Just built new system - Having major problems. Please help!

Hi guys,
Happy remembrance day to all!
Just built a new system a few months ago. Have been chasing gremlins ever since.
Having lots of full on crashes, Fcpro is yielding dropped frames, start up sometimes leaves me with no audio or no video. Numerous restarts fixes the problem. I'm loosing my mind because this system is just slowing me down with restarts, crashes and I'm on a huge TV series project just starting in on the post so I need help resolving the issues asap.

Here's my system config. Any pros out there that might see something that I'm missing, please let me know...

Mac Pro Dual 2.4 quad. (new in August)
Stock ATI Radeon HD 5770 (Slot 1)
Kona LHi - (Slot2) Just re-installed replacement card from AJA. Their customer service team is great BTW> but no change so likely not the issue?
Internal drives are 4x2 TB's
Have a Lacie Big4 in Raid5 via eSata card in slot 4.
Not working from this drive. Only working off internals
14gb RAM config?

Dimm1 = 1gb (All are DDR3 ECC - 1066 mhz)
Dimm2= 4 gb
Dimm3= 1gb
Dimm4= 1gb
Dimm5= 1gb
Dimm6= 4gb
Dimm7= 1gb
Dimm8= 1gb

Just about to pull out all the 1gb chips and use the 2 x 4gb chips on their own.

Running OX 10.6.8
FCPRO v.7.0.3
Just installed the latest update from AJA v9.1.

Footage was shot as XDCAM in 23.98. Imported into FCPRO with import XDCAM which converts to mov. Sequence is 1920x1080 ProRez422 @ 29.97. Set to unlimited RT, dynamic quality.
This mornings dropped frames were on a single video clip with 4 ch of audio. That's nothing for this machine to process so I'm thinking there is something else going on here.

AJA is spitting out video via HDMI to the monitor, audio is analog XLR to my mixer.
No other aja cables are in use.

Have trashed prefs, cache, PRAM.

Think I have provided all the important info here but if I'm missing anything, let me know.

Any ideas????

Here's to hoping....

I would start with the Ram.... I've had more gremlins solved by different ram configs that just about any other solution on new systems.

Personally, and I dont know why, but I have always been a multiple of 4gb guy for ram. I seem to remember having lots of trouble running 14gb on an octo, and 10gb on an quad at one point. I was good with 8 and 12 though on both systems. I hated staring at the pulled out RAM chips. I would actually add them back when I got into After Effects.

At least its a starting point for process elimination that shouldn't take too long.

This problem just has so many little alleyways to get lost down. It's really hard to diagnose and I think that's why you're not getting much love in the Forum.

It could be a million things. Not very helpful I know, but I've found that it's often a bad install. Wipe the drives clean and start again. And you don't really want to hear that, because we all know that's a good day's worth of time lost, and it may not be the answer.

I was always under the impression that for a Quad, the RAM needs to be in groups of four identical ones? So mixing a 4GB chip with a 1GB wasn't a good idea? I'm really not great with hardware, so I could be mis-remembering.


www.derekmok.com

Yeah the RAM grouping looks off to me too, but I'm not enough of an expert on RAM to say for sure.

A dumb question here:

"Footage was shot as XDCAM in 23.98. Imported into FCPRO with import XDCAM which converts to mov. Sequence is 1920x1080 ProRez422 @ 29.97. Set to unlimited RT, dynamic quality."

Did you render?



www.strypesinpost.com

Thanks for the replies guys.

Pulled all ram, just have the 2 x 4gb chips in there now in slots 1 & 5. No change.

Full render, no change.
Even with 1 video, 4 audio running the system drops frames and sometimes crashes.
WFT?

Agreed, there are a million possibilities. Just hoping 1-100 might do the trick.

Waiting as a last report before doing the wipe and reinstall. Leaning that way.
Just trying to get important projects updates done beforehand just in case.

Any other ideas?

Cheers!

Trying to narrow it down - can you play the file using quicktime? Using quicktime will it do a stop-start during playback? How are your hard drives configured? RAID 0, 1, 5, 10, etc?

I'm assuming everything is up to date.