UberAreaLight overheats
TharrickLawson
Posts: 14
Does anyone else have massive overheating problems if they use UberAreaLights? If I render a scene with even just one of them, there's a good chance my computer will shut down, and when booted back up the power-on self-test will show a CPU temp of >100C.
Current CPU is an AMD Phenom II X4 965 at 3.40GHz. Am I trying to punch beyond my weight here?
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Check to see if any of your fans are dirty, including the heatsink
I've checked, and there's nothing wrong with my computer's cooling. I don't get overheat shutdowns doing anything else, either - *only* when rendering while using uberarealights :(
Do you get the same temp. with Prime95 or SuperPi?
Can you explain this please?
Those are calculation programs that are often run as a stress test on a new machine, they keep the processor at 100% on all cores.
Every machine should be able to cope without overheating, if your machine also fails on those then its definitely a hardware problem not software.
There's nothing Uberlights do that's especially taxing.
I have an X6 from the same family of AMD chips, are you using a bucket size of 16?
Bucket size is 16, yes.
I ran SuperPi calculating to 16 million, core temperatures hit about 70-75C - not ideal, and I may be adding a few more fans to my case, but not quite at the same level as Daz has brought them up to before.
For comparison, rendering a 1000x1150 shot with 2 raytraced spotlights gave me temperature maxes of 89C on all cores (Dropping bucket size to 8 brings that down to ~85)
Those are pretty bad temps.
The max operating temp for that processor is 62C !!!
Does the fan speed up and get really noisy?
A little.
I've now dismantled and cleaned the heatsink (It was worse than it looked :( ) and reapplied thermal paste, relocated the computer to try to improve air flow, and a few other bits and pieces.
SuperPi at 16m digit gives me a max temp of 56 now, and re-rendering that test scene gets me up to 63C, which is a hair over the max but a significant improvement.
Guess it was a hardware issue, thank you for your help :)
That's good.
It's interesting that DS stresses it more than SuperPi does.
Yes, pretty interesting. Not sure why, and to be honest I'm not that tempted to delve into that particular mystery :P
May be because SuperPi is single threaded?
for long safer renders you could use your /video card GPU over-clocking utility and reduce the clock rate
there's also options to set the GPU fan speed to automatic/manual
on my ASUS it's called GPUTweak
That would explain it. :-)
That would explain it. :-)
It doesn't seem the original SuperPi has been updated to use multicore and I'm not sure about prime95 either
However I've seen some other similar tools that are optimized for multicore, and are more adapted to nowadays systems
63C still seems a little excessive. you might want to check those fans or move the box to a cooler location in the room if possible.
Are you OC'ing the CPU? an overclocked CPU for rendering is not recommended, for games it's great for rendering it's just bestowing a beating on the components. The other issue might be the fan. Are you using a stock fan with or without an overclocked CPU?
There are a few threads I found with reports of that model CPU overheating with games and some of the recommendations were suggesting a better fan for that cpu or maybe it just runs real hot but that seems to be between 50 - 55C with cores to the floor.