John,

Maybe Bill will enhance the PPBM4 results with a RPI (Relative Performance Index) and add some readability enhancements that I suggested.

In essence it adds a more balanced index to view your results in comparison to other systems.

An overview is attached for your information. Again, Bill likes the idea but no guarantees that he will implement the changes I proposed.

With these enhancements you can see that your system performs in the upper quartile of all the results submitted on both the AVI test and the MPEG encoding test (as shown by the upward sloping arrow), but performs around the median on the Render test, and the same applies to both the Total Time and the RPI.

The cause of this result may be the relatively limited RAM for a dual CPU system, but still is pretty decent. If you look for instance at Jim Simon's results, you see that his RPI is significantly lower and mostly suffers from inadequate disk setup.

Hope this helps you in putting things in perspective. And I am glad you sorted out the DVD burner issue.

John--

I have basically the same machine you do.

This may not be your issue, but if you look back in the threads, you'll find one about RAIDs in which I had problems adding SATA drives and getting them all seen by the system. Turns out to see more than four drives (even though there are six ports on your MB) you must have AHCI enabled, and you need to tweak the registry to do this without resulting in a BSOD if your OS is already installed.

This may not be your issue but worth a try. I detail all my trials and tribulations in the thread. Otherwise the only other alternative is to enable AHCI before installing your OS, which means reformatting your system drive and re-installing Windows after setting up your drives.

Adam,

When are you going to upgrade to CS4 and submitting your results to Bill? And did you update your Areca drivers to the latest version? It was, at least for Bill and me, quite an improvement, although there still are a couple of wrinkles to be ironed out.

Hi Adam,

I'd say that almost certainly is my issue - I had to do as you say: disable AHCI in order to get Windows booted without BSOD.

I've found your thread - lucky you were so thorough. I owe you big time for your work.

I'm not at home at the moment to test, but presumably that page in the registry is easy to find?

Ham, I must admit I am as confused as I've ever been by your version of the benchmark results. I like the colours! But the performance index and the arrows are over my head. My performance index is 200 - does that mean it's exactly half as good as yours? ;)

I can't believe how much I've had to learn about computers just to be a video editor - most of it from Harm's endless advice. Filmmaking is my interest - and when I first got an editing computer, I had absolutely no idea what was inside it - it was just a box that enabled me to edit my footage. But since I've started editing, I've done five times the computer building & troubleshooting than I have editing. And I've done a lot of editing! I can't complain though - frustrating as it is, I do so enjoy tinkering around.

John,

That is correct, if your index is 200 where my index is 100, your system is half as fast as my system under the assumption that your work reflects about 40% MPEG encoding, 40% rendering and 20% exporting or disk intensive work. These weights are an assumption on the average workload, but if you never render your time line for preview use, and hardly use disk intensive operations like exporting AVI files to Encore for example, you should give more weight to the Time Total ratio (71.3/38.0 = 1.88) to compare with my system.

Are you familiar with the terms upper decile, upper quartile, median, lower quartile etc.?

If you have a number of observations, for instance like the AVI test results and you rank them from fastest to slowest, the top 10% are at or above the upper decile (green up-arrow), the ones between 10 (upper decile) and 25% (upper quartile) from the top are shown with the upward sloping arrow, the ones between 25 (upper quartile) and 50% (median) are shown with the right arrow, the ones between 50 (median) and 75% (lower quartile) are shown with the downward sloping arrow and those below 75% (lower quartile) are shown with the downward red arrow.

Harm--

I haven't upgraded to CS4 yet, and might not ever (even though it's sitting on my desk now, still in shrink-wrap); I've been scared off by so many of the issues others report, including diminishing support by Cineform for the functions I need and the reported glitch in multicam (which I haven't heard has been cleared up by the latest update). I've got CS3 working the way I want it for the most part and my only motivation for upgrading had been to utilize the better memory management of CS4, but with the recent talk of CS5 possibly being true 64-bit, I may just wait.

John--

The registry key should be easy to find just by using the "Find" function in regedit. Hope it works for you. I'd been unsure about whether it made sense at the time to post so much detail, but hopefully it will prove helpful.

Ok... I don't know if this is good or not.

As per the first attachment, it looks as though it's already set to zero... Have I got the right one?

Searching just for AHCI produces a whole other tree as per the second attachment, though I have no idea of its relevance...

There's also a LEGACY MSAHCI section which has a "NextInstance" valuse set to 1, a whole msahci section that I don't understand... Do you remember off hand which one you had to change?

Harm,

that does make sense to me. My girlfriend is a maths teacher - she'd shoot me for not realising that instantly!

Oh, man, this is way above my pay grade....

Sorry - don't mean to hassle you; and I'm very appreciative.

I'll back up the registry and trial and error through it.

Worst comes to worst, I'll reinstall Windows with everything plugged in. Though I have to say, I imagine everything was plugged in when Win7 was installed, as I had:

1. System drive
2,3,4: RAID 0.
5. Blu Ray Burner
6. E-Sata

All being read and understood.

But maybe having since disabled AHCI in the BIOS has done this...

Ok I changed a value in the registry, went back to BIOS, enabled AHCI, booted, got BSOD.

Went back to BIOS, Disabled AHCI, booted.... Blue Screen!!!

So I think that whatever I did in the registry has blown my chances of a successful boot regardless of the configuration...

Maybe it's time to go back to zero and install Windows7 again...

Out of curiosity, regarding the Highpoint RAID card, it's been recommended to me both ways when it comes to installing the driver:

1. Wait until install of Windows, then install driver.
2. Load driver during Win7 install.

I tried to do option 2 the other day on a spare HDD but after loading the driver and asking Win7 to install to my system disc, it says that it is not an appropriate volume to install to.

Is that because I have loaded the RAID driver but the intended system disc is not attached to the RAID controller?

John,

There is no need to install the Highpoint driver as the first action when installing Win7. That is only required if you want to boot from the raid which makes no sense to me. This would be different if you were to use a 4 disk raid10 like Steve does, but in your case, forget it. Just install Win7. When installing Win7 do not worry about the Highpoint not having the correct drivers. First get your DVD and BR recognized. If that has succeeded, you can install the Highpoint driver and if that breaks the DVD/BR devices, at least you know where to look.

I took your question to heart and have updated the spreadsheet with legends. Look here:

See, I knew this would happen. I broke your machine....

I'd follow Harm's advice. The whole AHCI before OS thing I think has to do with MOBO SATA ports only, and shouldn't be related to your controller card, I think.

Haha, that's great Harm - explains it perfectly!

Steve,

You definietly didn't break my machine! I am very grateful for the help! I am kind of relieved that I can just go back to zero. My only frustration is that on that drive I had a list of all the services that I could afford to cull and still have total necessary functionality.

NB: Interestingly, culling those services produced amazing speed increases in all day to day operations on the computer... but... as far as the PP4 BM... no gain whatsoever for the processor intensive tasks...

All right, time to go back to zero!

After this, I promise to take it easy on my mahines so that you guys can have some time off! I owe you more than I can ever repay!

Hm... maybe it IS time for a Mac, after all.....

Nah.

Haha, gee I hope not. I don't want to learn all this stuff again.

Although things like this tempt me:

This may amuse you. As I installed Win7 on the editing machine with AHCI enabled, it took aaaaaages. Like, an hour plus, compared to the usual 15 - 20 minute install. Never the less, all goes fine right up until the Enter a User name and Computer Name screen, at which point the screen flashed repeatedly, maybe 5 times a second over and over forever, preventing me from typing anything, because with every refresh, the cursor position reset to the center of the screen. I couldn't do anything!

So, I had to press reset. Luckily, upon boot, it took me to the "Setting up your computer" screen as though the reset had never happened.

As for the drives... All of them there except the HD DVD/Blu Ray Combo drive and the Highpoint RAID drives...

First of all, I have an IDE DVD Drive which is fine and from which I installed Win7.

As far as SATA though:

1. C:\ system HDD
2. D:\ hot swappable HDD
3. E:\ internal back up HDD
4. F:\ E-Sata back up HDD
5. J:\ SATA Blu-Ray Drive

But...

6. Blu-Ray/HD DVD Combo... not shown in Disk Management but is in Device Manager as "This device cannot start"... Any ideas?

Highpoint RAID isn't there yet either but I'll install the drivers and I'm sure it will appear.

EDIT: First thing that happened after using Windows the first time: Windows took about 1 minute to tell me it had downloaded updates and needed to restart. I clicked RESTART NOW. It shut down, booted up, got to the Starting Windows screen, with the brightly lit Windows logo on the screen... and sat there... and sat there... and sat there... five minutes went by... and it sat there... and I almost pressed reset.

But finally, it started Windows... and there was my Blu-Ray/HD DVD drive - there was my 2.7TB RAID 0!

It just worked!!!!

I am so happy I could kiss you guys!

I'm now about to go about fine-tuning it as per Harm's guide on the Adobe forums.

EDIT: Ok, initially I thought these long waits on the Starting Windows screen were because of significant updates to the system... but it looks like I'm stuck with them. Every time I reboot, no matter the reason, even if I just click Restart straight after booting... it takes five minutes plus to get into Windows from that screen - at least! It just sits there saying "Starting Windows" for ages. It's interesting that, as I said earlier, the same thing happened with the installation. It took ages, where usually, installing Win7 is a pretty snappy process.

Ok, so the looooong boot problem seems to be caused by all the discs being plugged in. I remove them prior to boot, boot up takes seconds.

The trouble is... if I do it that way and then try to add them once Windows has loaded... too bad. This is strange, since SATA is supposed to be hot-swappable. Weirder still is that the ones I leave plugged in for boot-up, when I unplug them whilst running Windows, it can take up to a minute for their icon to disappear from My Computer - and in fact it's still clickable for that whole time!

So my next challenge is how to treat each of these drives in the BIOS. Do I enable them (not all of them appear) so that an ! appears next to them?

John,

Try this as well:

# Go to Windows command line with administrative rights
# Type:
vssadmin list shadowstorage to see the current allocation.
# To change it, use:
# vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=[drive]: /for=[drive]: /maxsize=[size]
# I recommend using 1% of your boot drive, so for a 500GB drive I would set the maxsize to 5GB, and keep it the same even on larger drives:
vssadmin resize shadowstorage /on=C: /for=C: /maxsize=5GB

Maybe this will also help.

Will do. What does it do exactly?

Also, I did it fine for C drive. D drive gave me grief. And I'm not sure whether I'm supposed to put this shadow storage on each individual drive or all of them on c drive. I'm not sure if I follow correctly.

Shadowstorage is used to store system restore points. It is pretty large by default, but usually you only need a couple of restore points if at all, so this wastes quite some space on your disk. By reducing it to 5GB you have enough space to store around 5 different restore points before the oldest one is being overwritten by a new one.

Likely only your C drive has shadowstorage allocated. Not your D drive and you don't need to allocate room on the D drive.

For further info: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/l...8WS.10%29.aspx

This is sort of off-the-wall and probably isn't the issue, but you might go into your BIOS on startup and look at the boot order. Sometimes things get mucked up and the system spends ages looking for Windows on every drive but the correct one. I actually had this problem with an external USB drive that somehow got inserted into the Boot order.

John, I don't know how you are keeping it together. I would have thrown my pc out the window by now, or maybe even....bought a Mac.

Here are some thoughts:
Have you run MemTest overnight? Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool

Have you checked your power supply?

Have you tried the HD DVD/BR drive on ports 1-4 or another working PC?

Here are some ideas:
Get an external 5.25" USB enclosure for the HD DVD/BR drive
Get a simple PCI Sata card for a couple of the drives

On a different topic:
John, what power supply are you using and does it have only a single 8-pin CPU power cable? If so, how did you get around this? (I ask because I just read that using Molex-to-8pin CPU power cables in a dual-CPU pc can be bad for the CPU)

Sometimes I do want to chuck them all out and just keep my day job.

The hard discs/drives are all working fine now I'm glad to say.

Haven't run MemTest - I've never really had any reason to doubt the RAM. Do you think I have one?

Regarding the PSU, that's a good question. I had a guy do the installation of the MB and PSU and CPU into the case for me. Now he also put in the RAM, but put them into the wrong slots, so it's possible he's done something funky with the PSU too. But honestly, I got him to do all that because my knowledge in that area is very weak. I've built a bunch of computers now - but all of them have had the MB and PSU connected by someone else, because I don't know what I'm doing. How would I know if they are powering the CPU appropriately?

I have an Antec TPQ-1000 1000W TruePower Quattro ATX & EPS 12V Power Supply, Modular Cables, Four 12V Rails, 80Plus Certified, 2x8-pin PCI-E, 2x6-pin PCI-E

Ok - one more problem down... my drive was being weird because of AHCI being enabled in the BIOS. But I couldn't disable it - that would mean all the other problems would come back.

So I reinstalled my old Si3112 SATA controller and it now runs the BluRay/HD-DVD drive.

The Loading Windows screen time is very short now. Thank goodness.

In fact now, with the Highpoint, the Si card and the six SATA ports on the MB, that's 12 SATA devices in total I could have connected! Maybe that can be my next project...

John, glad to hear things are working out.

According to newegg, your Antec PSU has 1 4pin and 1 8pin 12v CPU plugs and a dual Xeon motherboard requires 2 8pin plugs. I had read that you should be able to use a standard Molex to 8pin adapter, but I recently was asked the question of proper voltage being supplied to the CPU using an adapter. I am not an electrical engineer so I don't know the answer. I would assume the adapter should be fine because Molex to PCIe power adapters work just fine and they supply close to the same power for the 8pin plug.

You really should run Memtest (Memtest86+ - Advanced Memory Diagnostic Tool) just to be sure. I had very odd and random problems due to a single bad stick.

One of these days I'll get around to running Memtest.

This power issue you're talking about (which goes right over my head) - how would I know if the board/CPUs are being powered correctly? What do the connectors you're talking about look like? I'm familiar with Molex plugs and the plugs to power GPUs, which I assume are they Molex to PCI-E adapters you mentioned. But I'm nervous that it could have been done wrong...

From 1st PC Corp.

Model Number: CB-4M-8F
"This 12" long cable adapter converts a molex 4-pin from a regular ATX power supply to either a P4 ATX 4-pin or a EPS 8-pin female by combining the dual P4 ATX 4-pin. This dual use cable adapter is black sleeved as well."
http://www.1stpccorp.com/Images/CB_u.../CB-4M-44F.png

Model Number: CB-4MP4-8F
"This black-sleeved power cable adapter converts a P4 ATX 4-pin female to a 8-pin EPS female connector. Cable length is 6 inches"
http://www.1stpccorp.com/Images/CB_u...CB-4MP4-8F.jpg

Model Number: CB-6M-44F
"This Dual-Use cable adapter converts a PCI-Express 6-pin to a EPS 8-pin, or a P4 ATX 4-pin, which is then plugged on to a motherboard. At 12-inch long and black sleeved, this cable adapter is very functional and looks sleek."
http://www.1stpccorp.com/Images/CB_u...-44F%20web.png

The power issue goes over my head also, so, I suggest calling a reputable system builder who deals with dual-CPU systems on a regular basis and see what they say.

The disks:

Ok, after hours of Googling and trying to solve the problem of the portable SATA drives not disappearing from Windows Explorer even after they had been disconnected and powered down, I found and downloaded a program called HotSwap from here which allows me to deactivate the drive before unplugging it. This was imperative as I had a drive get corrupted by removing it, thinking that no data was going to/from it. Luckily it was a backup, because there was 270GB worth of footage on it!

Now I can be sure.

The power:

As far as I can tell (and I'm not too switched on when it comes to this stuff, all of the power connectors come straight from within the power supply and go straight to the motherboard with no adapters.

Also, looking at the motherboard manual, it looks like all that is required is one 8 pin (plus the other stuff). Am I right?

You are totally fine and I think this confirms the use of Molex adapters. I looked at pictures on newegg to confirm, and there is the 8 pin above the top cpu and there is the 4 pin + Molex you pointed out. Because Supermicro builds a server class board like this, then its certainly ok for boards without the molex connector.