Max 2014 crashes. Getting me down.

[tricky]

I read from time to time that several users have next to no crashes when using Max. I find this hard to believe.

I have recently got myself a new workstation. Its a Dell precision machine with dual Xeon E5-2697 v2 CPUs (so 24/48 cores), 64GB memory and a Quadro 4000 card. I am running the latest set of Autodesk certified drivers on the card. I have the latest service pack on Max2014 (SP5). I have all Windows 'important' updates installed.

As far as workstations are concerned, this should be pretty solid.

However, I'm just working on an interior scene. Nothing too complicated. The max file is around 200MB (compressed) in size (some high resolution furniture models in there). I have disabled autobackup as we have had issues where if we click render as an autobackup save occurs, a crash can happen. Instead, I have set a task popup that reminds me to save every 30 minutes.

So, working away and I figured its about time to save my scene. I clicked save and max crashes, giving me the option to save a recovery file. I chose not to as we have had issues in the past where this can corrupt your max scene. I know that I hadn't done very much since the last save, so I just opened again and re-did the things that I had lost - adding a couple of books on tables etc. I then went to 'save as...' to save as a new file version. This time, Max juust completely disappeared without warning.

What gives? Why do we have these problems? Is there anything else I should be looking at to make things more stable?

[tricky]

The only other updates I could find were through a Dell utility that came pre-installed. It has found various BIOS, network and chipset updates which I have also no installed. As far as I can now tell, my system is sound. I will monitor and wait for the next crash.

[voltron7]

I think I had some similar issues and it was because of an nvidia driver I updated. Rolling back the driver fixed the problem, for me...Best luck, that sounds awful!
Hopefully someone else will have a solution.

[tricky]

Things are slightly better than they were, but still a couple of Max freezes and crashes since I ran through the Dell recommended updates.

Absolutely ridiculous.

[eyepiz]

That happened me several times when I first migrated to 2014 from 2013 it was to the point were even the Autobaks were corrupted. I narrowed it down to some models that the materials became corrupted in 2014. I just had to merge the file into a new scene piece by piece until I found the objects that would crash max.

[Morbid Angel]

sorry to hear your troubles, your system sounds smoking hot I hate when shi*t like this happens.

I may suggest a few things. Try to isolate the issue to a particular portion of the hardware/software and it should be easier to determine from there what could be the cause. Try working locally (if you are on the network) saving to c:\whatever for a while see if things improve.

Do run ram tests, as this also sounds like it could be a ram issue.

I doubt its the video issue, but you can try working in different modes, f.e. direct x11, 9, nitrous etc and see if this changes anything.

Do try saving without compression, this could be an issue of its own.

Also, try another version of max. I hear max 2015 is a big improvement (thought I haven't used it my self)

Regarding the video drivers. I have two systems side by side - one supermicro built xeon server with gtx 780ti. Another is dell t5500 with quadro 4000 all latest drivers in both. On dell I can't run certain autodesk products...it just refuses

[alexyork]

From an HDD/SSD point - check your HDD settings. Are you running SSDs or HDDs or both? Are they SATA2 or 3 or a mix? Try new cables (yep, really). Make sure they're running AHCI mode if possible rather than IDE (beware that changing this could/will probably mess up your OS if you don't know what you're doing). Try making sure you have the latest Intel Rapid Storage Tech drivers installed and that your drives are all reported as a-ok. Also run the latest Intel chipset drivers (this is all assuming you're running an Intel chipset board).

[tricky]

I left memtest86 (or whatever it is called) running from a USB boot device all night. All tests passed when I came in this morning with no errors.

The c-drive is SSD and I have another 'misc' drive in here which is a SATA3. I don't really use this for very much. All our projects and their assets (textures etc) are on a central Synology NAS. It would be tricky to work locally because of this.

Does save with compression cause issues? I may well turn this feature off in that case.

I am reluctant to move to Max2015 yet. We have too many jobs running to make the switch.

In looking at the BIOS, all seems pretty normal to me and IIRC the disks are running as AHCI already.

No crashes today yet - will continue to monitor.

(and thanks for your supportive comments chaps)

[Morbid Angel]

I have two identical dell systems - t5500 dual x5650. One runs rock solid, while the other periodically bsods with message: hardware failure. It can run for weeks fine, do heavy rendering, sims etc then crash while idle. I think its something to do with the page file on a bad hdd. But I can't for sure figure it out.

What did help though was going to dell site and doing their diagnostics software agent thing, it ran and downloaded some dell hardware drivers for some chipset I guess. After that it became more stable.

And as a funny note, I contacted dell support and they told me - well its unstable because you installed windows 7 on it (while original system shipped with no os). I was like, yeah that's a good one!

[tricky]

And as a funny note, I contacted dell support and they told me - well its unstable because you installed windows 7 on it (while original system shipped with no os). I was like, yeah that's a good one!

Haha - so it is absolutely rock solid as long as no software runs on it. A rock solid 'door stop'!

[tricky]

I still haven't managed to prevent Max from crashing. Its better than it was, but I'm still getting 3 or 4 crashes a day. The latest one just happened and the session of Max just disappeared completely - no event logged in the event viewer or anything! How can that happen? Normally, an event appears telling me the app crashed, but this time absolutely nothing.

Only thing our software supplier is suggesting is to reinstall max. I can't see this doing anything at all as the system is brand new and only really has max, vray, itoosoft plugins and photoshop installed. When I did install max, it took around 1 hour (or maybe more) to install, but I think this is quite normal isn't it?

[alexyork]

An hour or more to install max sounds wrong to me. It's slow but on my slowest machines it wouldn't take longer than about 20 mins tops. On a decent machine with an SSD probably less than 10 mins.

From all your posts I think you have an issue with either or all of:

1) hard drives (ssd or not)
2) cabling
3) chipset drivers
4) motherboard
5) potentially underpowered or dodgy PSU
6) dodgy max install package

I would recommend downloading a fresh copy from Autodesk's site and try that. 1 hour to install is definitely too long unless it's being installed over a very slow network and/or downloading and installing the service packs at the same time. But even then it's too slow I think.

[Morbid Angel]

you have tried deleting 3dsmax user doc folder right?

[Morbid Angel]

also, in administrative tools, under event viewer see if there are any error messages? could be a hint to whats going on.

also, do disable any antivirus and firewall to see if it helps.

[voltron7]

+1 for checking the PS. I had a machine that was acting this way and eventually the PS died. It was fine once I replaced the PS.
Hope you get a solution soon!