Mike, could you post the components/os of your beast machine? Thanks!

Kevin, it's essentially John Rofrano's Core 2 Quad system - which was based on John Cline's system.
JR's specs are at http://johnrofrano.com/pcequipment.htm
JC's specs are at http://www.johncline.com/quad.htm
My changes were:
drive 1 (system): 200 GB Seagate SATA;
drives 2 & 3 (capture & edit): 500 GB Seagate SATA (i.e. no RAID);
24" Dell monitor;
Geforce 7900 video card;
M-Audio Revolution 5.1 sound card;
basic Logitech surround sound speaker system.
Total price was around $5K Canadian.

Be advised that the QX6700 has been replaced by the QX6800. Tests show that it's marginally faster.
Also, after April 22, a drop in Intel CPU prices has already been announced.
Scroll down to craftech's response (last one on the page) in the http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/...0355&Replies=6 thread on the Sony forum for pricing details.

Mike

Thanks Mike, I've already got my eye on the new e6420.

OK Ian. You're going to either hate me or love me :-)
After it crashing on me 3 times (all at the same point in the motion blur section, of course), I changed the number of rendering threads in Prefs from 4 (the default) to 1.
SUCCESS!!
It took 2 hr. 10 min. 31 sec. but it did do it.

Mike

Mike

Thanx so much for that and for tracking down a partial solution. I'm glad it's not just my system. It also seems to work OK on 2 threads (that one region took 47 minutes). One for Sony support I think; although I would never render anything as complicated as that, I do think it's a bug.

As an experiment I rendered the frst 5 seconds of that test and the results for each number of threads are:
4 threads - 2:12
3 threads - 2:47
2 threads - 4:14
1 thread - 8:35

I also ran the original VASST render test:
4 threads - 0:14
3 threads - 0:17
2 threads - 0:24
1 thread - 0:46

Thanks again.

Ian