Final Cut Pro X freezing on top spec new 27" iMac, help!

Glad you're encouraged.

If you scroll back in this thread to 8:18 this morning, you'll see that I suggested you create a new user account at that time.

Russ

edit: woops didnt see your first post!

was going to suggest trashing preferences, but looks like you already did

: ( so only a swap seemed to work? there's no fix for this im running into the same problem

Just a heads up, I've read that some people are having issues reading/writing data through the fusion drive. This may be the issue, especially if you're working with large file sizes that worked previously on a machine without fusion drive technology. It's worth looking into, I think. The GPU doesn't seem to me that it would be the issue since it uses CUDA technology, which supports openCL. I would try to find a contact directly to Apple engineer support rather than your local genius bar. Best of luck to you.

PS. I read that the reason why is because the SS portion of the fusion drive (being only 128G) freaks out when dealing with large files because it foresees not being able to store/handle the entire file. This may cause freezing and other OS panic symptoms.

I wonder if we are starting to see issues with FCPx and fusion drives ? One of the reasons I got a 2011 refurb recently was because of the unknown fusion drive. I couldn't afford the big SSD that was going to be offered in the new iMacs and didn't want to hang my hat on a fusion drive but now I understand that one can break the fusion drive and reformat them as separate drives. That might be a possible thing to try.

But in the case of FCP X projects being on an external drive, there really wouldn't seem to be anything of major size associated with FCP X on the boot/fusion drive to confuse the SS portion?

You and I wouldn't think so, but I wouldn't rule it out. Fusion Drive is functional through software, so at it's infant state it's hard to say for certain whether or not even external source drives would confuse it and cause performance issues. It's definitely something I would look into.

Also, something I found out recently is that the NVIDIA GTX 680MX that you're running supports CUDA, but not OpenCL directly. You may need to download a driver/CP from NVIDIA in order to get better performance out of your processors. I still don't think that your GPU is the issue, but you never know...if you're trying to exhaust resources anyway.

I'll be curious to hear whether Apple will in fact swap it out for you. Keep us posted.

Jon -

One other thought, for my own curiosity if nothing else. The fact that a couple of the things you tried worked for a while before failing again, and also that rendering (high processor load) seems to create problems suggest the following to me: If there is a heat build up over time and resulting overtemp situation, that could affect performance.

This could result from faulty fan functions or other things.

There are some freebie programs - istatpro? - that give you data on temperatures, fan speeds, etc. Might try running one of those.

If indeed that turns out to be the problem you can't deal with that and should return the machine, but at least it would bring some closure to the issue.

I have an older 27" iMac, and amazed how hot the top of it gets. So some cooling malfunction could possibly give you the erratic behaviour you see.

were there any tests done without the harddrive?

my freezing issues went away once I ejected my external

It is your new iMac, not FCPX. It is defective.

Have you called Apple Care, yet? Call them.

If you got it from an Apple store, set up an appoint first, via on-line.

Otherwise you will wait & wait, etc.

To get around that ask, to speak to the store manager.

In 28 yrs of using Mac's. I had two that had to be re-placed.