That particular system costs way too much money for too little actual performance. Here's why: 1) A single Xeon E5620 is slower than a first-generation i7-920 or even a currently available i5-2400 to begin with. The only reason to get a Z800 is in its dual-CPU configuration - and it needs dual hex-core Xeons to even come anywhere close to worthwhile. Unfortunately, the E5620 is only quad-core, not hex-core. 2) For that platform, get 24GB or 48GB of RAM. 16GB isn't enough in a dual-CPU-capable platform and does not divide evenly into three memory controller channels (these particular Xeons are triple-channel - but 16GB of RAM using four sticks would have forced the memory controller to operate in a hybrid triple- and single-channel mode where the first 12GB would operate in triple-channel and the remaining 4GB would operate in single-channel). 3) The Quadro 4000 is actually recommended by AVID for its higher-end programs. However, Adobe Premiere Pro CS5.5 does not make much if any use of the Quadro's added capabilities; in fact, as far as performance is concerned Premiere Pro will think the Quadro 4000 is slower than a GeForce GTX 460. 4) Why two burners? All Blu-ray burners also burn DVDs and CDs. In fact, the only purpose of dual optical burners is to copy one DVD directly to another without having to rip the original DVD's contents onto the hard drive first. Or is it that you thought that Blu-ray burners accept only Blu-ray media and don't accept DVD or CD media at all? 5) As configured, that Z800 lacks any internal RAID drives. Premiere Pro benefits from fast internal RAID drives (but you should avoid RAIDing the OS drive). And two external USB 3.0 drive kits are usually too slow in physical transfer speed to be of much use for any purpose besides backups since many of them spin at only 5400 RPM or even slower. Very few commercially-assembled USB 3.0 external hard drive kits spin at 7200 RPM (the minimum rotational speed for a hard drive that we recommend in an editing system). ... View more

ultimatte wrote: Do I understand this right that  more RAM would be better for other Adobe Software like AFX and Photoshop? You're confusing VRAM (graphics card RAM) with system RAM, which are both entirely separate from one another, in this case. AE and Photoshop prefer more system RAM but don't rely on graphics card RAM as much. ... View more

ultimatte wrote: So would you recommend a GTX 560 Ti with 384 CUDA cores and 2GB over a GTX 560 Ti with 448 and 1,25 GB? Thanks a lot! That depends on the size of your video frames. With RED 4K, the 1.25GB card could very well run out of RAM - and when an image demands more RAM than the discrete card has onboard, the entire image will default entirely to the MPE software-only mode for rendering. On the other hand, typical 1080p frames are easily contained within the 1GB of video RAM unless numerous multiple layers and effects are applied. ... View more

Go to "My Computer", right-click on the disk that you want to change the settings on, select "Properties", then uncheck both of the boxes at the bottom of the "General" tab (labeled "Compress this drive to save disk space" and "Allow files on this drive to have contents indexed in addition to file properties"; by default, the latter check box is checked). ... View more

RFDPiper wrote: Rule 5: Turn off index search and compression. Both will cause severe performance hits if you leave them on. Sorry, I have confusion about this.  What does this refer to and where is this done?  In the OS or in Adobe? In the OS. ... View more

Jack, As Bill stated, your GTX 550 Ti isn't helping your system's CS5.5 performance much. The GTX 550 Ti, with its 192 CUDA cores, is at a point where the performance starts to degrade substantially if you go any lower in the GeForce lineup. That's exactly why I picked a GTX 560 (336 CUDA cores) over the GTX 550 Ti for my auxiliary i5-2400 rig even though there is only about a $50 price difference between the two. Thus, while the GTX 550 Ti is perfectly adequate for CS5, it is marginal for CS5.5. And had Bill included a GT 440 or GT 240 GDDR5 card, that overclocked i7-2600K system with such a 96-core card would have produced an MPEG-2 DVD time that's nearly double (read: almost twice as slow as) what he had attained from the GTX 550 Ti - well over 250 seconds (versus 146 seconds from the GTX 550 Ti). By the way, cards with 768MB of VRAM cannot enable MPE GPU acceleration at all: MPE GPU acceleration requires a minimum of 765MB of free, unused VRAM in order to even work at all. Unfortunately, Windows itself eats up a few megabytes of that VRAM so that in the end a card with only 768MB of total VRAM has only 749MB of free unused VRAM. Thus, MPE will be "permanently" locked into the software-only mode with a 768MB card. ... View more

Marc, This is not always the case. However, Western Digital is notorious for selling both older- and newer-generation hard drives under the exact same base model number. In the case of the RE4, it turned out that both the 250GB and the 500GB versions (after further investigation) use the same single 500GB-class platter - but the 250GB version just happened to leave one side of that platter blank. In other words, the 250GB RE4 has one platter and one head while the 500GB version has one platter and two heads. And not all larger-capacity drives are faster sequentially than smaller-capacity drives. For example, the first 1TB hard drive, the original Hitachi 7K1000, required all of five 200GB platters just to achieve its 1TB capacity - with the consequence that its sequential transfer speed is naturally limited to only 80-something MB/s. (Compare that to the latest Hitachi 1TB drive, the 7K1000.D, which uses a single 1TB platter with its maximum sequential transfer speed of close to 190 MB/s.) ... View more

Not necessarily. In most (but not all) cases, the smaller-capacity hard drives tend to be older, lower-density designs that deliver significantly slower sequential transfer speeds than their larger-capacity, higher-density siblings or cousins. You see, both drives use a single platter - but if both the 250GB and the 500GB drives use the entire area of both sides of the platter, the 250GB drive will be significantly slower in sequential speed than its 500GB cousin (only about 90 MB/s versus 130 MB/s). Put together, the six-disk array of the older 250GB drives will be only slightly faster than the four-disk array of newer-design 500GB drives, but you'll lose significant total capacity - only about 1.25GB total with the six-disk array of 250GB disks versus 1.5TB with the four-disk array of 500GB disks. ... View more

Actually, Dr. Jared, the Thermaltake Toughpower Grand PSU is 80-Plus Gold certified. The difference is the platforms that the various 80-Plus Gold certified PSUs are based on. The Toughpower Grand is based on a premium CWT (Channel Well Tech)-manufactured platform. Thermaltake's poor professional reputation for its PSUs can be attributed to the TR2 and TR2 RX series PSUs: Most if not all of those cannot handle anywhere close to their labeled wattage ratings without their DC output quality going out of the ATX spec. For example, the TR2 RX "850W" model can only provide up to about 550W under realistic internal operating temperatures. And yes, Dr. Jared, the Quadro 4000 is weaker than a GTX 460 SE: The Quadro 4000 has only 256 CUDA cores versus 288 CUDA cores in the GTX 460 SE. By contrast, the plain GTX 560 has 336 CUDA cores, while the GTX 570 and 580 have 480 and 512 CUDA cores, respectively. And yes, Quadro 4000s sell used for more money than the full retail cost of a brand-new GTX 580. So, you actually earn some money just selling the Quadro 4000 and buying a GTX 580. ... View more

I also respect your opinion. In fact, a Quadro also makes sense if one wants to "graduate" from Premiere to higher-level Avid programs (which always prefer Quadros). ... View more

Thanks for clearing that up. It means that a 2TB "internal video drive" is actually made up of 2 x 1TB 7200 RPM drives in RAID 0 (called "aid0" by some people). And the Thermaltake Grand PSUs your Tsunami systems always use are good, but I can find better-quality 80-Plus Gold units in the same price range. ... View more

I agree, Harm. Here's why: 1) The cheapest option, the GTX 580, is also the best option for CS5.5 performance. Premiere Pro does not take full advantage of the Quadros, and that the Adobe apps actually perform slower with any of the three Quadros offered than with the GTX 580 simply due to the inferior hardware specs of the Quadros (in fact, the Quadro 6000 is actually based on the older GTX 470 with a 384-bit GDDR5 RAM bus instead of the 320-bit bus the actual GTX 470 used). The Quadro 4000 suggested by that shop is actually the slowest GPU out of all of those, based on performance in CS5.5. Note that despite my rant, the Quadros do make sense if you frequently run applications that either make good use of the Quadro's capabilities or absolutely require a Quadro just to even run at all. 2) That vendor does not offer even an aid0 array, let alone a RAID, for any of its Tsunami systems even at extra cost. The only disks offered at all are all single, non-RAID disks. 3) The Thermaltake Armor A60 case offered is not good enough for a serious editing system: It can barely fit a GTX 580 inside. Worse, its air circulation inside is poorer than even an Antec Nine Hundred, let alone the Cooler Master HAF series cases, due to its single front 120mm intake fan and the arrangement of its hard drives (the sideways-mounted hard drives result in the hard drive mounting bracket almost completely obstructing intake airflow, leaving only a single 120mm side-panel-mounted fan to provide intake airflow to the rest of the case). 4) The power supply is not specified at all. It could have been a poor-quality unit that could barely handle even half of its claimed wattage. And all that costs more money than their constituent components are worth, even though there is a cost premium for assembly and testing. ... View more

Nice job on the chart, Harm! However, some of the "easy" codecs are nowhere near as easy as the chart seems to indicate simply because some of those codecs actually require massive disk performance and size just to be handled properly. And DV and HDV is "easy" only because of their lower resolution and moderate-to-high compression (these codecs are limited to 25 Mbps total). Less-compressed codecs (even at extremely low resolutions) require much, much more disk space - and thus, much, much higher disk I/O system performance. And "difficult" codecs are "difficult" due to the CPU horsepower that's often required of them. And AVCHD not only requires a relatively robust CPU to handle properly, but also require somewhat faster than "standard" disk performance due to the fact that most NLEs decompress and recompress video on the fly. (For Premiere Pro CS5.x, 4:2:0 AVCHD video gets decompressed to uncompressed 4:2:2 during the editing stage, and then gets recompressed into the desired output format during encoding. Some other NLEs are natively 4:4:4 RGB - and all material gets converted to 4:4:4 RGB in those NLEs and then to the desired output format on the fly.) ... View more

Here's the thing, Turbut: Most LCD (or LED-backlit LCD) monitors are still of the TN panel variety, which can only reproduce 6-bit color. And even a good IPS panel-based monitor can cost $500 to $800. And the lower-priced monitors are increasingly S-IPS (a cheaper version of IPS that sacrifices a bit of image quality in favor of faster response times) or of the VA type (which does not offer the best of both worlds - but rather, the poorer of both worlds). That's because most people want things cheaper, not necessarily better. Thus, if a monitor can't faithfully reproduce the output of even a GTX, let alone a Quadro, why waste the money on such an expensive and slow GPU? Good monitors that can take full advantage of the 10-bit output of a Quadro can cost well into the thousands (or even tens of thousands) of dollars. ... View more

Bill, I will be submitting my CS5.5 results of my main i7-2600K rig with the GTX 470 at stock and at either 4.4GHz or 4.5GHz. However, my results are much, much closer to that of your GTX 285 than to that of your GTX 480. EDIT: It turned out that I might need a new card and a new case in order to improve my scores with CS5.5. The particular GTX 470 I was using has an Nvidia reference cooler, and the GPU's fan speed fluctuated wildly and frequently ramped up to maximum speed during the MPEG-2 DVD test (this indicates that the GPU might have been throttling back frequently to avoid overheating). Moreover, my system has been somewhat less than totally stable with this card installed: Sometimes, I got no display while a few other times I had a 116 BSOD code just attempting to boot into Windows (although most of the BSODs occurred while I had that card running in an i7-950 system with a Gigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R v1.0, which was never totally stable to begin with). But my CPU (at least in the Cooler Master CM 690 II, which does not have a sufficient number of or sufficiently-sized fans for such a higher-end rig) is already running relatively warm, into the upper 70s C during Prime95 at a relatively modest overclock of 4.5GHz - and getting a new graphics card with a better but open cooler would have increased the heat inside the case (and therefore the CPU) by a fair amount. As it stands now, the 110-ish second time in the MPEG-2 DVD test is about par for a GTX 470 on an overclocked i7-2600K system, but I felt that it could have been quite a bit faster. As for the case, then yes, a bigger case with better and more numerous fans would have allowed me to overclock my CPU even further without seriously overheating. Instead of the current 4.5GHz, I might have been able to reach 4.8GHz if I had a CM HAF 932 instead of the CM 690 II. Message was edited by: RjL190365 ... View more

Thanks, Bill, for the CS5.5 results. This confirms that if one is stuck with a cheapo GeForce or Quadro card with fewer than 96 CUDA cores on a reasonably fast i7 system, and he is using CS5.5, he might as well permanently lock CS5.5 to the MPE software-only mode and not even bother with the "hack" at all.  Under this scenario, the 9500 GT in MPE software-only mode achieves a total time of only 435 seconds versus 1002 seconds in MPE GPU-accelerated mode. (In fact, an overclocked i7-2600K with 16GB of RAM but a really cheapo GeForce card with CS5.5 set to the MPE GPU mode is even slower overall, especially in MPEG-2 encoding, than the 990-ish second result of my stock-speed i3-2100 with only 4GB of RAM and integrated Intel HD Graphics 2000 with CS5.5 set to software-only mode.) It also shows that the best current values among the CUDA GPUs have somewhere between 300 and 500 CUDA cores (this means the GTX 560, 560 Ti or 570, of which the 570 is officially on the Adobe list). ... View more

The GeForce cards are limited to two monitors per card, unfortunately. This limitation is in hardware. That said, if you plug something into all three ports, you might not get any image at all from any of the three ports unless you disconnect at least one of the monitors. ... View more

I tried it. Unfortunately, I had the exact same experience with it as I did with any other consumer program. At least with the most recent version that I used, it does not support 60p or even 50p at any resolution. Only 30p or less is supported even at 720p (and any 60i or 60p content chopped down to 30p looks horrible to my eyes). Worse, I cannot get the properly downsized (downrezzed) transcoded footage to work at all in any of those programs (at least without requiring extremely destructive recompression). The only downsizing that works at all with these cheapo programs uses completely wrong alogarithms that leave severe artifacts in the final image (with the worst being so bad that it might as well have only 15 lines total of resolution). Moreover, none of the consumer programs have a GPU-accelerated mode at all. All aspects of those programs are software-only. (I confirmed this by running GPU-Z, and discovered that the GPU utilization is stuck at zero or near-zero even with a super-expensive Quadro that I borrowed for testing.) In addition, the consumer programs are strictly 32-bit only. Thus, they cannot take full advantage of even a very old single-core Pentium 4, let alone today's high performance systems. By the way, my HD camera only shoots interlaced (1080i or 480i). Unfortunately, the consumer programs by themselves do a very poor job of downsizing interlaced footage. None of the still cameras in my possession shoot higher than VGA (640x480) - and at only 30p or 15p. ... View more

Here's the problem: I am not a paid professional at all (as far as video is concerned). I am just a casual video shooter who is simply frustrated with the limitations of every single one of the $100 consumer video editing programs (for example, many of those programs do not properly support progressive source video at frame rates above 30 fps (in which case every other frame gets dropped at the editing timeline no matter what) or do not properly support progressive source video at all at any frame rate (in which case the video gets interlaced at the timeline even if one does not want that to happen - and often using a bad-quality alogarithm) - and such mangling of the video at the timeline shows up in a painful manner in the finished product). Under those circumstances, I am forced to use a "prosumer" program. With that said, although my main rig has one of the listed cards, it does not mean that a given future version of Premiere Pro will even support a currently listed card at all for the MPE GPU accelerated mode. In fact, given the history with some other NLEs, older cards that were previously listed are now no longer supported in GPU mode. Eventually, those older cards will no longer be supported even in software-only mode. By the way, the GTX 480 has never been officially listed on the Adobe supported cards list even though its lesser GTX 470 sibling currently is listed. ... View more

I keep wondering with all the people using the hacks, what happens if Adobe closes that door. I understand after upgrading from 5.5 to 5.5.1 and then to 5.5.2, you have to reapply the hack, but what happens if they literally closed the door. People will have a lot of video cards that will not use the MPE. That includes newer cards. If Adobe were to have closed that door, the list of supported GPUs would have been restricted to very expensive and older-model Quadros. Anybody with cheaper-than-$1,000 cards and/or newer-than-last-gen GPUs would have been permanently locked to the MPE software-only mode. The only way to keep a lot of users satisfied and at the same time eliminate the hackers would be for the next CS (CS6) to fully support OpenCL in its MPE GPU accelerated mode. This would allow most if not all Nvidia and ATi/AMD GPUs to use MPE GPU mode. However, such added support comes at a cost of even more software bloat and possibly higher prices for the CS6 suite. Plus, Adobe has announced that it is abandoning the three-version upgrade policy in favor of a one-version upgrade. This means that anybody trying to upgrade CS4 or earlier to CS6 must either upgrade to CS5 or CS5.5 first and then to CS6 in order to get the upgrade price (as the upgrade pricing for CS6 will be restricted to registered users of CS5 or CS5.5). Users trying to upgrade directly from CS4 or earlier to CS6 will be charged the full, non-upgrade price. ... View more

Actually, the Nvidia card must have 896MB or more RAM. Preferably 1GB or more. As for Adobe not supplying technical support when the OP calls in regarding a non-Adobe-certified GPU, they will not supply such support other than the canned response "With that card Premiere Pro should be run only in MPE software-only mode". ... View more

Actually, TLER is permanently disabled on the Black drives - and all of the other "consumer" desktop WD drives - manufactured since October 2009. (The manufacturing date is the date on the drive's label, not the date of purchase.) There is no way at all whatsoever to enable TLER on the Black or on any other "consumer" desktop WD drive made recently. That makes the WD desktop drives ill-suited for use in a parity RAID (RAID 3, 5 or 6) since most RAID controllers themselves give up reading after 8 seconds when they encounter a read error - and they mark the entire drive as "failed" even though it is actually still good. That's bad. The RE-series drives are not recommended for RAID 0 (which Harm calls "aid0") simply because they offer no advantages at all whatsoever over a conventional desktop drive for this purpose. In fact, if one drive has a read error, the entire RAIDed pair or coupling may be dropped, resulting in possible loss of all of the data in the array. Message was edited by: RjL190365 ... View more

blackrosekiller, Don't get any of the WD RE series hard drives if you're going to use them in RAID 0. Their firmware has the TLER feature permanently enabled, with no way at all whatsoever to disable the feature. That feature is beneficial if you're using a parity RAID level such as RAID 3,5 or 6 - but actually hinders reliability in RAID 0. The TLER feature kicks in after seven seconds if it encounters a read error - but then the drive simply gives up reading in RAID 0 because there is absolutely no redundant data to recover from! That results in permanent loss of data. ... View more

It's not a good idea to edit anything HD on any system (laptop or desktop) based on a dual-core CPU. In fact, HD video editing beyond simple HDV requires a CPU with at least four physical cores in order to work well (the mobile i5 CPUs are only dual-core with HyperThreading rather than true quad-core). Unfortunately, all of the MacBook Pros fall well short of Adobe's minimum practical requirements: None of them are available at all with Nvidia GPUs (all of them either use integrated Intel HD graphics or offer only AMD/ATi GPUs - all of which are not supported at all at present in MPE's GPU-accelerated mode, and thus would "permanently" lock Premiere Pro into MPE software-only mode). ... View more

Harm, I did forget to mention that the DX58SO2 is missing a few voltage settings that are necessary to successfully overclock the i7-9xx CPUs more than moderately. But being an Extreme Series motherboard, its BIOS does allow running the RAM above their stock speeds. But even with that, I found that I could barely achieve an overclock to 3.9 GHz with any of the 45nm i7-9xx quad-core CPUs on Intel-branded X58 motherboards when entry-level X58 motherboards from other brands could run stably with those same CPUs at 4.2 or 4.3 GHz. And don't plan on using the eSATA port(s) on the DX58SO or any other Intel Extreme Series motherboard: Intel is one of the few motherboard brands to use an eSATA chipset from Marvell rather than the more common Jmicron. The speed, especially the write speed, of the Marvell eSATA chipset is pathetically slow compared to that of the Jmicron eSATA controller. I could not get an interface speed of more than about 50 MB/s from the Marvell 61xx eSATA chipset (versus more than double that on the Jmicron eSATA controller) unless I also install the Marvell 61xx RAID driver - and then, the installation of that driver creates new compatibility issues. Message was edited by: RjL190365 ... View more

Sorry to say this, but the chain made a few wrong choices. The AV-GP hard drives are not compatible with PCs at all - but instead they are designed specifically for standalone HDD-based DVRs and PVRs. And their "800W" PSU could have been a generic one that could have handled or provided barely half that much before failing. And the Quadro 4000 costs way too much money given its hardware specs (it is based on the original power-hungry GF100 that the GTX 480, GTX 470 and GTX 465 were also based on, but cut to only 256 cores on the Quadro 4000 versus the 480, 448 and 352 cores on the GTX 480, 470 and 465, respectively). For so much money, there is zero practical performance improvement in CS5 over the cheaper GeForce GPUs. And as I have found out, 12GB of RAM is not quite enough RAM for CS5. ... View more

Yes, QuickSync does make a difference in CS5.x performance, especially on laptops. Most desktop PCs, however, have much more powerful discrete GPUs than their laptop counterparts. ... View more

Thanks for the (promising) initial results. Based on that, QuickSync does not affect the timeline export rendering speed much (if at all) since MPE GPU accelerated performance is already fast enough in that regard. However, QuickSync can speed up encoding/transcoding performance. Thus, if there is a way to switch easily between the two in current Sandy Bridge systems with both integrated graphics and a discrete CUDA card, you could have close to the best of both worlds. But right now, this capability is limited to a few laptops. On a desktop PC, if you have only one monitor, you will have to power down the desktop system before you switch GPUs; this makes switching between integrated and CUDA harder than it needs to be (since the DVI or HDMI monitor connector needs to be physically disconnected from one port and reconnected to another port). If you were to run PPBM5 on such an easily switchable laptop that's running CS5 5.0.3, expect the MPEG2 DVD and especially H.264 Blu-ray encoding (and to a lesser extent the software-only MPE timeline rendering) performance to be significantly faster with QuickSync enabled than with it disabled (when using the integrated Intel graphics). In fact, software-only MPE timeline rendering performance with a QuickSync-enabled system with the integrated Intel graphics would have been about equal to the rendering performance of some of the slowest GPU-accelerated CUDA-equipped systems on the PPBM5 results list. If you're using only the CUDA Nvidia GPU, QuickSync has no effect. ... View more

Unfortunately, even with QuickSync, Premiere Pro CS5's software-only MPE is still significantly slower than its GPU-accelerated mode. In other words, you cannot currently have both MPE GPU acceleration and QuickSync at the same time. ... View more