M6400 Covet crashing in Maya

Do you have any evidence that the problems reported in the Inquirer articles you (tried to) link to affect the 3700? Or is this just speculation on your part? The articles you were referencing are all talking about older parts, mind you.

 

The problem went away after I hosed the factory Dell image and reinstalled from scratch.

BUT I didn't use Maya much after that, I was in AfterEffects at that point. I did however open my most demanding project and run it for a while, with good success. (Project can only open on 64-bit OS, Maya sits at 3.6 gigs of RAM use - a decent Maya stress test, if not comprehensive on features.)

Unfortunately they refused to make good on the screen issues so the system has been returned, so I can't do any more testing.

[EDIT]
I definitely suspected a faulty factory image on this after a while. The problems were not limited to Maya. For example, Adobe Premiere CS3, AfterEffects CS3, and Audition 3.0 all hard-locked the system on start before I did a reinstall. Also when I asked techs for a driver list and the correct install order, they flubbed it up BAD. They pointed me to all the 32-bit drivers.

Given they probably ship far fewer 64-bit than 32-bit I am quite ready to assume that some tech at Dell got confused between e.g. R32465 vs. R32466. (made up numbers... but still, which is the 64-bit one? )

 

the 3700m IS based on that older technology

 

Yes, but that means nothing; it's not the technology itself that has anything wrong with it, it's the specific parts they were talking about.

 

We're wanting something solid because you're basically saying "don't upgrade to any technology made in the last 3 years because it will fail."

(ATI not an option - see the Autodesk Maya hardware qualification page if you don't believe me.)

 

http://area.autodesk.com/index.php/forums/viewthread/19044/

 

@satrycon: Do you really think Dell or HP would equip their "certified" workstations with buggy cards? As Pirx already said not the hole chip series was corrupt.

 

I am sorry, but I can't see any useful information in the thread you linked. One guy has a problem with the software on his M6400, and some clueless Autodesk guy gives him a confused answer. Then there's some noise from others around this. Is that all you got?

 

I am 90% positive the guy having that trouble had it for the same reason I did, which was a borken Vista64 install by a Dell tech who didn't know the difference between 32 and 64 bit drivers. Like I said my problems went away when I dumped the factory image and installed the correct drivers myself. Supporting that is the fact that Dell tech support reps gave me a list of drivers to install on my 64-bit machine (64-bit having been made clear) and the list consisted of all 32-bit drivers.

The problems you have been hearing about as far as I know were a manufacturing issue on the chip substrate which caused a high percentage of 8-series geforce and x600 Quadro GPUs to experience total card failure after a year or so. Which is bad, but it's also completely unrelated to the processing technology on the chip, it's related to the manufacturing process, and that can be fixed without even designing a new GPU.

To the point, this would be like saying all LCD flat panels from LG are bad because one of their major LCD factories had big issues for a period of time, and to wait until flat panels are no longer manufactured with LCDs.
(LCD tech <--> NVidia GPU tech,
flat panel manufacturing problems <--> GPU substrate problems)

And BTW NVidia didn't catch the problems for a while because it was one of those nasty failures that takes a while to show up. Like a carpenter making mistakes building a front porch. Whoops, 20 years later, he finds out that cutting the boards flush and not leaving spaces on the underside causes water buildup and gradual rot, but he couldn't discover that until the porches started rotting.

 

Heh, I like your analogies...