M6400 Covet crashing in Maya

Silicon substrate manufacturing is a very analog process. Rather than hating them for high failures in one line, I'm more along the lines of really impressed that the rest of them have held up to year after year channeling more heat and power per square cm than a toaster, plus the mechanical stress of heat expansion.

BUT that doesn't mean I don't want to know if the current line still has the problem. I just haven't seen anything yet to elevate it from "wild internet rumor" status.

 

fair enough.

 

ordered it with quad core, 16gb ram, 2 x 500gb 7200rpm drives, 1920x1080, quadro 3700m 1gb, vista 64...they have a 60 day return policy here so the bloke at the dell retail shop said check it out any problem they'll replace it

 

My advice: After you boot the machine for the first time into the factory-installed image, check for C:\Windows\minidump. If it's there, and there's system dumps in it, send the machine back without wasting any time with it.

I just got a replacement for a machine with the same specs as yours that I had given up on after futzing around with it and trying to get it to behave for a week. This one did have minidumps stored on the hard drive, meaning the machine had bluescreened several times during setup. It passed all the diagnistics, but I am still convinced that it had a hardware problem, which expressed itself in intermittent BSODs on reboot. The new machine I have seems to be clean and sound, so far (knock on wood...).

 

will do.. thanks

 

ha ha the "official response" i got from NVIDIA today >>Thank you for contacting NVIDIA Customer care.

This is Farzana and I will be assisting you with the query you have.

I understand that you would like to know if there is known issues with the NVIDIA Quadro FX 3700M GPUs designed for the Dell M6400 laptop.

Please be informed that there is no known issue with the Quadro FX 3700M GPUs. Please note that we assure longer chip life to the manufacturers and do no commit on the Mean Time of Failures of the card or the NVIDIA chipset based products to end users and there are many possible reasons for a card to fail which does include usage. For this reason, I suggest you to get in touch with the laptop manufacturer's for the shorter life span of the laptop.

You can contact Dell at 800-624-9896.

Please feel free to contact us for any further clarifications.

Best regards,
Farzana,
NVIDIA Customer Care

 

And? What's wrong with that?

 

"Please note that we assure longer chip life to the manufacturers..." to actually have to say that is hilarious for a PRO quadro card, the software we guys use ranges from 5000USD to 150,000USD per license... the commercials and films we work on range from 50,000USD to millions and millions of dollars ......and its just what nvidia did last year..blame it all on the computer manufacturers..yes im grumbling.

 

from the autodesk forum >
Re: Dell Precision M6400 and AliasStudio 2009 64bit problem...
Posted: Dec 3, 2008 8:21 PM
I have found a solution to the problem. I installed the nVidia Quadro 3700 driver that is used in a desktop configuration. This driver seems to be very stable on my laptop. The 3700m (mobile) driver has some bugs that need to be worked out by nVidia.

 

was this issue resolved finally ?