M6400 Covet crashing in Maya

What nVidia is saying in that reply you got is that they have a limited ability to guarantee the longevity of the manufactured card that uses their chip. They are saying that because they are NOT the people who actually put the chip on the card and created the product.

i.e. another way to phrase what they said is, "we have agreements in place with the manufacturers that guarantee the longevity of the chip under proper manufacturing circumstances. The manufacturer then has a longevity guarantee for the card with their end-user customers. We don't have a longevity agreement with end users directly. It is possible for a card to fail because of its usage or environment."

nVidia --> Quadro microchip set --(given to, e.g.)---> PNY, Dell, HP etc. --> manufactured card --> you

The longevity of the manufactured card will depend on the construction including what brands of capacitor were used, the quality of the ventilation in the product, whether the owner successfully kept all the dust and cat hair out of the fan blades, whether they messed with clock settings etc.

For example many laptops have been manufactured with completely insufficient cooling for their graphics chip. HP had a few notorious ones that I'm reading about while I comb their forums for warning signs about the 8730.


Maya (and several other problems) became stable for me after a full reinstall of Vista 64, from disk, downloading Dell's drivers and installing everything myself etc. Took a few days, but it fixed everything. I'm now convinced that several people on the Dell assembly line are very confused about which drivers are 32-bit and which are 64-bit, which work on both, possibly the order of install, who knows. I had a tech give me links to a full set of 32-bit drivers when he knew it was Vista 64, and had to go hunt down the 64-bit set myself.

So yes, it's resolved, I suppose, though it means if I were to buy a replacement M6400 I will by default have to reinstall the OS on receipt. (all day process. )

I have not heard a resolution (or even a known cause) for those people with poor quality audio.

 

"possibly the order of install," was also a thingy while installing red hat on the m6400.

 

Does Redhat need the chipset drivers etc. like windows does?

 

http://i.nconspicuo.us/2007/03/28/n...iver-fix-here-is-the-solution/#comment-139022 this thread has been going on forever

 

http://supportapj.dell.com/support/...mID=PREC_M6400&hidos=WLH&hidlang=en&TabIndex=

 

Thanks I'll check them out

 

have your issues been resolved yet ?

 

No, I returned that thing a few weeks ago. I considered buying another, but:

* was worried about the tons of reports of audio problems
* was worried about mine and others' reports of screen quality issues
* sales rep wanted a couple hundred $$ more for the M6400 with non-E2E screen and 80GB 5400rpm drive than I paid for the Covet with E2E and 160GB 7200rpm
* 1:50 battery life is abysmal

The software issues were just another thing on the pile. I -think- they went away after a full OS reinstall. I only got 4 functional days of work out of that thing before it became clear that customer service would not make good on the misrepresented screen. So all I can say is "I think it would work properly, but you'll probably have to reinstall the OS yourself from scratch, and I haven't managed a lot of testing."

(Yeah, I know, not promising.)

So, my order is already in for an 8730.

When it came down to it, I can't pick up the M6400 and go somewhere and work. I'm completely tied to the presence of an outlet. The feedback I'm getting on M6400 battery life places even a quadro 2700 + T8400 processor config at only 2hr:30min. Feedback on the 8730 is it has better battery life than the 8710, which if that's true puts the QX9300 and FX3700 config at least above 3 hours. With snap-on battery, the M6400 life goes up by 100%. The 8730 life goes up by 150%.


Anyway to answer your question, all I can say is "I think so."

 

Hi.. I'm a little late to the party, as in March 13, 09.. But I can tell you that I'm having the exact same crashing problems in Maya, right down to the tcpip.sys situation.. I already did a new 64bit ultimate install to no effect. I assume that this issue is still open? I can say that I've spent a lot of time on Pshop C3 working large images >2GByte with no problems.. In fact so far Maya 09 is the only app that has been screwing me on a regular basis. Their lack of autosave and disaster recovery has been a thorn in my side for years but this has been taking it to a new level.

Anything happening with this issue?

thx

-G

 

This is all I could figure out by the time I had to send the laptop back so try some of these:


The power profile setting "PCI Express -> Link State Power Management" had a definite effect on how long I could run Maya without crashing. Set to Off had best results.

It did not seem related to whether or not I had an external monitor plugged in or what was in the scene. Also it didn't matter whether I was using the full Aero interface, or if I was in Classic mode.

Things got significantly better after a full manual reinstall of the OS. I think it went away after that, but didn't use the laptop in Maya long enough to tell for sure.

I'd say get a Dell tech to help you download all the drivers onto a thumbdrive. Make triple sure the tech knows which OS you have, 32 or 64 bit. The tech who helped me got it wrong and I had to hunt down the correct driver set myself.