GTX 570 and Premiere CS 5.5: Mercury Playback Engine doesn't seem to work

Question

Hi everyone,
I'm getting choppy playback and a red render bar on Premiere CS5.5 whenever I apply to a clip one of this effects: Any effect on the distort folder, noise alpha or Magic Bullet Looks 2.
The sequence is an AVCHD 1080/24p Premiere preset and the media files are AVCHD from a GH2 (1080/24p at 24Mbps).
My system is more or less like this:
Motherboard: Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3
Processor: Core i7 2600k
Ram: 16Gb DDR3 1600 Kingston HyperX
Graphics Card: Gigabyte GTX 570 1280 Mb (it comes factory overclocked)
(Only one 1920*1080 monitor is attached to the graphics card right now)
HDDs: 3 Western Digital Caviar Black 1 TB lay out as follows:
        c: OS, Program Files, pagefile
        g: Project and media files
        h: previews
And now, the symptons: In an AVCHD 1080/24p sequence with 24Mbps AVCHD clips, all in the same video track, whenever I apply an effect from the distort folder, Magic Bullet Looks or noise alpha (and probably any hardware accelerated effect) the render bar turns from yellow to red and I get choppy playback unless I set the playback resolution to 1/2. If I change the Mercury Playback Engine setting from hardware to software nothing changes. So I'm thinking that the GTX 570 is not working with Premiere CS5.5 for some reason. In this thread (http://forums.adobe.com/message/3736541) some people had similar complains. Also rendering feels pretty slow. For example a 30 seconds clip with a Magic Bullet Looks effect applied takes 150 seconds to turn from red to green.
I've tried completely uninstalling the nvidia drivers and installing the latest ones to no effect. I'm kind of frustrated, I've chosen this system and CS5.5 thinking it was going to be a smooth experience and I'm a bit dissapointed right now. Hopefully there will be a fix for this. Or maybe I'm doing something wrong myself.
Thanks a lot in advance and sorry to bother you with this.
Cheers.
Diego

Answer 1

Thanks a lot Harm and Jim,
I continue to be amazed by the willingness of people around the web to help each other. Maybe there's still some hope for the human race after all.
Regarding my MPE expectations I suppose that it's a sign of the times; spoiled kids like me expecting the world from a new system and then getting dissapointed at the first symptons of something not going as smooth as they think at first. But then again when storytelling costs you more than it pays at the end of the month, sometimes it's difficult not to get into drama-queen mode every now and then.
Sorry for going a little bit off-topic here but, is there away to make completely sure that the graphics card is actually doing its job inside Premiere? This thread: http://forums.adobe.com/message/3736541 got me a little nervous thinking that it may be a bug or something on CS5.5 that prevents the GTX570 from working properly.
Also is there a way that I can improve general performance and rendering times without investing a lot more in this new machine. I thought about buying a couple of more disks and running a RAID through the motherboard but maybe the impact in processing power is not worth it. Sorry again to ask so many questions but video editing is almost completely new for me. Not so long ago writing was enough for me, but that's not anymore the case. Now, I'm using every storytelling medium that I can. So my mind is always filled with question marks dancing to Tchaikovsky ballet suites and who knows what else.
Thanks a lot again. I hope I can repay the community in a not so distant future.
Regards.
Diego
Atticus Diablowsky
AKA D.B. Alonso
AKA Diego Benito Alonso
AKA "Hey you, little punk, ¿where do you think you're going with that?"atticusdiablowsky.com