Hi All,

Upgraded my AMD Phenom X6 to a FX8370 today, on an Asrock 970M Pro3 motherboard. This processor is supported by the motherboard and the Windows desktop comes up fine. I am not overclocking anything, just default CPU out of the box.

However, whenever I try to Add a Skylight to an empty default scene Houdini 15.277 crashes. Also if I add a sphere to the scene and add no lights then render with mantra, mantra crashes. This is the same exact hardware only the CPU has been swapped.

All other software, I use, seems to work fine. For instance I can render in Blender without crashes and play games without crashing and use After Effects without crashing.

It seems odd to me that Houdini would be so sensitive to a CPU swap so I thought I would just throw this out to the community and see if anyone has any tips or similar experiences?

Bad CPU, maybe?

Try seeing what the CPU temperature is with a monitoring app, sometimes the thermal paste doesn't quite spread properly when the heat sink is remounted and it overheats, causing a lot of issues. Sounds like it's crashing when multiple threads are used.

I am using CPUID and HWMonitor to inspect my hardware. It runs as cool as the last CPU @78F idle and 142F under full 8 core load.

Blender is clearly using all 8 threads when rendering without a problem also Handbrake can encode video using all 8 threads so I am not ready to say the CPU is bad yet. It was purchased new and sealed. I have built many computers over the years so I feel like I did the install correctly with the thermal paste and fan.

Maybe the CPU needs to burn in or something funky like that..?

I managed to get some console feedback. What is odd is I see mention of VRAY in the text. I don't even have VRAY and Apprentice would not run it anyway.

This message appears in the console after I see all 8 buckets appear in the viewport.

VRAY is the name of a Houdini library (VEX ray), not anything to do with the V-Ray renderer.

Ah,

I did have a copy of H14.470 installed and tried that as well. Mantra does not crash, however, it does not render either. The console has a more tidy message with the TRACEBACK BEGIN/END.

Here is what is in the crash log.

Crash report from Admin; Houdini FX Version 15.0.277
Uptime 60 seconds
Thu Nov 05 14:34:11 2015
Caught signal 4

Traceback from 4900 ThreadId=0x00000758
+0x0fd30037