Computer completely freezes during rendering

[Deckard]

Hi everyone,
The past weeks my computer often freezes during rendering or during IR. Windows becomes totally unresponsive and the only thing to do is to push the power button for a forced shut down. This happens usually within the first minutes of rendering, if I get past the threshold of the first 5 minutes then it doesn't crash. Not sure if it's a Corona-related problem, I just updated to Corona 12 and it happened again. Any ideas to work this around? Any help would be much appreciated. I use 3ds Max 2024.2 with Corona 12 (previously Corona 11 hotfix 2). Computer specs are listed below.

HP Z8 G4, 2xXeon Gold 6150, 128GB RAM, RTX A2000 12GB, Windows 11 Pro for Workstations 23H2

Thanks!

[maru]

If it freezes to such a degree that you can only reboot the PC, I highly doubt it's directly related to Corona. I would expect it to be some kind of hardware issue such as overheating (CPU, VRMs, or other), not powerful enough PSU, corrupted RAM, etc.
Have you tried running the Corona Benchmark? https://www.chaos.com/corona/benchmark
What about other benchmarks / stress tests? Is everything working fine under heavy load?

[Deckard]

Thank you for your suggestions.
I think I've found the cause - fingers crossed...
It must've been a CPU overheating issue, as some cores reached a temperature above 100 degrees, before the fans kicked in.
What I did (and it works so far) is to disable "turbo" mode for the CPUs in BIOS. I lose a small amount of CPU power, but at least I got no freezes so far.

[maru]

I am not familiar with the Xeon platform so I can't suggest any specific solution, but if the CPU is overheating (even at 100% load), this means that the cooling is insufficient. Or in other words: the CPU should have proper cooling to operate even under 100% load.

[Alexandre Besson]

Same issue

[Avi]

Some users were discussing a similar issue some time ago here: https://forum.corona-renderer.com/index.php?topic=32138.0

They resolved their issue by disabling specific exploit protections for 3ds Max and Corona. Navigate to Windows Security > App & Browser Control > Exploit Protection and disable settings like Control Flow Guard for these applications.

You can also use HP’s support and diagnostics tools to identify hardware issues. https://support.hp.com/us-en/product/troubleshooting/hp-z8-g4-workstation/model/16449805

https://support.hp.com/us-en/help/computer/lockup-freeze-issues