So I took the plunge and updated to PD8 to take advantage of the discount.

To recap, Im an i7 920, 12 GB DDR3 RAM, ATI 4870 with a 2nd 4870 in crossfire running Vista 64 bit ultimate.

I was able to load all my PD7 pds files.

The good:
1) PD8 loads projects much faster
2) PD8 was able to render (produce only) a 10 minute clip with heavy slideshow/magic motion onto AVCHD that PD7 could not (ie, PD7 would always crash no matter what I did). PD7 would only render this clip at SD/480i while PD was able to render at 1080i.
3) So I tried rendering my 38 minute AVCHD video made of several SD and HD clips and photos made into slideshows with several effects. The first time, it crashed at 29 min. I tried it again and it rendered it successfully!( Note I run 8 cores, but turbo mode off (I do use OC at 3.6 GHz))

The not so good:
1) The program crashed several times with the media source error
2) A hang just doing a multi trim
3) Rendering seems to take longer in PD8 than pd7.
4) definitely turn off preview (the program crashes more when producing).
5) cant totally eliminate not having a DVD menu
6) The produced AVCHD file was 4.18 GB, but PD could not fit it onto one AVCHD DVD because of overhead (it said the project needed 5.2 GB, and a single DVD can only hold 4.7 (I ended up rendering it in Nero 9 without the menu)

Bottom line,
I am glad I spent the $44 to upgrade, since PD7 updates will no longer come, as PD8 is more stable and performs better

But there is clearly more room for improvement.

I wish oh wish they would make a native 64 bit application to take advantage of the larger system memory...

by the way I was also using catalyst 9.12 hotfix drivers/avivo for GPU acceleration.

One other note is when the 38 minute movie was rendering with GPU acceleration, my i7 was running about 20% on all cores, occasionally a single core here and there would blip up to 50 or 60%.

Also, BTW, CL is delivering build 2220c as the standard download when you buy it.

Alex