Help with new Workstation! (long)

GEasterly wrote on 2/27/2004, 9:57 AM
Hey folks... long time-no post (just illustrates how well Vegas works for me, I guess) but now I've got a crisis.

I am in the extremely enviable position of having been "blessed" with a Dual Xeon SE7501HG2 mb and two 2.8 ghz procs. After getting the whole thing fired up, I come to find out the 7501 chipset doesn't support XP. I had the whole system up and running with Vegas fine, but then I tried to get the gbit NIC working, and discovered that this thing is setup to be a server only - in a serious way. It doesn't even support XP, and putting in a Quadro NVS200 just locks it up...

OK, I'm still getting the two Xeons for free, so I figure it's worth buying a SE7505VB2 workstation mb. I did so, and have it all up and running. Now I install Vegas. When it's done, I start it up, enter my s/n, and wham: gpf before the splash screen even finishes (interestingly: If I try to "report to Microsoft" the "error reporting" process hangs. If I just "don't send", Vegas simply terminates).

I guess what I need to know is if I'm facing some kind of fundamental Incompatability with an Intel SE7505VB2 motherboard: anybody running Vegas with this board?

So far to troubleshoot I have:
Uninstalled the Audigy 2 ZS (physically)
Uninstalled the PNY Quadro NVS200 PCI
Re-installed Vegas 4.0a from CD several times

Still the same behavior.

I updated the motherboard drivers with the latest immediately after installing XP.

Possible interesting note: the first time I installed Vegas, it finished installing in the usual fashion, but when I go to start it up, it's not on the Start menu. hmmm. I navigate to the exe in the programs folder, and start it manually. After asking for the S/N, it tells me that Vegas is not installed correctly, and to reinstall. I couldn't uninstall, because it never registered, so it wasn't on the Add/Remove Programs list. I start the install routine from the CD again, but it only offers to uninstall or repair, so I select uninstall, reboot and start again. This time it installs fine, but I'm getting the gpf everytime I click the icon. My concern is that the initial botched installation has permanently whacked the registry somehow, and an XP re-install is in order.

System specs:
Currently:
motherboard
a gig of registered RAM
two 2.8 Xeons
two IDE 120 Gig HD
Win XP pro

additional hardware to be installed when I've got Vegas working:
Audigy 2 ZS
PNY quadro NVS200
Adaptec USB/FW Duo




Comments

TVCmike wrote on 2/27/2004, 10:14 AM
Hmmm, this is a weird problem indeed. Have you installed all the service packs for XP from Windows Update? Have you tried Vegas 4.0e?

If you haven't invested much time, I would try a full reformat and reinstall of XP. XP has a nasty habit of disliking fundamental hardware changes on it. For example, sometimes the motherboard or RAID drivers aren't automatically detected and installed, and using the old ones will sometimes screw things up. I hate to recommend a reinstall, but knowing XP it might be the best and easiest course of action. Reinstall XP, then install all service packs from Windows Update, but DO NOT install the Windows Update drivers (get them from the individual manufacturers' websites beforehand). Then install Vegas 4.0e and see what happens.
GEasterly wrote on 2/27/2004, 11:22 AM
That's kinda my thinking, TVC. And yes, I allowed Windows update to do it's thing the day before I installed Vegas...but I let it do it automatically. When you say "DO NOT install the Windows Update drivers", do you mean to manually go to the windows update site, and de-select a "drivers update" or some such from the list of updates?

FYI, Starting the re-install now. Here's the latest ,however: I did a system restore to the earliest possible point, which was after the first successful WinXP boot. Installed Vegas from CD as the only application on the system (without allowing windows update or anything else to run) and guess what? same thing as before...it said it was done installing, but it wasn't on the Start menu.

Anyway, that's it. I'm doing a complete re-install now... I will try to install a newer release of Vegas this go round also, instead of starting with 4.0a.
GEasterly wrote on 2/27/2004, 1:13 PM
OK, reformat and installed XP again. installed Vegas 4.0e before doing a single update, and it loads!

I'll start updating/adding hardware now, and look for trouble, but I think somehow that my original failed attempt to install Vegas must have messed up the registry somehow, and all should be fine. I'll let you guys know how the system runs when I start a real project with it. I'm graduating from an older P4 2.0 ghz system - I'm sure I'll have some questions about the Xeon world.

Here's one I can think of: I notice that the task manager shows 4 CPU graphs with the Dual Xeons... on the old setup I disabled hyper-threading and it showed 2 graphs... question is, is it more efficient to have HT off if you have dual Xeons?

later
Graham Easterly
RBartlett wrote on 2/27/2004, 1:42 PM
I'd leave HT turned on.
If an application, or the range of applications/tools you run together are written to be multithreaded and adequately so then you don't need HT in that case. If the tools/apps you run aren't and especially if you operate many of them together. Then you might well squeeze some more out.

Turning off HT would perhaps buy you some back. However some would argue that you'd gain some CPU I/O bandwidth by removing one of the Xeon's. I certainly wouldn't condone doing that!

If Vegas was more able to use multiple CPUs, then I might sway you to turn HT off. The exception is MainConcept MPEG-2 rendering in Vegas4.

That was a bit of fortune, having a dual Xeon land your way.
Have two copies of Vegas open, DVD-A rendering and this forum open. You'll still be responsive, even though many folk do prefer the fastest single CPU they can get (and RAM). I'd go back to dual CPUs if I could, personally.

Well done and good luck with re-adding those peripherals. AMD are going to add HT type technology this year, so it must suit the general case.
TVCmike wrote on 2/27/2004, 6:10 PM
Glad you got it all working. I didn't think there was any serious reason for your trouble.

As for HyperThreading, I concur with RBartlett in suggesting you leave it on if for no other reason than if you multitask. It'll help you squeeze performance out. And, I know that you can get 15-30% better performance in MPEG-2 rendering too with HT versus non-HT (at least on a single processor, YMMV, etc.).
GEasterly wrote on 3/2/2004, 8:54 AM
OK, things are going well - I haven't really done anything major as yet (I'm still loading apps and getting the thing ready for day-to-day work - ugh! - Install the application, track down the 50 digit serial number, register the application, get the latest updates for the application, try to duplicate my preferences - REPEAT - man I hate moving 2 years of work from one PC to the next - networking, email, utilities, jeez...).

As an aside, I decided to buy a dual head adapter and a couple Viewsonic A90f 19" CRTs for this thing, and yes, as many have said before, if you ever go dual monitor, you'll never go back! having Vegas spread out across a 1280 x 2048 work area is positively orgasmic. I also never realized how crappy my old CRT was. Got the A90f's at CompUSA for $230 (20 bucks off) each... best money I've ever spent.

Did do a couple quick render to AVI tests to see if HT on or off would make any difference - I have a 6 layer, 10 second file made up of all Vegas generated media, each involving some kind of alpha effect or motion or both: it took exactly 3 min and 4 seconds to render whether HT was on or off (as expected). What is really amazing is when I re-ran the test while surfing the web, checking email and working in Illustrator, the render times only changes by a couple of seconds, and if I didn't know that the rendering was going on in the background, I would not have been able to tell.

later...
busterkeaton wrote on 3/2/2004, 9:43 AM
For Vegas, how much faster are the Xeons than an equivalent Speed Pentium 4?

Are there any rendertest results for this? Or generic video tests?
GEasterly wrote on 3/2/2004, 12:26 PM
no hard data to give ya, but I don't think the Xeons are much, if any, faster than an equivilent P4 at things like rendering and previewing. I think the biggest advantage seems to be in the multitasking department, which I do a lot of.
But if I hadn't got the Xeons basically handed to me, I surely would have gone with a conventional P4 system... unless money is no issue, there simply is no way that the cost of building a dual Xeon from the ground up is worth the exponential increase in cost.... from EPS power supplies to registered RAM, to very pricey motherboards, it gets expensive quick... and you ought to hear this baby ROAR with it's factory cooling fans/wind-tunnel cpu coolers (I'm putting this baby in the next room, and running all my peripherals via USB and FW hubs... I'll let you know how that works out, LOL).

GE