Motherboard Failure in Trainz

[Euphod]

I use ASUS boards, and never have had a problem, but let's consider the coincidence factor when blaming Trainz for mobo crashes: I believe folks spend a great deal of time running Trainz, building, playing, testing content, etc... It makes sense to me that there is a greater chance of a faulty mobo going South while you are using a program that you spend a great deal of time in, rather than a program you use in frequently, for short periods of time.
What are the odds?

 

[JCitron]

I use ASUS boards, and never have had a problem, but let's consider the coincidence factor when blaming Trainz for mobo crashes: I believe folks spend a great deal of time running Trainz, building, playing, testing content, etc... It makes sense to me that there is a greater chance of a faulty mobo going South while you are using a program that you spend a great deal of time in, rather than a program you use in frequently, for short periods of time.
What are the odds?

I suppose we could blame the beer we drink while using Trainz too!

John

 

[SuperFudd]

Another failure mode that could be agrivated by Trainz or any program using maximum CPU AND GPU power (current) is the deteriation of the quality of the connection where the power supply connects to the mother board. This happened to me on an Asus MB though the fault may have been the quality of the connector of the power cable and not the power pins of the MB. Over a period of time like months or years of "high" current through the connection there was enough warmth generated in the connection to accelerate corosion leading to a poorer connection leading to more "warmth" leading to more...
Eventually the voltage drop accross the connector was enough to drop the voltage on the motherboard to a point that the MB would fail.

 

[nugget2225]

suggested cooler

i have an amd bulldozer 8 core cpu and with the stock cooler, would run at 50c at idle and almost 70c under load and most amd chips have a threshhold of 60c or you can damage the chip, for those of you that have a decent size case, the corsair h100 is great, i now run at 15c to 20c idle, at 3.6 ghz and 38-42c under full load using prime for 3 hours, and i am sure trainz is no where near what prime pushes, just a thought, its 100 bucks and if you have room for it, its definately worth the money and a 5 year warranty

 

[NSWGR_46Class]

Were all the mother board's chip set drivers current and up to date and were they the right drivers for the operation system you were using.

 

[Dubdave6]

Re: Motherboard failure

Hi guys,

I've just downloaded trainz12 and my pc seems to be acting up a little, it due a replacement but reading all of the above is frying my brain! Nevermind the motherboard!

Besides the minimum requirements as outlined by Auran, what additional stuff should I be looking for to optimise the running of Trainz? Any thoughts, in simple terms please!

 

[gearhead2578]

RAID!! I've built 2 PCs trying to keep up with the demands of trainz since starting with trs06 and finally figured out the last hitch in the system was the time it takes to access the data on the HDD. Given I'm not doing too bad with what I've got (see signature below) I'm currently building a new system for TS12 and raid is definately in the plan along with a sick AMD vid card with eyefinity. I definately agree about cooling and BACKUP, BACKUP, BACKUP!!! Too many hundreds of hours spent to take a chance losing anything. At the moment I backup all work as cdp to a seperate HDD at least once a week.

 

[Wessex_Electric_Nutter]

That is 100% spot on. Funny how TRAINZ gets blamed for everything that goes wrong.

Thats nothing to worry about, I've done much worse. Its very, very hard to programmaily damage the hardware of a computer, even then, you would need to find a really obscure bug that would cause a lot of damage, e.g. thermal runaways, although that is not impossible. I have a zotac ITX motherboard that has a core2quad and thermal runaway, which I try to manage as much as possible. Its not a bug, its just my setup (and yes, that can cause thermal runaways, your setup, smaller cases = hotter, restricted airflow = hotter. Both found in cheap cases, I.e. the less than £30 or so price range.).

And if that isn't bad enough, I have broken a Playstation 3, which wouldn't be soo bad, if:
It didn't cost £13,000 per unit(!)
It wasn't one of the few dev kits a university had, they had 10 of them, one I was using, just had to break when I compiled something with the YLOD.
It was 2 weeks old when it happened.

It was luckily a warranty repair, so I got off lightly. Even now though, despite costing huge sums of money, I have to joke about it, because I was using it and although the hardware broke, it was jokingly my fault.

 

[JCitron]

Thats nothing to worry about, I've done much worse. Its very, very hard to programmaily damage the hardware of a computer, even then, you would need to find a really obscure bug that would cause a lot of damage, e.g. thermal runaways, although that is not impossible. I have a zotac ITX motherboard that has a core2quad and thermal runaway, which I try to manage as much as possible. Its not a bug, its just my setup (and yes, that can cause thermal runaways, your setup, smaller cases = hotter, restricted airflow = hotter. Both found in cheap cases, I.e. the less than £30 or so price range.).

And if that isn't bad enough, I have broken a Playstation 3, which wouldn't be soo bad, if:
It didn't cost £13,000 per unit(!)
It wasn't one of the few dev kits a university had, they had 10 of them, one I was using, just had to break when I compiled something with the YLOD.
It was 2 weeks old when it happened.

It was luckily a warranty repair, so I got off lightly. Even now though, despite costing huge sums of money, I have to joke about it, because I was using it and although the hardware broke, it was jokingly my fault.

NVidia did have an issue a while back with their drivers that cause their video cards to overheat. Combine that with overclocking, and poof went the video card.

How could a Playstation cost $30,000? That's an awful lot of money for a toy! This is unless it was some limited edition, gold plated, one of a kind, special unit!

John

 

[gearhead2578]

Seriously enough I smelled something hot one night and it was a fan failure on my vid card. For some reason my ATI (AMD) radeon card wasn't being monitored correctly by my MSI AMD equipped motherboard...... Had to download some updated drivers for the board - long story short I ran TS2010 and checked temp on the vid card was hitting 90+ celsius....... No alarm/shutdown/warning.... nothing. You could see brown spots on the board:hehe: tried to turn the fan and it was stuuuck

 

[NikkiA]

How could a Playstation cost $30,000? That's an awful lot of money for a toy! This is unless it was some limited edition, gold plated, one of a kind, special unit!

John

WEN gave the clue in the next line:

... dev kits ...

£13,000-£20,000 is the going rate for dev kit versions of the consoles that allow you to run code without it being digitally signed by Sony, MS, whoever.

 

[Wessex_Electric_Nutter]

NVidia did have an issue a while back with their drivers that cause their video cards to overheat. Combine that with overclocking, and poof went the video card.

Actually, a little more than that, the chips themselves were defective, I know because I have 4 laptops with the same chips and one of them is usuable because the chip (nVidia Geforce Go 7600) is completely broken and won't give an output on the laptop panel.

£13,000-£20,000 is the going rate for dev kit versions of the consoles that allow you to run code without it being digitally signed by Sony, MS, whoever.

Which is necessary when you are a gaming student and console programming is part of the sylabus, they didn't cost the uni that much each (as they are for educational purposes), but still. If that wasn't bad enough, the room which also has a load of XBOX 360 dev consoles, had some interesting issues last year, one got flooded over the summer IIRC and they had to disconnect it, put it in a bucket for 2 weeks and pray it still works, which it did.

 

[JCitron]

Actually, a little more than that, the chips themselves were defective, I know because I have 4 laptops with the same chips and one of them is usuable because the chip (nVidia Geforce Go 7600) is completely broken and won't give an output on the laptop panel.



Which is necessary when you are a gaming student and console programming is part of the sylabus, they didn't cost the uni that much each (as they are for educational purposes), but still. If that wasn't bad enough, the room which also has a load of XBOX 360 dev consoles, had some interesting issues last year, one got flooded over the summer IIRC and they had to disconnect it, put it in a bucket for 2 weeks and pray it still works, which it did.

I forgot about the 7600 Go chips. Their desktop 7600s also had a similar issue as well. I had one card poof out on me.

That makes sense regarding the cost. I missed the dev part. This is similar to what Microsoft does with their MSDN licenses. A developer can purchase a subscription and get everything on DVDs and downloads. The cost is about $18,000 for a site license.

Not to change the subject, but many people do not realize the actual cost of product development whether it's a physical item or even software.

John

 

[Wessex_Electric_Nutter]

Not to change the subject, but many people do not realize the actual cost of product development whether it's a physical item or even software.

True, but if you are like me, a hobbyist, if I didn't have the express product, would need to fork out for more professional tools to keep the knowledge up. Thats not a good advert for a lot of companies, especially when you have no intentions of making a single penny for the software.

 

[JCitron]

True, but if you are like me, a hobbyist, if I didn't have the express product, would need to fork out for more professional tools to keep the knowledge up. Thats not a good advert for a lot of companies, especially when you have no intentions of making a single penny for the software.

Very true. Microsoft did a nice job with the bundle. When I was in school, I made use of it for my studies, and still use the software off and on.

If you can afford it, I recommend getting a Technet subscription. www.technet.com

John

 

[jbanetman]

Others that replied, are correct, a program, whether game or engineering software, will not, by itself cause a CORRECTLY maintained, PROPERLY built, pc to fail. But combined with a marginal hardware, like a pc with a power supply loaded to near its maximum, and perhaps dust clogging the fans, CAN suddenly fail, when the new program makes extra demand on the cpu cooling, video card having to speed up working harder, etc. Also, a component can suddenly die due to age or stress, and be coincidental with a new program. Through experience building high-performance pc's, and overclocking, one of the most important components for a margin of safety is getting a powerful enough power supply, to handle the expected maximum load(taking into consideration cpu overclocking, video card overclocking, and the extra power that demands), number of gpu's and each of their loads, plus an extra capacity of, in my practice, 20 percent more than needed. Also considering any extra capacity in the near future. With this, only a catastrophic component failure would be responsible, not having to worry about not enough power supply. This case sounds like a marginal power supply.