Cycles rendering is blue-screening my PC!

Hi there,

I have a scene where I am rendering an object filled with a new Cycles volume material with a volume texture. The first 6 frames of animation rendered fine, but now it will only render 1 frame before crashing but unlike other Blender crashes, it is not just Blender itself that quits, it is my whole PC - it goes to the Blue Screen and starts memory dumping etc.

What else is odd is that last week i had rendered another animation sequence from the same scene (with new Cycles volume shaders/textures too), just a different camera angle but with LOTS more stuff going on. While these previous renders took 7 hours each to render, they didn’t crash. This new sequence has far less stuff in-view and only take 45mins each to render…yet it is these less intense renders that are bluescreening my PC . By the way my PC is a decent spec workstation.

I assume you’re using your GPU to render as you nowhere mention it.

  1. Did you update your Nvidia driver? -> Uninstall it -> reboot in safe mode -> use for instance Guru3D’s driver sweeper -> reboot -> reinstall latest driver
  2. Worst case, one of the capacitators or voltage transformers on your GPU became faulty. It’s a common cause of BSOD under full load and you can only RMA your card.
  3. It worked last week because there was just not enough dust in your GPU heatsink to cause overheating - still, usually the GPU should throttle when becoming too hot, not BSOD.
  4. Your PSU is faulty and can’t supply enough power when rendering.

Best way to find it out is by elimination:

Start by getting Furmark or Afterburner+Kombustor.
Let it torture your GPU and watch.
If it BSOD’s it’s not Blender, it’s either your driver or your hardware -> reinstall driver as in 1)
Watch the temperature, if it raises fast and high (past 100°C) clean your heatsink/fan.
Try to undervolt your card and clock it down (Afterburner) and see if it becomes stable -> GPU or PSU faulty.
To find out if the PSU is faulty you should also be able to BSOD the system when running the CPU under full load. Download Prime95 for instance and run the full heat/stresstest. BSOD -> most likely the PSU faulty.

HTH

Thanks.

As it was volume shading, it was CPU not graphics card.

I wonder if the event manager in Windows will tell me exactly what caused it?

check all fans are clean just be its just getting to hot

Same process.

Run Prime95 to torture your CPU, max. heat and memory. If it crashes it’s not Blender.
If you don’t have anything to monitor your CPU Temperature, use OpenHardwareMonitor.
If it crashes in Prime, it’s either heat, the PSU or a faulty capacitator or voltage transformer on your mainboard or one of your memory modules.