Quadro 4000 giving me a hard time

[mancormedia]

Hey community!!

Here is a tricky one!
I've been working with my Video Editing workstation for quite some time now ;
Asus Gene IV mother board
16 GB Ram
NVidia Quadro 4000 video card
750 watts Antec power source
Western digital hard drives

THing is about a week ago the most feared Blue Screen of Death came up. I could not manage to make windows to start again. Long story short... i noticed i could run windows on safemode so i tried repairing it with no luck. After RE installing windows and MoBo drivers i decided to download and install the latest Nvidia driver but once i reboot windows started to load until it was supposed to display the logon screen (Blue screen where user and pass form is prompted) then black screen. I just cannot make windows to start properly wich is extremely weird. I would normally conclude "video card died" but it works without insalling latest driver.. even performance driver from nvidia.
Please Help any hints?

 

[iamacow]

it sounds like after you install the drivers and the card gets some load, it crashes. I'm thinking it's either the cooling on the card (like dead fan) or PSU related. I say this because in safe mode, the card isn't running full speed. Also without nvidia drivers to stress it.

just a theory

 

[mancormedia]

it sounds like after you install the drivers and the card gets some load, it crashes. I'm thinking it's either the cooling on the card (like dead fan) or PSU related. I say this because in safe mode, the card isn't running full speed. Also without nvidia drivers to stress it.

just a theory

THanks for your answer. So you say its probably either the card's cooling fan or (best case scenario) the PSU . How can i test them both in order to replace the right part? Also how would you test a defected PSU ?? I know there is a way but how?
I really hope is not the card since i do not have any idea how to fix it's fan!!

 

[iamacow]

well you can check the temps of the GPU with HwMonitor. The Quadro 4000 can hit 100c before down clocking but since it's basically a GTX 460 the temps should be like 70-80c on load.

The only reason I said PSU, is because it takes a lot of watts to run those FEMI Chip/Core cards. But since it also uses the 12v line, everything from the motherboard to the CPU uses it and could crash from low voltage. I wouldn't rule it out, but you would have other issues like constant BSOD if it was the PSU and not just when dealing with the video card being stressed.

Do you have a spare card to swap out with?

 

[k1114]

I don't think it's the psu. Typically good psus like that antec will not turn on if it couldn't power the card regardless of drivers being installed. Capacity is definitely not a concern because it could be run on a good 450w. It doesn't take much power, less than a 460. It's gf100 so more to a 470/480 with specs lower than a 460 though. It won't crash from low voltage because that's constant unless it was faulty but then it shouldn't be starting at all. 12v on 12v rail with fluctuations having nothing to do with capacity usage. Since you can get into safe mode you can get the bsod reports. It should give a much better direction to look instead of shooting in the dark as we are now.

 

[iamacow]

k114 has a good point

 

[mancormedia]

well you can check the temps of the GPU with HwMonitor. The Quadro 4000 can hit 100c before down clocking but since it's basically a GTX 460 the temps should be like 70-80c on load.

The only reason I said PSU, is because it takes a lot of watts to run those FEMI Chip/Core cards. But since it also uses the 12v line, everything from the motherboard to the CPU uses it and could crash from low voltage. I wouldn't rule it out, but you would have other issues like constant BSOD if it was the PSU and not just when dealing with the video card being stressed.

Do you have a spare card to swap out with?

Ill find the way to test either another card and psu. I do not have a spare card to test this scenario with but ill get one. Also, could a bad psu damage the MoBo or any other part?

 

[k1114]

A normal person doesn't have the equipment to test a psu but you'd see the symptoms. The psu is not even a consideration to me at this point. The symptoms don't point to it. A bad psu would damage other components but dirty power makes the other components crash especially the cpu so gpu driver won't matter. I wouldn't even look at cooling either. It makes no sense since you're crashing on startup. Now I'd say gpu but it's still not clear without bsod reports. With no driver it only does basic functions so may not crash until the driver is in and other functions can be used.

 

[mancormedia]

hey You Guys,

Thank you so much for the help provided. I manage to test everything and you were absolutely right. GPU died. Well it cannot load all drivers but either RAM and PSU were fine. It really sucks when a 900 $ piece of board just suddenly dies on you. Specially when you got tons of work to deliver. Anyways i was thinking on changing it for a ·VGA GTX 970. What you guys think about that GPU ?

Is there any way to fix the Quadro GPU back to life ? all technicians said "Can't do". But i was thinking if there is a way to fix it since it's not completely dead .. just playing Zombie.

Thanks in advance

 

[k1114]

There's some kind of hardware failure so there isn't anything to do unless it's under warranty. Why did you go with quadro over geforce and now choosing the other? Seems like you'd want a quadro for a workstation.

 

[mancormedia]

There's some kind of hardware failure so there isn't anything to do unless it's under warranty. Why did you go with quadro over geforce and now choosing the other? Seems like you'd want a quadro for a workstation.

Honestly i just want my workstation up and running. The gtx was my best guess with a short budget. Warranty is over.

 

[iamacow]

Honestly I would just buy another quadro on ebay. the Quadro 4000 can be found for $130 and the Quadro FX 4800 which is the generation before (same performance) is $50-75. I have personally bought 5 Quadro on ebay over time. never had a issue from any card so far.

Quadro 4000:
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?_from=R40&_trksid=p2050601.m570.l1313.TR12.TRC2.A0.H0.Xquadro+4000.TRS0&_nkw=quadro+4000&_sacat=0

In fact I was thinking of replacing my Quadro FX 4800 which I paid $150 for 3 years ago, with a Quadro K4000 and triple my performance for about $400.

Or you could get the new Quadro M4000 (OCT 2) which is coming out shortly. Its basically a workstation GTX 970 for $850

 

[mancormedia]

Geez you're right. The problem is that those ebay posts show cards that will be delivered on October 5th at least. Im in south america and i found a friend whos in nyc at the moment so time is limited enough to buy one from new egg and wait four days for the card being delivered.
Of course there are loads of good options but ebay will take some time to process that shipping. Geez a quadro 4000 for less than 2 hundred bucks sounds cool.

So the gtx is a lower performance card? I model 3d and use after effects a lot. Quadro 4000 was not such a big bang for the buck to be honest. Everything good but not just spectacular for 900$. Im guessing gtx will be better since its only 350$.

Why do you mean by workstation card?

 

[k1114]

The gtx is not a lower performing card, it will actually perform better in some cases. If the 3d software is opengl, quadro will be better. AE is also opengl for the viewports so does better there even if it is a lower spec gpu. Workstation is quadro, gtx is consumer. There's differences but I assumed you would have done research before spending $900 on it. Quadro gets drivers specifically made for most design software so they are more stable and less bugs. It's why serious work gets quadro even if it is lower performance so you don't have to deal with downtime like this. Technically the 970 is more than double the performance of a 4000 but they intentionally gimp performance in drivers. The 970 should do well if you want to get up and running quicker.

 

[iamacow]

If you are working in After Effects than a consumer card (aka gaming - GTX) will be the best performer. This is because AE likes CUDA cores and lots of vram. The amount of crashes it can be totally worth it for the performance boost. It's true a consumer card will crash more because the drivers aren't optimized.

So now it comes down to the 3d modeling software. If you are using 3Ds Max than a GTX card will be fine. Anything else like Maya, CAD, etc NEEDS a Workstation card or a GTX 970 will preform worse that that old Quadro 4000.

 

[k1114]

In after effects, cuda is only for 3d raytracing which most people don't use. The viewports are much better with quadro. Autocad is dx and performs better with gtx but there are different cad. Archicad is a different monster vs autocad vs other cad software. You could switch maya to viewport 2.0 which helps a lot on gtx since it's dx instead of the default ogl but I've had some shader issues with it.

 

[mancormedia]

Guys thank you so much for all the quick responses. It really helped me a lot with this issue. Finally i kept my quadro 4000 in a drawer since it's dead, bought the gtx 970 SC (didn't know there was 3 or 4 models for just that card). I though After Effects will behave a lil slower since the Quadro were supposed to be a much better card but reality tells me it won't. At least for me AE previsualization is MUCH faster and responsive than with the Quadro. Don't really know why is this but i can totally tell the difference and it's quite big. I haven't had the chance to try 3d Modelling so far but i got a Hunch about what will coume out of this. EVGA GTX 970 rocks so far.
Once again.. thanks sooo much for all the helpful INFO!!! you guys rock!

 

[iamacow]

Glad you got it resolved. The consumer cards will crash the programs once in the while. I actually switched to a Quadro when I did a lot of critical work because I lost time and money from AE crashes while editing. But generally if you have the settings to auto save every 10minutes, it's totally worth the few crashes compared to the cost.

 

[stigskov]

I had the same issue, and I really didn't have time to mess with new graphic card/drivers/mechanics. I traced the problem to dried out capacitoors, ripple on the supply causes the card to reset and since the card is not hot-pluggable, screen is lost. You may still be able access the workstation through Remote Desktop, and save any potential documents, I have that feature enabled, so I was able to.

You can replace the caps, they are available at Digikey.com https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nichicon/PLF1C271MDO1/493-3018-ND/1136108 https://www.digikey.com/product-detail/en/nichicon/RS80E821MDNASQJT/493-4035-1-ND/2347925
Note: They are NOT standard capacitors

Replacing is very hard because of the exceptional heat transfer of the board - but it can be done.
much easier - IF YOU HAVE ROOM BEHIND THE BOARD when inserted in the PCIe slot - is placing the capacitors in PARALLEL with the caps on the board (leaving teh original caps on the board), just placing them on the back side. It it still hard to solder - make sure they are soldered properly, also make sure the capacitor case is not shorting to anything on the PCB (maybe wrap the caps in tape).

Good luck