Help, Blender causes PC to freeze

I just found out that my PC started freezing occasionally and it doesn’t matter if I’m on Linux, Windows or other OS.

I’ll describe what happened.

I was using blender modelling a simple scene then suddenly, the display just went off and the keyboard’s lights too went off as well. I tried pressing a few keys and moving the mouse but nothing happens. I hit the reset button and the PC seems ok again.

I though it was an hardware problem but it only happens when Blender is in use. Even when it was minimized, this happens too. I think this freezes started to occur when I started using Blender 2.70. i downloaded 2.70a in hopes that the problem will go away but it chooses to stay.

They say this freezes occur when modelling high poly scenes.Well, I always try to keep the polys down as much as possible using decimate modifier. Whenever I want to model a big scene such as a city scene, I will split it on multiple .blend files.

I will use 3ds Max for now and see if the problem will reoccur. It if did, I think it is an hardware problem. Probably GPU which is odd because I only use CPU rendering so I’m not putting allot of stress on the GPU.

I have not played any games on my PC ever since.It’s just strictly for 3d modelling still scenes only.

Hello.
You can download an earlier version of Blender 2.7 and try.

Is it only happens with a particular scene? You use the system monitor while you work with Blender to see whether the RAM usage exceeds its capacity quickly.

To discard hardware problems, you make a memtest. Linux LiveCD distributions usually have memtest on one of the options when boot.
Then install a CPU/GPU temperature moitor and check the temperatures while the render is running or you are modeling.
You could also look around stress tools for CPU and GPU. These tools are commonly referred to overclock related sites.

Edit:
Could you share one of those scenes where the problem occurs?

Does this only occur while rendering, and is your system overclocked?

101 % hardware problem.

+1

Try to run Prime95 for a couple of hours to see if you BSOD.

I’ve been using 3ds max for 4 hours now and the problem did not reoccur yet. I think something in my PC is not compatible with Blender 2.70. I’ll stick to Blender 2.68 for now.

I never touched my PC’s bios settings or overclocked my CPU and GPU.

I think this occurs after rendering with Blender. It only occurs occasionally.

I’ll try Prime 95 when I hit home.

Me too experienced some rare (3 times by now) but totally system freezes since using 2.70/2.70a. This happened when I was simply modeling in 3D View. THe Display stays like it is and no more interaction is possible but pressing the reset button on the front panel of my PC. Mouse and keyboard didnt do anything.

After the PC restarted there is no error logged in the windows events before the manual reset.

I just don’t know, but wondering, what this could be.
My PC never behaved like this before (like “not behaves at all”), so for me it seems to be related to Blender 2.70a. But this could be related to a Windows update or graphics driver update too, I just can’t tell.

Win7 64bit
Graphics - Radeon HD6850 (Catalyst 14.4)

EDIT
Last time I had freezes like this I was able to solve it by changing the settings for “Window Draw Methode” to automatic in the Blender User Preferences.
Back then the freezes where about the same frequence and even in similar situations, when I was modeling in 3D view, but didn’t affected Windows at all. Just Blender freezed and Windows gave the error message “blender doesn’t respond”, or such. Also the Windows Events told “the graphics driver had been reset”.

I thought my PC is no longer compatible with Blender but fortunately it was just the RAM.

How did you find out and how you fixed it ? Have you replaced all RAM modules ?

I did a memtest.