Premiere CS3 and dual quad-core mobo performance

[Jan Janowski]

I’ll bring some JPEG’s in from my A100 camera, it is much bigger than 1000.

I’ll print out your question, so I don’t miss anything… I’ll try to do it tonight…

Looking for 1939 Indian Motocycle

[Jeff Brown]

[Vincent Becquiot] “…you will only be able to assign two cores per application using the “set affinity” function. Which is nice but only useful if you like to multitask. Someone confirm this once and for all?”

Not sure if I’m correctly following you, but I can say that a properly multi-threaded application [Mental Ray rendering, e.g.] will use 8 cores simultaneously, under XP-32-Pro. I think core usage these days is determined more by application that by OS. Also, some tasks simply cannot be multi-threaded due to mathematical reasons, which can cause ‘lowered’ performance.

-jeff

[Arc Nevada]

I had heard even Windows XP Home Edition would make use of all 4 cores provided the software being used (Premiere, Maya, After Effects etc.) could make use of them. Is this correct? I do not want to get Vista and I heard Premiere Pro will make use of all 4 cores with the 32 bit XP OS.

I would like to think a 2.66 GHZ quad core should make the Matrox board obsolete.

[Vince Becquiot]

What I meant was that if you do a ctrl+Alt+Del and go to processes, you can assign cores to different applications using “set affinity”. Meaning you could assign 2 cores to AE and 2 to Premiere for example. And as I understand it, that’s the only way a 32 bit OS will take advantage of more than 2 cores natively. Again, I could be wrong as I’ve heard people arguing on both side, and I can’t test it here.

Now, a render engine ($$$) will take care of that limitation for some applications (Nucleo will do the same thing for AE), but you won’t need it in a 64 bit OS, since Premiere WILL use all cores automatically, (8 in our case) unless you specify otherwise with affinity settings. Of course, now you are trading performance for possible issues with drivers, though if this is a new machine it’s unlikely. BTW, you don;t need Vista, XP64 will do.

Vince

[Jan Janowski]

OK… Did the test…
A100 JPEG files are 3872 x 2592, which are much larger than what you were wanting, but should show there is plenty of headroom. Imported 3 into an NTSC SD session and twirled, zoomed and positioned the images. NO PROBLEM playing them back on timeline without rendering them!]
NO PROBLEM!
I even went so far as to call up the Preformance Monitor to show all 8 processors. Maximum CPU useage was 5-6% while playing back the timeline without rendering…
NO hesitation whatsoever.

By the way: I put all my $$ into CPU and Motherboards, and cheaped out on the video display cause I ran out of money: I’m running the NVIDIA Quadro FX560 with two Refurbished Gateway 1830 Displays at 1280 x 1024. This seems to work fine, even though it isn’t the high horsepower display card the seller wanted me to buy.. But it still works fine…

I hope this is the results you wanted…..

Looking for 1939 Indian Motocycle

[Jan Janowski]

Here’s the link to the motherboard:
https://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon1333/5000X/X7DA8+.cfm

And a link to the display card:
https://www.nvidia.com/object/quadro_fx_product_literature.html

I stayed with XP Pro 32 bit because I knew it would work.

Looking for 1939 Indian Motocycle

[Paul Thurston]

Some people have had a better experience with PPCS3 if they have at least 2 gigs of RAM for every processor core.

In a “consumer” 32-bit MicroSoft OS, this can not be had, but with certain “other” versions it can, for example: WIN Server 2003 32-Bit with PAE enabled, WIN Server 2003 64-Bit, WIN XP 64-bit, WIN Vista 64-bit.

Others have had great success if the BIOS is updated to work correcty with 4-core processors. (Check out http://www.biosman.com to know how to update your BIOS without messing up your SuperMicro motherboard.)

Others have had great success if the temperature inside the case is within designated extremes. If you realize that inside the case the temperature gets to 140º Fahrenheit too often, that may be the cause of your machine slowing down. By design, Xeon Intel processor chips cause themselves and the RAM to slow down if the temperature inside the case gets too hot.

Finally, others have had great success by being careful with their power supply.

If your power supply cannot handle the power requirements (the wattage) of all the stuff connected to it, you may notice strangeness. If the computer at times turns itself off for no reason, (no WIN XP exit, just turns off…) the power supply is being over taxed in wattage.

This can also happen if you connect too many high wattage components to only one or two rails (electrical circuit coming out of the power supply.)

For example, if the power supply has four rails (4 circuits) and each can handle 250 watts (the power supply is rated 1000 watts on its chassis), and you just happen to install 300 watts of stuff on only one of the rails, the power supply will then turn itself off when the heat goes up. In this case, the power supply is rated to 1000 watts, but 300 watts causes it to fail because of the overload of one of the circuits.

You may also want to check your power supply just to make sure it’s completely compatible with your motherboard. Most of the motherboards labeled somewhere as being 5000x… (meaning they are compatible with XEON 5000 sequence processors) also, expect a power supply that is EPS12V compatible.

When you shop online for a power supply, type “EPS12V” in the site’s search engine. This may help you determine quickly if they have power supplies that work with your motherboard.

Based on what you have explained, I would first look at your BIOS and check if it’s compatible with the processors installed.

Regards,
Paul

[David Owen]

Wow! That’s info that I (and others) can use. Thank you!

I’ll present this to my dealer and see if he spots anything we’ve overlooked.

Thanks to all who’ve responded. The Cow rules!

– David

[Arc Nevada]

David,

I hear ya. I have heard of some people getting worse performance form PP CS3 than PP CS2. I think PP CS3 is a good program if set up right. After reading this I may opt for a Core 2 Quad motherboard and buy PP CS3.

[Jan Janowski]

I can tell you that I never had to make any “Tweaks” to the system, or any system I’ve ever had PPRO loaded on.

In fact, other than a display driver, to get optimum overlay working, I’ve never had to “Tweak” any system I’ve loaded Adobe products on — it’s always worked ‘out of the box’.

Looking for 1939 Indian Motocycle