[Arthur Lacour]

Eric,

I feel your pain, I have experienced it myself, having worked happily with Premiere Pro CS3, I upgraded when I needed Photoshop, Illustrator, Soundbooth & After Effects, it made sense just to go with Production Premium CS4.

There were immediate problems with Premiere Pro CS4, it ran like a proverbial dog, while the other CS4 components performed just fine. I ended up wasting much time with tweaks garnering only marginal improvements.

Then I attended the big video show in London at Earls Court in Feb this year and got a little time with one of Adobes “Serious Magicians” as his business card described him, to be fair he offered little by way of useful advice but did suggest I check processor operating temps when rendering etc. He said these types of activities work the processor hard and if too hot the system will restrict power to cool it along with increasing fan speeds.

I like you run a quad core Q6600, and sure enough it was bumping the red temp zone during rendering etc. The first thing I did was change the Intel processor paste for some Artic Silver which immediately dropped the temp by some 7 degrees C. Things improved but only by extending the time before playback began to judder, so I then upgraded to a full sized Coolermaster Tower case, it’s huge and has gobs of fans (though not too noisy) which was good for a 10 degree C drop in temps, now even under the longest playbacks/renders etc. I never get near the Red and things are working better.

It still isn’t working particularly well though , the code just seems to be buggy and normal activities will cause crashes. Despite only using the computer for video editing.

The other thing I noticed is you mentioned your using an 8800GTS video card, now Adobe isn’t great on making this clear, but I have search extensively on their site to get a definitive answer to no avail, however some areas of the Adobe site suggests it isn’t a supported card it’s the GT that is supported and it needs to have 512mb on board at a minimum. In my desperation to get PP CS4 working properly I swapped my 384mb 8800GTS for a 1GB 9800GT (8800GT no longer available) and it made diddly squats worth of difference.

I also made sure my projects, OS & scratch disks were on separate 7800 spin speed 1TB drives with only minor improvements

The only piece of worthwhile advice I can offer is to improve your system cooling, because if you’re using the stock Intel fan and paste it probably isn’t up to the job on it’s own.

If I find anything that helps I’ll post again, Good Luck!