Thursday, April 13, 2006
Neon Xeon
My workstation at the new job is a Dell Precision 530. It has dual 2.4MHz Intel Xeon Processors, 80Gib, 7200rpm hard drive, 1Gib of RDRAM (2 slots of 512Mb) and an nVidia Quadro4 700 XGL GPU. All under the famed Windows XP, Professional Edition (supports dual processors and domains, while XP home does not).This PC should rock my little world. Should.
Other than the standard M$ apps, I mostly use this machine to run solidworks. Pretty standard stuff too, no trillion part assemblies. No parts with circular arrays of more than 40 members. No parts with complex surface renderings.
But, yesterday it BSODed 3 times. Today it did it twice, once when I tried to open windows explorer (nothing else open, been running after boot for at least 15 minutes).
The stop code indicates that a hardware condition caused the BSOD. As of two days ago I have all the latest drivers. (I don't have admin rights on the machine, but I asked IT nicely and they updated the drivers after I was having problems in my first week at the job -- it made no difference.)
The CPU/GPU combo is tested and certified by Soldiworks. I am going to blame Dell. I am not sure what they do down there in Texas, or Singapore, or wherever these are made, but it seems to have consequences.
What makes me sad is that this machine should really smoke. Mais non.
Back to the old CAD mantra: "Save Often, and Back It Up." ¶ 10:29 PM
My workstation at the new job is a Dell Precision 530. It has dual 2.4MHz Intel Xeon Processors, 80Gib, 7200rpm hard drive, 1Gib of RDRAM (2 slots of 512Mb) and an nVidia Quadro4 700 XGL GPU. All under the famed Windows XP, Professional Edition (supports dual processors and domains, while XP home does not).This PC should rock my little world. Should.
Other than the standard M$ apps, I mostly use this machine to run solidworks. Pretty standard stuff too, no trillion part assemblies. No parts with circular arrays of more than 40 members. No parts with complex surface renderings.
But, yesterday it BSODed 3 times. Today it did it twice, once when I tried to open windows explorer (nothing else open, been running after boot for at least 15 minutes).
The stop code indicates that a hardware condition caused the BSOD. As of two days ago I have all the latest drivers. (I don't have admin rights on the machine, but I asked IT nicely and they updated the drivers after I was having problems in my first week at the job -- it made no difference.)
The CPU/GPU combo is tested and certified by Soldiworks. I am going to blame Dell. I am not sure what they do down there in Texas, or Singapore, or wherever these are made, but it seems to have consequences.
What makes me sad is that this machine should really smoke. Mais non.
Back to the old CAD mantra: "Save Often, and Back It Up." ¶ 10:29 PM
