[Cloudman]

Hi all

I have a serious hardware issue. I'm ruling out software as I have tried different files, upgrading to v3 and the problem persists. I have tried rendering on a different machine and all is fine. Any suggestions? It's really baffling me and our systems admin as there are no error messages other than this. After about 5 minutes of rendering it crashes. The weird thing is it's only just started doing this with all files rendering just fine previously.

All graphics drivers are up to date, Win 7 64bit has been updated to latest.

Any guidance is much appreciated.

[JDHill]

Maxwell represents a good torture test for any machine -- I'd look at swapping in different memory (maybe from the machine where you say there is no problem, if possible), and/or otherwise checking the integrity of the existing memory, and would also keep an eye on CPU usage & temperatures. You could reduce the likelihood of hitting bad memory addresses by rendering a simple scene, at low resolution, with multilight/etc disabled; this may cause the CPU to get worked even harder, as less time is spent moving data around, and so could possibly shed further light on the situation. Other possibilities to check for might include a failing hard drive, and/or corrupted system files (which may be able to be fixed by using the sfc utility).

[choo-chee]

I can tell you that maya+maxwell is not working well on ati cards (or at least used to not work well). it crashed a lot so i changed back to Nvidia and all is fine.

[Cloudman]

Thanks for the replies. This is still an issue unfortunately. Here are the steps I have taken so far,

Rendered out the scene on a different machine....all is fine so not an error with the scene
Upgraded to v3. Still crashes
Written the file to a different disk to check the integrity of the drive. Still crashes
Re-installed Windows 7. Still crashes

I guess the video card is the only thing to try, but it's been rendering fine for 2.5 years on this machine. Very odd.

Any other suggestions?
Thanks

[choo-chee]

if all scenes crash on render I would suggest checking the CPU temperature. We have an air-blower in our office and we clean all computers every 3-4 months. Without these steps all CPU radiators become full of dust and hairs and whatever and CPU is not cooling down well, which leads to crashes.

[dk2079]

Any other suggestions?
Thanks

i always give this a try when i have instability issues with HW:
http://www.memtest.org/
http://www.memtest.org/download/5.01/me ... taller.zip

this 2nd link is a USB stick installer,most practical, it boots into a little OS checking all memory as none is held by the Windows OS yet.
new version supports multicore, hit F2 after the boot.

also you can go into: system management>sytemTools>EventViewer>WindowsLogs>System

and filter critical events, errors and warnings. eventually you find some entries that point in the right direction

[seghier]

test other video card on your machine to know where is the problem