benchmark it in a number of Apps in the near future, and also compare XP32 to XP64.

I'd love to benchmark my system but have no idea how. Can you point me in the right direction?

[Adam Gold]

Originally Posted by John Hewat

ALSO: I understand that the best configuration for storage is to have Windows and CS3 installed on the System Drive and to use the RAID 0 for footage storage and creating the rendered files, yes? Is it also better to have the project file saved on the RAID or is that insignificant?

And the Media Cache Database? Where should that be? It defaults to My Documents\Adobe\Common...

The way you have is it to my understanding the best. Adobe has a page on this, but it depends how many drives you have. IIRC, you have the system drive and then everything else is all together in RAID 0, right?

Here's how I'm planning on setting up my new beast:

Drive 0 -- System drive with XP, CS3, Cineform, etc. Nothing not video-related.

Drive 1 + 2 (2 x 1TB in RAID 0) -- All captured Video

Drive 3 + 4 (2 x 1TB in RAID 0) -- All other assets and media cache

Drive 5 (Single 1 TB drive) -- render and preview files

This way reading and writing are mostly on different physical drives at any one time, and we'd never be trying to pull both video and audio from the same drive simultaneously. I think.

Here's the Adobe link:

http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Prem...8DDE57377.html

[Mike McCarthy]

These days it is almost always better to aggregate the performance available from your drives into a single array. This is better for file management and flexibility, and will almost always provide higher performance as well. (Given a good controller) It also is easier to add security, getting Raid5 with one more drive.

[Adam Gold]

Mike,

I thought that my plan above would get me the best of both worlds, as no controller would ever know what the actual files were and by putting audio and video on physically separate arrays, we'd never have to worry about a bottleneck if the system tried to retrieve them simultaneously from the same place. But if I read you right this isn't really an issue and I'm just over-thinking this? What if we did one system drive, 4 1TB drives in RAID5 for all assets, and one render destination drive? Would that make more sense and not sacrifice speed?

Also, a while back you referred to multipliers perhaps being a factor, that is, you have to use 667MHz RAM with a 1333 FSB (confirmed by the manual), and the CPU speed might be better if the multiplier is more even? For example, a 2.66GHz CPU might be more efficient than a 2.83 or 3.0 with a 1333 FSB? Or is this a non-issue?

I'm placing my order soon and the 5430 chip is looking like a lot of bang for the buck, if not the fastest CPU, and at 2.66 GHz is exactly a 2:1 ratio to the FSB.

[John Hewat]

Thought I'd ask a question.

I have two computers at home, the one specified above (the 8 core Xeon) and I also have a Q6600.

To compare them it's obvious which would be the better machine:

2 x Quad Core X5450 3.00GHz
4GB RAM
2 x 7800 (one GT & one GTX) GPU

vs
Quad Core 6600 2.4GHz
2GB RAM
1 x 8600GT

I have started running both PCs simultaneously to test the speed difference in particular tasks.

CS3 loads within about 2 seconds on the 8 core, and takes about 4 on the 6600. Importing clips on the 8 core is faster, everything is pretty much. Things just happen faster. Rendering is slightly faster.

However, I thought I'd test to see where the extra money went on this super computer when it came to Magic Bullet Looks. I put a short clip (365 frames) into Magic Bullet Looks to test.

I created the exact same project on both PCs at the same time and placed the same clip in it and applied the same filters in Magic Bullet Looks. On the 8 core, it was instantly more sluggish, even just clicking on the look preset took a second or so for it to apply to the preview, whereas on the 6600 it happened instantly.

Then I clicked OK and finally pressed return to start the render.

$100 if you guess which one finished first and $1,000 if you guess the margain!

The Q6600 took 1:03 (one minute, three seconds) to finish.

It took the server, with twice the cores and twice the ram an extra 2 minutes!!!! 3:03 (three minutes, three seconds) exactly.

The computer which is supposed to be amazing was almost three times slower than the humble 6600. How the heck can this be?

Magic Bullet uses the GPU, right? And surely the 7800 is faster than the 8600, right? Everything about the 8 core PC is better and faster... except using Magic Bullet and rendering its effects...

How can this be?

I've attached the spreadsheet of my tests, including the time taken to complete renders as well as the average CPU performance.

EDIT: RE the tests, the only other thing that confused me was that the size of the AVI that HD Link created from the MP4 was different on both computers. Just over a MB larger on the 6600. Anyone know why? I definitely had the exact same conversion settings.

EDIT Vol. 2: I am also getting a large amount of "An error caused Premiere Pro to close" or whatever messages on the dual xeon machine - almost every time I use it! Could it be possible that I just need to re-install it?

[Adam Gold]

This is all very sobering.

Have you installed these?:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php...r_Intel_SSE4.1

[John Hewat]

Originally Posted by Adam Gold

This is all very sobering.

Have you installed these?:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php...r_Intel_SSE4.1

No, I had no idea that site even existed. I'll do it now but it looks like it only improves specific things so I don't know if it will improve Magic Bullet...

Do people think it could be a graphics card issue?

[Adam Gold]

I was wondering the same thing. Also, how are your HDDs set up on your old PC?

I'd read elsewhere that dual quads were in some cases slower than older solo quads. Perhaps those plug-ins and the impending release of SP3 will improve the situation.

[John Hewat]

Originally Posted by Adam Gold

I was wondering the same thing. Also, how are your HDDs set up on your old PC?

I'd read elsewhere that dual quads were in some cases slower than older solo quads. Perhaps those plug-ins and the impending release of SP3 will improve the situation.

Hope so. The dual quads are DEFINITELY faster than the single quad in everything other than Magic Bullet. I have no concerns about it other than that. In all other tasks it flies.

[Adam Gold]

But the crashing issue... you don't suppose the guy I referred to earlier, who posted on NewEgg that Premiere "doesn't work" on the 5450, could be right?