I upgraded my old Dell Precision 490 Work Station from 32-bit to 64-bit Win 7 Pro...and from MC 5.5 to MC6. Expanded RAM up to 8GB matched set. Installed faster 300GB SSD for C drive. Put a Matrox O2 Mini on for real time monitoring.
Edits go fine until I try to render a Pan and Zoom and wham...no error messages...the whole computer crashes...black screens dead...followed by Windows DOS screen..."windows closed unexpectedly, do you want to start normally or in safe mode?"
I thought perhaps my old original NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450/4000 SDI (single card, dual designation) had caught up with me...was not an approved card, but worked ok on 5.5...so I took the recommendations of previous posters on a previous thread of mine (http://community.avid.com/forums/t/111066.aspx) and just yesetrday swapped the old FX card for a new Quadro 2000. I also upgraded to MC 6.05 which now actually likes the card (made sure I had the supported driver)...now no more 'card' error message...and I can edit all day as long as I don't try to render P&Z.
With the old FX 3450/4000 card, the P&Z render would almost immediately crash the whole computer...not just Avid. Now with the Q2000 it renders longer...albeit kinda jerky progress bar movement...for about a minute...and then again crashes the whole computer...no error message...just wham...black screens. Safe mode query, etc.
I have only the most basic understanding of the parts and how computers work...so I've dredged the forums about this kind of a problem...but haven't seen a similar crash scenario thread so far...crashing on just one action...a render. I can edit all day as long as I don't try to render P&Z. Do that...and crash one minute later in the middle.
Would be grateful for suggestions on what to look for...(other than the obvious, buy a new computer...I am really short on $$)...so could this be a RAM issue? I could easily expand from 8 up to 32GB.
Here is my current configuration and thanks for any recommendations:
Computer Model Precision WorkStation 490
BIOS Vendor Dell Inc.
BIOS Version DELL - 15
BIOS Date 4/25/2008
OS Version Microsoft Windows 7 Professional
Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU 5150 @ 2.66GHz
Clock Speed 2.7Ghz
L2 Cache Size 4096
Memory
Available Memory 83.01 %
Page File Size 8,189.7MB
Available Page File 100.00 %
Virtual Memory 16,377.5MB
Available Virtual Memory 90.14 %
DIMM 1 4,096.0MB
DIMM 2 4,096.0MB
Network Card
Drive Type Drive Size Total Available Space Used Space
C: 3 11,169,477.7GB 55.1GB 56.6GB
D: 3 46,577,692.8GB 382.6GB 83.2GB
E: 5
F: 5
Type Description
DVD/CD-ROM Drives
HL-DT-ST CDRW/DVD GCC4482 ATA Device
PIONEER BD-RW BDR-207D ATA Device
Disk Drives
INTEL SSDSC2CT120A3 ATA Device
WDC WD5003ABYX-01WERA1 ATA Device
Display Adapters
NVIDIA Quadro 2000
IDE ATA/ATAPI Controllers
ATA Channel 3
Standard AHCI 1.0 Serial ATA Controller
ATA Channel 4
ATA Channel 0
Standard Dual Channel PCI IDE Controller
ATA Channel 1
ATA Channel 0
ATA Channel 1
ATA Channel 2
Keyboards,Mice & Pointing Devices
Standard PS/2 Keyboard
USB Input Device
Monitors
Dell 1908WFP(Digital)
Sound Devices
High Definition Audio Device
Matrox WDM audio device LE