nMP crashing playing Starcraft in Windows

[austinpike]

I've got a 6,1 (12 core D300) at work that I tote home on the weekends for entertainment purposes. I have Windows 8,1 installed on an external thunderbolt drive with a few games. Seems that when the Starcraft action gets hot and heavy it will shut down. When it does, it feels quite a bit warmer than whenever I'm doing work on the Mac side. My daily work doesn't really stress the GPU - it is mostly CPU-based 3D rendering.

So I'm wondering if the drivers aren't set up to cool the thing as well in Windows, or if the machine really just isn't able to handle Starcraft. (!)

Obvious troubleshooting step would be to install Starcraft on the Mac side and try it there, but I'd rather keep OSX for work and Windows for entertainment. I'll probably do it anyway out of curiosity, but thought I'd check here for other people's experiences using the nMP for gaming.

 

[h9826790]

If it's cooling problem, then you don't need any games. Run Luxmark V3 stress test can easily stress both D300. And there are plenty of way to stress the CPU as well.

You can do them in both Windows and OSX. If your nMP survive in those tests, then it's the games problem.

If it can't survive, then you know your Mac may be defective. Or if it only have problem in Windows etc.

 

[pat500000]

I've got a 6,1 (12 core D300) at work that I tote home on the weekends for entertainment purposes. I have Windows 8,1 installed on an external thunderbolt drive with a few games. Seems that when the Starcraft action gets hot and heavy it will shut down. When it does, it feels quite a bit warmer than whenever I'm doing work on the Mac side. My daily work doesn't really stress the GPU - it is mostly CPU-based 3D rendering.

So I'm wondering if the drivers aren't set up to cool the thing as well in Windows, or if the machine really just isn't able to handle Starcraft. (!)

Obvious troubleshooting step would be to install Starcraft on the Mac side and try it there, but I'd rather keep OSX for work and Windows for entertainment. I'll probably do it anyway out of curiosity, but thought I'd check here for other people's experiences using the nMP for gaming.

why don't you play it on mac version?

 

[thornslack]

SCII is primarily a CPU bound game and has never thermally taxed my gpu. My experiences are on a cMP with NVIDIA hardware however.

Maybe double check your Radeon drivers or watch the CPUs in task manager or some other monitoring software to see their temps. Is crossfire in effect? I want to say I have vsync on or adaptively enabled on that title to avoid pushing too many frames, which will also drive up temps. I think the blizzard launcher can verify the integrity of the game files to rule out corruption as a possible issue. Lastly, it runs much worse in OS X. Expect a major fps drop, although it could offer insight into your problem.

 

[Demigod Mac]

Shut down as in, you're playing SCII and suddenly the computer shuts off?

 

[austinpike]

Shut down as in, you're playing SCII and suddenly the computer shuts off?

I think the last time I used it, it was maybe extreme frame stutter/hanging rather than a full shutdown, but yes the computer has just shut off a couple times.

Maybe double check your Radeon drivers or watch the CPUs in task manager or some other monitoring software to see their temps. Is crossfire in effect? ...

I'll check the drivers; crossfire is enabled in the control panel. I'll try HWmonitor for temp next time I use it.

I'm not overly concerned as it works fine on a daily basis (which uses all CPU cores to ~100%.) The gaming use is pretty infrequent, so not high on my list of things to troubleshoot. But if there is a hardware flaw I should probably get it figured out. Luxmark on both OSs sounds like a good idea. Thanks for the input everyone.

 

[Demigod Mac]

That's interesting because that happened to me once (cMP 5,1, Titan X) during SCII's final level which is quite insane.
Afterward I used Nvidia Inspector to lower the power to 90% (225W) and had no problems the next time.
That's the only time it ever happened, so I'm wondering if it's something to do with the game itself.