Running into a weird problem that seems hardware related, but only manifests in Houdini. Up until about a week ago, I was happily using Houdini Apprentice on my AMD 3600X based system. Decided to grab Indie and upgrade my machine at the same time to the following config:

AMD 3950X
64GB DDR4 3200 (2x32GB)
MSI B450 pro carbon ac
Gigabyte GTX 1080

Did some stress tents, benchmarks and everything seemed fine. As soon as I popped into Houdini, I'd get random but frequent shutdowns - as in monitors go black, computer locks up and the only thing I can do is flip the switch in the power supply itself. Even holding down the power button won't help.

I assumed this was my old 550W PSU proving insufficient with both the CPU and the GPU being stressed at the same time in Houdini. So I ordered a new high quality 750W PSU. This seemed to help and for 2 days, I was happily spending a few hours a day with my now stable system… Until about 3 hours ago. It came back with a vengeance and I now can't seem to go more than a few minutes without these crashes.

It always happens when trying to look at the result of something. Say change something in a wrangle, the instant I click outside the wrangle editor, *poof*. It can seemingly happen anywhere, whether it's the first or the tenth time doing a specific operation.

Temperatures seem fine all around. Not sure what else to try.. Any ideas would be greatly appreciated!

Maybe bad memory, or bad motherboard? I've heard of users having to disable AMD precision boost with Houdini in another thread.

Yeah, sidefx support emailed me a suggestion to turn off Core Performance Boost - still at work so haven't had a chance to try it but a quick google search revealed countless other Houdini users with the exact same symptoms! All seemingly fixed by that one setting. Can't wait to get home, this will be a massive weight off my shoulders hah.

tiagosantosvfx
Yeah, sidefx support emailed me a suggestion to turn off Core Performance Boost - still at work so haven't had a chance to try it but a quick google search revealed countless other Houdini users with the exact same symptoms! All seemingly fixed by that one setting. Can't wait to get home, this will be a massive weight off my shoulders hah.

It might be worth trying to RMA. If I had to disable turbo boost on an intel cpu to get stable clocks, I would consider it a defective part.

Disabling CPB seems to have done the trick! Phew.

I did contact AMD a couple days ago but haven't heard back. I bought the CPU second hand which saved me almost enough for the Indie license, but means I'm stuck with it whether it works or not

MSI (the motherboard manufacturer) pretty specifically told me they wouldn't consider RMA'ing a part due to incompatibility with one specific application. Which I can understand. This “instability” does not seem to be a problem anywhere else as far as I can find.

I don't necessarily expect software devs to have to work around the whims of hardware manufacturers, but I'd be very curious to know exactly why and how this is a problem in Houdini but not other 3D apps or synthetic stress tests. In my case, I am using a pretty extreme CPU that is teeeechnically compatible with my motherboard, but it sure as hell wasn't made for it. I'd even be inclined to buy a new higher-end X570 board, but since this affects so many Threadripper users with $$$$ motherboards, I'm not convinced a different board would help.

CPB is overclocking and that MSI board only has 4+2 VRM units, which means it's pretty unstable for OC. Houdini is very good at hammering the CPU, so if you want to run CPB, look for something like a Taichi board. It has 12+4 VRM and has been very stable with a 3900x.