Mac Conversion for CS5 Nightmare

Question

After seeing the FCP Supermeet at NAB this year I decided to make the switch to CS5.5
I took the following Mac and made these changes to upgrade the Mac in prep for CS5.5:
Intel Mac 3,1 Quad Core 2008
3Ghz
Up'ed the Ram to 32Gb DDR2
Clean Install (Erase/Reformat) 320Gb 7200RPM Operating System Drive and installed 64 bit Snow Leopard
Installed updates to make Snow Leopard 10.6.7 version
Installed base driver for new Quadro 4000 for the Mac graphics card (because of Apple partial support you have to use an older graphics card to install this driver BEFORE you install the Quadro 4000 physically)
Physically installed the Quadro 4000
Installed the Cuda driver
Updated the Cuda driver to current driver using the Cuda Panel interface
Installed CS5.5 from DVD disc set
Have separate 750Gb 7200RPM media drives
Have an external 600mbps read/write dual channed 0 Raid array for media as well
NIGHTMARE!
Can barely play 1 track of h.264 video/audio on an HDSLR timeline preset
Can barely play 1 track fo video/audio on XDCAM EX 720p 24fps that comes with Adobe CS5 Classroom in a Book
Playback stutters and drops frames, audio glitches even when Playback Resolution is dropped down to 1/2 and 1/4 resolution
I have used both the Playback with Mercury and GPU acceleration and Mercury Engine Software only - same resulting stuttering playback
Watching graphical CPU usage  when playing back single track and there seems to be plenty of headroom
Media is stored on drive and raid separate from operating system drive. Scratch drive is on drive separate from Op Sys drive
The only out of spec component with this Mac is I am missing "Core Audio sound card"
But I have seen all sorts of Mac laptops running multiple tracks of HD with all kinds of effects applied and they played/scrubbed through the composition like butter.
Any idea - this MacPro tower with 32Gb and Quadro 4000 cuda card should tear it up with CS5.5

Answer 1

All our other edit bays are still at 32bit Leopard and are on jobs.
We pulled this one and did the noted conversion that we are having the problems with.
I guess your testing is both good news - the 3,1 model CAN be converted over and do a decent job.
I assume your co-worker's 3,1 had a Quadro 4000 for the Mac graphics card?
No choppy dropped frames at 1/2 or 1/4 playback resolution?
Bad news is the only idea I have left is start all over again and see if that changes it.
One new item to note, this morning on boot-up, when opening the "About this Mac" panel, the internal bong sound starts going off repeatedly (as if you are holding down a keyboard key continuously. And the scroll bars could not be used - when you drag one down and let go, they pop back up to the top. The only way to stop this all was to re-boot.
Yesterday I re-installed FCP and that gave me back the codec for nanoFlash XDCAMHD 422 files (and probably a lot of other missing codecs).
I then opened up a matching sequence in Premiere CS5.5 and was able to import one of these files now - so your advice on the missing codec helped here.
But when I placed this file on the timeline - video only - no audio, it stuttered and dropped frames no matter what resolution used for playback,
Then, here is the most telling thing, I rendered the "entire workspace" (1 clip of video only - 20 secs in length) it took 2mins/52 seconds with all 8 cores maxing out to render it.
I then got the green line above the video in the timeline - AND STILL THE VIDEO PLAYED BACK STUTTERING AND DROPPING FRAMES EVEN THOUGH RENDERED!!
That seems to indicate I either have something wrong with the video card or it's drivers? And maybe this morning's boot up demonstrates that as well?
What do you folks think?
Thank you so much Todd for making the extra effort to help with my problem.
So anyone following this issue, it appears to not be a CS5.5 issue - but an issue with my individual machine - or graphics card or driver. Would be interested to know what graphics card and drivers you folks were using for this test.