dual processor/raid system Crashes

JoJo Styles wrote on 10/2/2001, 3:30 PM

I just had a new Daw built with Win 2000, Asus cuv4x Motherboard,
Via Chipset, Dual P3/866 with a Raid array of 4 hard drives. It is
Locking up hard.Is anyone familiar with this configuration or a one
with the same performance that is stable? I have a Win 2000 P3 500
System that is totally stable. What about the P4 processor? Is there
any benifit to it. I can still reconfigure this system. Thanks!

Comments

Jdodge wrote on 10/2/2001, 4:35 PM

Hey Jaiye,

I don't have a dual proc moboard, but I do have a double drive RAID configuration using a Promise controller. When you say 'locking up hard', when is this occuring? Can you boot up at all? I'm sure there are other users who have configurations similar to yours who can add some input. A dual proc system with RAID acceleration is one of the toughest to set up. Lots of t's to be crossed and i's to be dotted.

Any input out there?

JoJo Styles wrote on 10/3/2001, 3:03 PM

Thanks for your Reply. What I mean by locking up hard is that Ill be
working in Vegas and It will crash/lockup and when you go to the
Taskmanager to quit the program it will not respond and you have to
reboot. Understand I have a win2ooo p3 500 raid system that is working
flawlessly. It has not crashed once since I had win2000 installed.
The new system will lock up after minimal use consistantly and it's
been tested out by the builder to be working fine. It's just with the
Sonic foundry software that it's crashing.The system is a Asus cuv4x
moboard, via chipset ,dual p3 866 , 512 Ram,etc. built by a firm, custom to
my specs.I'm clear that the dual is better in the Processesor intensive
rendering apps but at this point maybe a P3 or p4 1.2gz would be better?
What's your opinion?
Thanks Again , Jaiye

Cheesehole wrote on 10/3/2001, 7:24 PM

I'm using a CUV4X/D with 2 1Ghz PIIIs under Win2k. I've also got a Promise FastTrak 100 RAID card with 4 drives. Everything works perfectly. Make sure you are upgraded to the latest VIA 4 in 1 drivers. It's a commonly missed item since the latest drivers are not built in to Win2k.

good luck...

Jdodge wrote on 10/10/2001, 4:45 PM

Sorry for the late reply on this one. Busy busy busy.

You'd definitely be seeing more problems if it was a system issue. The via update will certainly help. Also make sure you have the application completely up to date, you can get updates here:

http://www.sonicfoundry.com/download/step1.asp?CatID=2

kosstheory wrote on 5/25/2002, 1:12 PM

I have gotten excellent results with the following system:

Dual AMD Athlon MP 2000+ processors
ASUS A7M266-D Motherboard
1 GB PC2100 DDR RAM ECC
SIIG UATA 133 RAID CONT Running 4 80 GB Maxtor UATA 133 Drives configured as two drives ( Onoe for Raw Clips and one for rendered media )

When Rendering From DV to DV I achieved 100% CPU usage on both CPUs for the duration of the render, which was quite fast! I was in awe! Seeing those frames shoot by on the preview was a sight for sore eyes. I've never seen anything quite so beautiful.

A lot of people say that the AMD Athlon MP processors are not stable enough to compete with the P4s. This baby is rock steady! I can throw anything at it, and it just gobles it up, and keeps on trucking. And I saved hundreds!

One thing that I am a little concerned about is the CPU usage during other types of renders. Like the mpg2 file I'm rendering right now. The CPUs are only being used to 50%. I suppose that the main concept mpeg2 encoder has no optimization for dual cpus? Looking at the performance tab of the task manager, it looks like CPU 1 is at about 80% and 2 seems to vary between 20% and 30%. There was an earlier post that stated that dual processor support for activities other than DV encoding might use one processor for decoding, and one for encoding. I suppose what the performance tab is showing might be proving that this scenario is true.

I hope that future releases of the main concept mpeg2 codec included with vegas will utilize the dual cpu configuration more efficiently. It is a puzzle why 100% of atleast one of the CPUs isn't being employed. As it is 80+20=100. So, I would probably get about the same results with a single CPU when doing anything other than DV encoding. Oh well. Maybe they should advertise it as "Limited" Dual CPU support, until it's further optomized?

Just my 2 cents