Poor performance on 3.0 mactel

[Walter Biscardi]

No clue on the Capturing on a G5 thing, but our Mac Pro Quad 3.0 is about 25% faster than our G5 Quad, both running a Kona 3, both running 4GB RAM. Lots of realtime on both, both running SATA Arrays.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Captain Mench]

Hate to ask… but what version of FCP are you using?? 5.1 or later?

CaptM

[Mark Maness]

From my experience with the Mac Pro Quad 3.0…

Check your memory. Is it installed properly? Is all from the same manufacturer?

Here’s an Apple tech doc on this:

https://docs.info.apple.com/article.html?artnum=304492

Trust me on this… I had the same issues as you and memory was my problem. I bought my system through ProMax and they replaced all of my memory with Kensington memory. The lead tech guy at ProMax told me about the issues with memory maufacturers and the new Mac Pro. He said that most manufacturers have made memory that works BUT FCp becomes very unstable with it. They did extensive testing and found that Kensington memory was the most stable.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com

[Erik Mickelson]

Well, first off I am running my capture scratch on a single 500GB hard drive(about half full/empty?) OSx and FCP are on the other drive. I have the latest FCP Studio install. I know that a single drive will only support around 30-40 MBsec, but my system was WAY snappier on the dual/2.3Ghz G5.

Now for Ram: I have 2 GB of Apple ram (4×512) in the 1,2 slots on each riser card. I then have 2x1GB sticks in slots 3,4 on riser card 1. Could this be the problem?

I will take out the 2x1GB sticks and see if it runs faster.

[Mark Maness]

[Erik] “Now for Ram: I have 2 GB of Apple ram (4×512) in the 1,2 slots on each riser card. I then have 2x1GB sticks in slots 3,4 on riser card 1. Could this be the problem?

I will take out the 2x1GB sticks and see if it runs faster.”

I assume that you read the Apple doc. Its true. I have the orginal Apple memory (2×512) sitting on the shelf. I have a total of 8 gig in my system.

_______________________________

Wayne Carey
Schazam Productions
http://www.schazamproductions.com

[Don Greening]

My new MacPro 3.0 is still sitting in the box (finishing up projects on the G5 first). I had Apple put 8 Gigs of RAM in it when they built it. Let’s hope they got it right 🙂

– Don

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[Erik Mickelson]

I removed the 2x1GB sticks of ram and the system has “sprung to life”. The waveform redraws for audio are 1000x faster(scientific research through peer reviewed sourcery proves it). I may have to send this ram back or put another 2x1GB sticks so there are two “sets” of memory.

Thanks guys.
I will report.

Hey,maybe there should be a sticky with best solutions for Macs.

[Walter Biscardi]

[Erik] “I removed the 2x1GB sticks of ram and the system has “sprung to life”.”

Ensure that you have properly MATCHED pairs of RAM. This is different than how the matched pairs have been in the past.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com
HD Editorial & Animation for Food Network’s “Good Eats”
HD Editorial for “Assignment Earth”

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Erik Mickelson]

Here is what I have gathered. Install ONLY in 4 or 8 slots filled, never 2 or 6! I have installed two more matching 1xGB sticks and the system is back to normal. As an example, I have a PSD title that blands on and then off screen, with 4 or 8 sticks of ram I get 17-19 seconds render time, with 2 or 6 I get 25 seconds render time. Enough said, the extra cost of the ram is only wirth it if you have multiple things open. Two gigs of 4×512 MB ram sticks should be good for DV and FCP use. Throw Motion into the mix and I would say 4GB minimum.
Thanks for the help guys.
Erik