Go to the Smartsound web site and download the free Express Tracks software.  It includes 5 free music tracks.  If you do not like those you can download one of your choice (you can preview their selections) for $30. ... View more

MUMediaDept wrote: .... should I splurge on a single hexacore (x5650?) with that crazy EVGA SR2 board (I'm not afraid of moderate air-cooled overclocking)?  Or go for a tried-and-true Tyan with a couple of Xeons?  Or just overclock a single 930? -Tim There is no value for the x5650 Xeon's or for that matter any dual Xeon with Premiere.  Take a look at the ADK benchmark information and also at my PPBM site and see that dual Xeons are not among the leading scores. ... View more

Newegg currently has the Spinpoint F3 1 TB on special fo $65 with this code (you may have to sign up for it to be usable) EMCYTNN25.  Free shipping. ... View more

Adam, can you see your burner in your BIOS?  You are confusing me with this statement acgold777 wrote: I think the drive is connected to an IDE controller, not SATA.  IDE is the old 40 pin Parallel ATA interface and that would be impossible to connect to this drive which is SATA.  Are you sure it is even connected to anything?  I am not sure what motherboard you currently have but if I remember right you also had an X7DWA-N is that correct?  I believe that to use SATA ports 5 and 6 you have to have ACHI enabled.  Now it is not going to be easy to enable ACHI.  While I have heard of a few successful people enabling ACHI after you have Windows loaded it is not easily or normally do-able.  A sure way is to start all over and reload the OS and yes I know that was the last thing you wanted to hear. ... View more

acgold777 wrote: Note that many people have reported problems with the LG GGW-H20L BD burner disappearing under Win7, never to return.  I'm one of them.  It worked perfectly under Vista 64 but none of the fixes proposed on the web have worked for me.  Device Manager reports a problem with the driver but the Microsoft troubleshooters say they can't find a better one. Fixes proposed on the web and in various forums include uninstalling and letting the system reinstall, hacking the registry, running the Microsoft Auto-Fix program and disabling AHCI on the mobo.  The drive is not listed in the Win7 compatibility list and the LG website includes drivers and SW only for XP and Vista. Strange, That is what I have and never any sign of a problem and I imagine that I have burned well over a hundred successful DVD's and a few assorted BR's.  Here is what Device Manager reports for me. ... View more

Rowby, here is my first cut at my tuning list for Win 7 64 Pro You may have to make your own decisions on each of these services based on your usage of your computer.  My goals were to set this up as a second (actually third) almost only editing and really primarily benchmarking machine. ... View more

I second all of Harm's comments, but when you get through a very important step is to make sure you tune your OS (hopefully Win 7 64) to get rid of the garbage that Microsoft has to include to cover every possible use but features that are not necessary for an editing machine.  As an example one function that you will not need is Tablet PC components, there are about two dozen or more of these that I turn off. ... View more

Do not forget when you finish installing Windows to look at your processes and when you find out how many there are you should consider tuning your OS to get real performance from your system with CS5.  CS4 and CS5 are both resource hogs. ... View more

OK here is a simpler way to find out what you have running.  Do a CTRL-ALT-DEL and select your Task Manger and select the Processes Tab.  Here is what you will see, except you probably will have more than twice as many processes running.  An untuned Win 7 installation can easily have 70 processes or more..  Be sure to have show all processes checked and stretch the window so we can see all of them.  Do this after booting up and without running any other software or Adobe software. ... View more

Monsieur_Hulot wrote: GRATULATIONS! got the same (or likely the same) results an my laptop - but not on my PC (win7, 64-bit). Please follow Harm's suggestion in post number 6 and show us what you have running before you try starting to run Premiere. ... View more

By any chance are your dual GTX 285 cards configured in SLI mode? ... View more

Yes, I have sucessfully pushed it to 4.2 GHz but I am not going to run normally at the clock rate.with my $1000 CPU.  Since it still is an experimental bench top system I am able to make very quick changes. ... View more

Simply overclock! ... View more

Just put a switch on your internet cable and disconnect from the web.while editing> ... View more

When someone tries this successfully on the Fermi cards please post here!  As the GTX 285 and the 295 are now obsolete I hate buying even a used card and I will not ever buy another Quadro card. ... View more

Please run my Premiere Pro Benchmark PPBM4 (yes I know it was designred for CS4) but since Harm has run it sucessfully on CS5 it will tell us how well you machine/OS is tuned and/or configured. ... View more

Of course I would not operate in a normal video editing mode at that speed.  The motherboard is my ASUS P6T7 WS Supercomputer.  While it may be an ideal CUDA platform, it is a lousy disk performer.  I have a faster (R)AID array than Harm (because a risky eight disk RAID 0), but cannot even come close to his disk intensive AVI encoding score of 1.4 seconds, the best I have seen is about 3.9 seconds.  Also if you scan the Results page you will see it is not my setup, all AVI results for this MB are lousy.  I cannot verify this but I suspect that the two nVidia N200's that are on this board may be the cause. ... View more

Harm, I did have a one module in a set of three go bad and OCZ quickly replaced the whole set.  I have had my i7-920 experimental computer running at 4.2 GHz with my 1600 6GB Platinum OCZ with 7-7-7-20 timing. ... View more

I have a high end Patriot Torqx M28 drive BUT do not reccommend buying one as there is no Win 7 TRIM support currently, and no way to reset it to its original condition or to clean it up.  Some SSD's you can use a utility like wiper.exe, but nothing for this model from Patriot.  Since you are on a tight budget you do not want to even consider Areca, I do not think they even have a PCI controller. While the HDtach looks great I found essentially no improvement over the same amount of money spent on good disks--if you have a decent controller and that is where your PCI bus only is going to limit you.  Your Green drive is also a handicap, you will not have great performance out of anything green. Does your motherboard have SATA 3Gb/sec (sometimes referred to as 300 MB/s) interfaces available? ... View more

I am guessing but looking at HDtach results your burst rate from your SSD indicates a real bottleneck, I am guessing that you have it on the SATA II 150 PCI board.  This looks to me like it is a 150 MB/s interface and then it also is on the PCI bus which is another bottleneck.  If you had it on a better interface (my Areca) it might look like this: But there is one other problem that I see that is that your SSD is the "V" series which stands for value as opposed to the higher cost high perfomance SSD's.  And even my Patriot device (which I do not recommend buying) did not do much for my performance (look at the results on PPBM4) and therefore my opinon that currently SSD's are not practical because they are not cost effective. ... View more

I personally would not try to pick out an Areca controller now for a future application.  Current boards are relatively old designs and new designs are most likely immanent. They need to upgrade the designs to accommodate PCIe version 2 and SATA 6 Gbits/s to stay up with current technology and the competition. ... View more

With PCIe there has been an improvement with most motherboards that are less than a year old now supporting PCIe version 2.0 that doubled the initial rate with some day we will have PCIe version 3 here is some information on transfer speeds: Capacity      Per lane:     * v1.x: 250 MB/s    * v2.0: 500 MB/s    * v3.0: 1 GB/s 16 lane slot (x16):     * v1.x: 4 GB/s    * v2.0: 8 GB/s    * v3.0: 16 GB/s The Areca controllers that are out now are only 8 lanes (x8) wide at present so yes the present generation of Areca boards would definitly be bottle-necked at 1 GB/s, but I think also the Intel IOP 341 chip would also be a bottleneck ... View more

Harm Millaard wrote: Imagine that in a 12 disk RAID30.... Areca might have to do some new homework to make it effective. I mentioned to Harm in a PE that I was very impressed with results of the "Poath Junction" PPBM4 AVI encoding score with just two disk drives.  I assumed that they were the newer Seagate 15K.7 drives.  I ordered one and here are the HDtach results: The PPBM results are very much like the results I get for two Seagate 7200.12 1 TB disks in RAID 0 ... View more

Great article on RAID.  But I have another suggestion for those with very deep pockets.  How about a 1 TB SSD in a 3.5-inch form factor for a mere $3500.  It has read rate of up to 260 MBps, write of up to 260MBps and sustained write of up to 230MBps. ... View more

There is no known application for a PCIx card slot for anything to do with video editing ... View more