System Crash with DR

[Adam Glover]

Hi,

 

I have had a dual Xeon workstation for about 4yrs and it has worked fine with no problems.

About two yrs ago I purchased an I7 workstation (as was always the plan) which is now my main modeling machine leaving my older one to do the grunt of the rendering etc..

 

About 8 months ago I decided to set up Vray DR across these machines.

All has worked brilliantly up until this month.

 

Now when I render an image using this set up they both jump in and start rendering fine, but around 1hr into the render the dual Xeon machine gives up.

It crashes and the monitor linked to it goes black, but with a white cursor blinking in the top left corner.

 

It doesn't seem to over heat (its liquid cooled with 2x corsair Hydro H80's), as its freezing in my attic studio this time of year (writing this with gloves on), and it was fine over the summer.

 

I swapped out the graphics card with a different one just as a test but as I thought that's not the problem.

 

I'm stuck really and don't know where to go from here.

 

I need to get this sorted asap as I promised a mate I would do some Architectural Visuals over xmas, so any help would be massively appreciated!!

 

Thanks

 

Adam

[TomasEsperanza]

Hey Adam,

 

Just a thought: It might be faulty RAM.

[joelmcwilliam]

Have you found a solution?

 

Strange you could find temperature monitoring software on the web:

 

http://www.hwinfo.com/download.php

 

http://www.cpuid.com/

 

Would be nice to have the system specs.

 

Did you changed anything prior to the system craches?

 

Have you tested your ram. There are tutorials on the web that can help you with this.

[Adam Glover]

Thanks for the replies.

I appreciate the response, sorry for the delay in posting back.

 

I did a memtest and checked the RAM modules, swapped out the graphics cards etc but that's where my expertise ran out. I needed a resolution quickly and guessing that it was a hardwear problem I ended up having to ring a guy to take it away and test it.

 

After 5hrs of testing, turns out that the motherboard has a fault, the PSU has one dodgy rail and I have melted one of my CPU's.

 

So it looks like an expensive rebuild is on the cards

 

I've been looking at 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V3 S2011-3 Haswell 8 Core 2.4ghz

 

Any thoughts?

 

2.4 instead of 2.8ghz, but a much newer chip and 8 cores so I think they could munch through renders quite well..?

 

Thanks again

 

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[joelmcwilliam]

Sorry to hear you have to spend the big bucks now. Guess lesson learned here. What was your power supply, if I may ask?

 

Yes, 2 x 2630 will be a very good choice for a rendernode right now, giving you the best bang for the buck.

[Adam Glover]

Cheers

 

PSU was a Corsair AX1200

 

 

Edit: CPUs were Xeon X5660 on a supermicro mobo..

[brendanrogers]

Thanks for the replies.

I appreciate the response, sorry for the delay in posting back.

 

I did a memtest and checked the RAM modules, swapped out the graphics cards etc but that's where my expertise ran out. I needed a resolution quickly and guessing that it was a hardwear problem I ended up having to ring a guy to take it away and test it.

 

After 5hrs of testing, turns out that the motherboard has a fault, the PSU has one dodgy rail and I have melted one of my CPU's.

 

So it looks like an expensive rebuild is on the cards ��

 

I've been looking at 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2630 V3 S2011-3 Haswell 8 Core 2.4ghz

 

Any thoughts?

 

2.4 instead of 2.8ghz, but a much newer chip and 8 cores so I think they could munch through renders quite well..?

 

Thanks again

 

Ad

 

Sounds like a pretty decent setup to me. You may want to make that your main machine again

[joelmcwilliam]

Auw, corsair ax 1200 is one of the better ones. How old was it? Did it have guarantee? Did you contact corsair?

 

You will be seeing a nice improvement in render speed going the 2 x 2630 way:

 

https://us.rebusfarm.net/en/tempbench?view=benchmark

 

(remember, cinebenchscore also depends on some level on the kind of other stuff you have in your pc, but the benchmark will give some indication between different cpu's)

 

Cinebench r15:

 

2 x e5 2630 v3 has a cinebench r15 score of 2061.

 

2 x x5660 has a cinebench r15 score of 1338 (guess this score was obtained in a best case scenario setup)

 

You will get at least 50% improvement in render speed. (I guess you will get between 50% and 100% improvement in render speed)

Edited December 30, 2015 by joelmcwilliam