PC Freeze while rendering Mpeg2

jascha wrote on 9/11/2004, 8:07 AM

Hi everyone,
I am having some trouble rendering with Vegas 5 avi to Mpeg2 as occassionally the whole pc freezes up. My Pc is a P3 866Mhz 512MbRam.
When i render i switch off everything else and i try to tune my pc to the best possible performance. I have 3 hard drives (80, 160 and 250 firewire). The capture hard drive is physically seperate to the system harddrive.
Sometimes i am lucky to finish a render and sometimes not. Usually i render blocks of avi videos of around 30 minutes but sometimes much longer. What i tend to do is to use Mpeg2vcr to join up mpegs together when i have to render seperate files due to pc crash. But i'd rather have the rendering finish it's job straight away. Sometimes also the pc tends to reboot automatically during a render.
I measured the temperature of my cpu (i guess) and it measures around 54 degrees. I have also used Ram Medic to allow for maximum ram. I switch off antivirus and firewalls too. I have also run Adaware and Spybot and NU and Regclean. The CPU tends to run 100% when rendering.
I reinstalled my system about 2 weeks ago and i run WinXP SP2.
I have searched for results in this forum but i still cannot find a solution. I love vegas very much.
Many thanks

Comments

ScottW wrote on 9/11/2004, 8:36 AM

When you measured your CPU temp, was that during a render or just idle? In either case, that's a bit on the hot side for an intel chip and it's probably the temp increase that happens during the render which is causing your problems.

My air cooled P4 runs at around 44c (according to the motherboard sensor) when it's idle (I've not looked at it when it's working hard). My water cooled P4 runs at 36c (according to the cooler sensor) maximum during renders.

I'd suggest a cleaning. Power down your PC, open up the case, and using some of the canned compressed air, clean all of the dust off your motherboard, cooling fins and fans (not just the CPU fins/fan, but the northbridge chip as well). Also blow out the dust in the power supply.

--Scott

jascha wrote on 9/11/2004, 2:19 PM

Hi Scott,
The temperature i measured of around 54 is both when idle and when rendering. It didn't seem to make much difference. I also took off the side panel of my tower to allow more air in but nothing so far made a difference. I will have a look at cleaning the pc and see whether it will make a difference.
Does this problem sound like a heat related problem? Does rendering require the cpu to work at 100%?
Thanks

ScottW wrote on 9/11/2004, 5:14 PM

Rendering usually causes the CPU to run at close to 100% (it depends or your hardware). Yes, this does sound like a heat related problem.