Total that got cut of there was £3,309. Which to be fair given what it allows me to do now will mean it should pay for itself within a couple of years worst case.
Hey all, thanks for all your replies to my previous post about the beefy machine for test renders, i am delighted to say i have gone ahead and ordered the machine after switching the gpu to a 4080 super, and getting a slighty better power supply.
I have also decided to go ahead and double the RAM to 192GB while they are still builing it. But i am getting concerned about cold boots and memory training.
How often does memory training happen? Is it every cold boot? Every manual reset?
The machine will be crashing alot, its just the nature of pushing them hard, and i dont want to be stuck waiting with that horrible feeling of if it will ever even boot at all, the next time i push the render quality a little too high in 3DSMax.
Would greatly appreciate some feedback on this from someone with experience of machines that have alot of RAM.
BSODs aren't normal under any circumstances. That's the last resort error handler when it becomes impossible to salvage the running system safely and it's better to just crash the whole computer.
You can't push a computer "too hard" through just userspace software to the point it inevitably crashes. If you can crash it by using too much CPU or GPU, you have hardware problems or sketchy decade old drivers you shouldn't use. It's not the Windows 9x days anymore, computers don't crash because you look at them wrong anymore.
You are quite right, but Its older versions of max with decades old plugins that are usually the issue, sometimes though i cannot avoid using these as i specialise in max and often customers dont bother updating stuff, but still need compatibility. Also alot of it is caused by me, i have often (not always by choice) had inadequate hardware, where once you start rendering, the machine will lock up in a way where its quicker to just reboot (even task manager can get locked out) than just wait for max to exit gracefully. While it is possible to find the sweet spot, some amount of crashing to desktop/forced rebooting is kind of inevitable in these cases, and here i am just considering the worst case scenario.
I appreciate your reply though, as offcourse its not normal, but some 3dsmax versions especially with older plugins/scripts are not unlike a modern game, where if you add too many mods or put too many parts on your rocket ship, will quite happily crash or freeze your machine entirely, or even BSOD.
It really shouldn't lockup the whole machine or BSOD still, 3DSMax plugins don't run as kernel drivers (I hope?). Although the lockups could eventually lead to BSODs if it corrupts files everytime you have to hard reset. The kernel has the final word unless compromised by a driver, it really should be able to kill 3DSMax and leave you with a usable computer.
I don't know Windows enough, but you should be able to configure it so it can't use quite all of your RAM and CPU so there's always a bit of memory and a CPU core available for Windows to function. That would greatly help not being stuck unable to open task manager. Run 3DSMax as a low priority task as well, so that Windows will prefer giving CPU time to literally any process first and 3DSMax gets whatever is left (which should still be plenty).
I'd still make sure to Google any BSOD codes and investigate their cause. Maybe over time your CPU gets a little toasty, or the CPU vendor got a little too greedy with the turbos and boosts, or just can't sustain the load all that long. I had to underclock mine because I had occasional lockups during long builds and it's been solid since.
It's generally preferable to leave some performance on the table if that avoids full crashes. Each crash is a potential corruption of your project's files, a long interruption in your workflow, and an annoyance.