Long Render Times = Danger to your Hardware??

[brudney]

well, i guess you have no valves on your cpu, now do you? if you have your fan installed properly, if your hardware is not overclocked, etc. , then you should be able to render for as long as your newest windows OS lets you=does not crash your system...long live Bill G.

anyway, nothing is forever, every single one part of your computer has some 'life expectancy'; but i mean if you don't plan to render something for let's say 10 years nothing bad should happen...again, it's all about the quality of your hardware and whether or not it was overclocked...but rendering for few weeks is nothing unusual and i think you shouldn't be worried about your hardware melting in front of you...

[directlight]

I have my machines at work, on pretty much 24/7, and other than the occasional reboot, I never had any overheating problems even when the Cpu load is intense and for days in a row while rendering.

If your machine is custom built, make sure the airflow is constant and consistent. If you're worried about high temperatures, you can download free utilities that monitor your CPU temperature status as well as other parameters.


~A

[balistic]

A long render generally isn't a physical danger to any of your equipment, as long as it's kept well-ventilated and you have plenty of RAM.

The only part that could fail in an unrecoverable way would be a hard disk, because it has moving parts and is sensative to heat. As long as you have enough RAM that you don't start swapping to disk mid-render, you should be fine.

Consider all the computers serving up the web pages you visit everyday . . . they're on all the time, and can be under stresses very similar to that of a big render.

edit: bad things could happen if a cooling fan (either in your power supply, or attached to your processor) decides to sieze up, but that's just as likely to happen while the machine is idling. If any of your fans start making weird noises, power everything down, make sure there aren't any obstructions (cables or dust bunnies clogging the fans), and then power it back up with the case open to verify that the fans are spinning and moving air. If they're still making grindy noises, they may be headed for failure, and it would be worth it to replace them. A new 300-watt ATX power supply is about 50-70$, and a new CPU fan is $20-40.

My record time for a single frame render stands at 12 days.

[darkefire]

thanks people! yeah, my PC is custom, but im well covered in the RAM and airflow departments. i was just wondering if "redlining" my processor for extended periods of time was bad, but i guess thats kinda what they're built for. thanks again!

[Wizdoc]

Originally posted by balistic
A long render generally isn't a physical danger to any of your equipment, as long as it's kept well-ventilated and you have plenty of RAM.

The only part that could fail in an unrecoverable way would be a hard disk, because it has moving parts and is sensative to heat. As long as you have enough RAM that you don't start swapping to disk mid-render, you should be fine.

True. A friend of mine blew a hard drive when leaving the comp to render a scene which was too much for the RAM to handle. Swapping isn't a problem in shorter renders, but he left the computer unattended - and the drive swapping - for a night.

But if your ventilation is okay, you can't really redline a normally functioning processor. Or at least, I haven't heard any stories of renderers, web servers and other heavy-load equipment had been damaged with 100% load.

[altruizine]

another suggestion...

I had my machine rendering for literally 6 months. Both processors pegged day in and day out. I had only a few weeks where my scene wasn't fitting entirely in RAM so I had a lot of swap going on, I render in image sequences and to one of my non-system non-swap drives.

Regardless - the thing that worried me most was not machine failure, but power outage and/or fluctuations (maybe I'm just paranoid because I live in New York city... heh)

Anyway, so my suggestion would be that if you don't already have one, get a UPS and put your machine and drives on it so something stupid like a small power burp doesn't hurt anything.

-JF

[darkefire]

rendering for literally 6 months :eek: GOOD LORD!!!!! i get my panties in a bunch when i leave the thing on for more than a DAY!!

A friend of mine blew a hard drive once again: DAMN! i have a partition of my HD set up as a dedicated swap file partition. got like 4 Gigs in it. and i have a gig-and-a-half of RAM. speaking general ball park terms, this should sustain me for most low-to-mid-range scenes, yes?

[Dead]

Point it bluntly

No, your machine will not fail unless you have done something stupid to it.
Computers are designed in a way to run at peak 24/7 for months on end.

HDD failure is unlikely but it does happen often. You best bet is to have the system drive and another drive which it renders out to.

I've had 15 machines running 24/7 for 2 weeks and I'm just a student

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