M6400 Covet crashing in Maya

Is anyone else having stability issues with the Covet?

How would I go about measuring heat on the CPU and GPU? I can't seem to find any utilities.

NTune crashes Vista 64 so that's out...


What I'm getting is normal fast operation for maybe an hour, and then fairly reliably the screens will all blank out for a second and then come back. Windows delivers a popup saying the NVidia drivers have stopped responding and then recovered.

Event logs show the message also: Display driver nvlddmkm stopped responding.

I got the Quad Core Covet, and the Quadro 3700. I have it set in the High Performance power mode, plugged in to the wall on the (extremely large) factory charger. The system will run all day if I'm not using Maya.


Also ever since receiving this I have been getting a security audit failure:

Code:

Code integrity determined that the image hash of a file is not valid.
The file could be corrupt due to unauthorized modification or the invalid 
hash could indicate a potential disk device error.

File Name:	\Device\HarddiskVolume3\Windows\System32\drivers\tcpip.sys

Network works fine so I don't know what to think of that. Anyone have this too in Vista 64 Business or Ultimate?

 

Which hard drive(s) do you have installed and are you using RAID? Did you install any new software just prior to receiving the security event? Are you running virus protection?

You could try running chkdsk c:\ /f and performing a full system scan with virus protection software

 

It's been there since the first time I turned it on. I don't have raid or any bad sector events in my logs.

I did image the factory disk on to my own disk before even turning it on, but the imaging software reports errors and it went through clean.

Also this is a Maya scene I've been working on using other computers and they have been fine. All I've been doing is animating characters that were already in the scene, i.e. all that's changed is where the keyframes are. From my experience Maya should be perfectly stable with this scene.

I did update drivers to the most recent ones on the Dell site. Far as I know you cannot get drivers directly from nvidia right?


I found a temperature utility and I'm going to watch it closely this time as I work. The GPU is staying steady at 55c with little to no GPU work going on.

I -do- have two screens, one the builtin and one plugged in, using dualview, so that is a possible source of error... But I should be able to do that on this card, and theoretically the enormous expense of the Quadro line is for having drivers that are tested and certified to handle this kind of activity on exactly this software.

 

While you can't get mobile video drivers directly from Nvidia you can get desktop drivers. The core driver for laptop and desktop cards are the same. There is a site that specializes in modifying the desktop driver inf's for installation on laptops. I'm currently using one of these drivers on my Toshiba M5 running Windows Server 2008 x64 as Toshiba doesn't offer a 64 bit driver and it took me a while to find one that was stable but if your adventurous enough you could try one of these drivers. The site is http://www.laptopvideo2go.com. As far as the security event you receiving I would bet the Dell Applications (most likley the Control Point Connextion Manager) has replaced the tcpip.sys file and they didn't bother to update the hash and wouldn’t' worry about it. If this is the case everyone using the 64 bit dell build would see this event and it's ironic that dell wouldn't get all their drivers WHQL certified on a professional workstation or that Microsoft would miss somthing like this in the WHQL certification process.

 

Thanks bjurkovski,

I'm now experimenting to see if it is something related to dualview...


But now I notice that I cannot access Span mode in the nvidia drivers from Dell?

Whaaaat is going on here? The "about an hour" thing is out the window, it just crashed after 15 minutes.

BTW as far as I can tell the nvidia drivers are what's crashing and Maya is just coming along for the ride because if the drivers go down and reboot Maya no longer has openGL instances to display to and can't recover.

 

tried running diagnostics?

that error might be pointing to something screwy on the data path... which can be anything from a loose lead, failing component or even duff psu.

the only time our dells (albeit not m6400's) have gone on the wonk is when something is wrong with the hardware... and we've been chucking silly renders at them for the past decade.

 

BTW there are partner certified drivers for the Quadro FX mobile cards on NVIDIA's website and Autodesk is one of them but it's doesn't look like they have any for the 2700/3700 series yet but at least there's hope.

 

Just verified it's not related to DualView. It is crashing exactly the same way with only the laptop display, set to Single Display Performance Mode.

So far this is completely debilitating, I'm unable to work.

I'm going to try a bios update and talk to support.

EDIT: NM, bios is the current revision.

 

Anyone else running Maya on the Covet??

BTW the main order page of the Covet specifically SHOWS Maya running on the thing, implying that is what it's made for so uhh Dell could have some 'splainin' to do here

 

Yeah, they market that specific model -specifically- to my industry for that exact need.

Dell's word on it is that if there is anybody who tests the software, my tech is not aware of it and there is nobody in his department who does that kind of thing.

[EDIT] And, that it's not their fault, and I should ask Autodesk. I'm running Maya 2008 2nd Edition on multiple other machines with Quadro graphics, some of them even desktop Quadro 3700 cards running Vista 64. (exactly like this laptop.) NVidia points me to Dell because they customize the nvidia drivers.

Looks like it's time to tweak random settings in between Maya crashes for the next... oh... 12 days. Yeah right.