Does rendering damage your CPU or GPU?
amyw12
Posts: 63
in The Commons
Many days this week I have used DAZ Studio and left large scenes (like 10,000 x something) to render overnight. And also; I love using the viewport iray render preview option every time I use DAZ so I end up rendering quite a bit.
I have the Ryzen 2700x and GTX 1080 Ti and 16 gb of ram.
will this continuous rendering behaviour end up damaging my computer’s cpu or gpu?
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Comments
What matters most is how hot the CPU/GPU gets during rendering, so the better it is cooled, the longer it will last, other things being equal. Especially the airflow through the case is important, if the air inside is too hot even the best coolers/fans are not worth much.
The short answer is "yes", although whether it matters depends.
Computer components have a lower lifetime at elevated temperatures. The documentation with my graphics card included some lifetime projections, and the expected average lifetime for gaming is less than a third of that for light everyday use. Still, even the shorter average lifetime was still around a hundred thousand hours (about a decade of constant use) - computer components are generally considered basically obsolete before they actually break.
Still, there will be a small percentage of outliers that break in a much shorter time, and rendering is generally more intense again than gaming - so it is possible that heavy use may cause your system to fail considerably sooner than that.
yes, lots of renders will cause heat problems proven in older cpu and gpu newers ones are much better though
It's a fact of the universe that the harder something is used, usually the faster it wears out. It's the nature of the beast.
Laurie
if your system is well cooled, you don't really need to worry much. Heat will shorten the lifespan the fastest. I've had a computer (AMD FX 8350 Black running at 4.1ghz) rendering for 4.5 weeks straight 24x7, prior to that, the same machine was doing intense photogrammetric processing (cpu at 90-100% gpu used sporadically) for over 3 weeks straight 24x7, as well as spending about 6 weeks rendering about 90% of the time. It still works fine.
I use my 3 year old laptop for Iray rendering, and I do a lot of it, and it still seems to be working fine (knock wood), I use it much more than the desktop. So, as others have noted, a well cooled/ventilated desktop should last until you need/want to replace it (if, of course, you didn't get the rare bad component or two, which likely will go bad early anyway).
your harddrives are more likely to fail before anything else even if you take care of everything not overheating etc whether you use your computer or not.
RAM can too.
Computers just have components that wear out, even monitor screens have a limited life.
The two primary reasons why most chips fail is heat, as others have said, or voltage spikes. Voltage spikes can occur without a properly functioning power supply and\or voltage regulation circuit or the lack of proper overvoltage\surge protection. Overheating can be mitigated, as others have said, by using appropriate cooling solutions. Overheating is not likely to damage your CPU directly, since modern processors incorporate thermal throttling technologies to prevent it. Basically, your CPU will slow down as it starts to overheat, and will continue to do so unless or until an acceptable temperature is reached. In extreme cases the CPU will shut down altogether to prevent damage. Unfortunately, to my knowledge, GPU's do not employ such technologies. Checking your GPU fan or other cooling solution regularly when frequently rendering for prolonged periods of time is prudent - a failed fan can be disastrous. Of course, there are many other components in a modern computer that will also be affected by heat, and the failure of one component can sometimes start a chain reaction that can damage others. I'm not referring to major components like hard drives here - a hard drive failure will not normally damage anything else and can be treated as a separate issue. I am instead referring to the multitude of more innocuous components that are found on motherboards and addon cards. For example, there are the components on the motherboard that provide voltage regulation. As mentioned earlier, failure of those components can certainly be disastrous. The causes of such failure are, once again, overheating and\or overvoltage (from the source). The solutions, once again, are to ensure proper cooling and voltage protection, coupled with routine monitoring.
With proper precautions, there is no reason why one shouldn't expect a CPU to last beyond its useful lifetime. Personally, I've never had one fail in use, even when the motherboard did. GPU's are another matter and are much more of a wildcard, IMO.
I remember in a post I made about restarting computers that many said they leave their PCs running for days or even weeks and don't restart. Some said they haven't restarted for months.
Even though your GPU and CPU may not be under much load for normal tasks, I think it's insanity to not do regular restarts, especially if you're pumping out renders. Perhaps along with keeping temps low, your hardware needs a regular sleep overnight from time to time to cool right off.
55% power use for my 1070 during rendering. Apart from the first 2 minutes, my CPU is only at 2 cores for the majority of the render.
Most recent computer games put more strain on my machine.
I think it's one of those things that isn't really worth worrying about.. probably more likely to have a part fail randomly than you are from anything heat related (assuming it's all within spec of the componants)
You are more likely to upgrade far sooner than a component will be close to wearing out. Unless you never upgrade. I have two PC that are built with parts over 10 years old, they are still doing well. As long as you make sure the temps are within range, and don't let it get caked with dust, it should last a long ass time. Some things might fail, it's bound to happen, but in my experience is it's rare. I have had one HD completely die on me, and one PSU completely die on me. The rest ended up in PC that I built to give away to family before there was any issues with it.
I've run across people who claimed that shutdown and startup were harder on a computer than idling was, so I rarely restart my computer. Admittedly, I don't use the Iray preview option constantly, and I can't pump out render after render because a). not my workflow, and b). the render queueing tool I have can't cope with the duplicate formula error that pops up when any scene loads G3M.
I think DAZ rendering killed my MacBook and iMac. The heat killed it. Rendering for hours with not much airflow is bad. I was able to fix both. The battery and hard drive crapped out on my MacBook. The GPU crapped out on my iMac. I never had a CPU died on me since I never overclock those on the Mac.
I know just render on desktops with more airflow.
Damage: No; there is a caveat to that assurance. If you are pushing any particular component beyond (or even at) its maximum recommended performance (PSU is a common such component), then said component could fail; if it's the PSU, it could take other components with it.
Wear out quicker: Yes.
However, using your computer for anything, wears it out quicker than not using it. Rendering is an intensive process that pushes computers; so yes it will have an affect.
Technically anything you do on your computer (even just turning it on) damages it. Things wear out. Both due to physical and heat related strain and use. As others have mentioned, you can mitigate heat damage to an extent through better cooling. My rendering PC has 2 liquid coolers (one for the GPU and one for the CPU), several large fans, and is located in a spot to ensure it has good airflow. I also regularly clean the dust out.
Whether wear and tear damage is a problem or not really depends on your expectations and budget. I've been using this current rig for 3 years. I built it with gaming and 3D graphics in mind. I've anticipated that "soon" I may have to start replacing some components and I designed the PC to allow me to do that by investing heavily in the motherboard to "future proof" it as much as I could.
If you're on an older machine and you're looking at your budget and realize that a failure of a GPU would put you out of commission for several months, you may want to ensure that you're doing your best to manage heat and see what you can do to reduce the amount of time the machine runs under heavy load.
You can always try undervolting the CPU/GPU. This helped me lower their respective temps by 10+ degrees celsius. My rig throttles the CPU beyond a certain temp and some of my renders were getting close.
Using anything will wear it down. So yes, use your computer and it will eventually die.
A two hour render would push the computer harder than playing a game for two hours, even on max settings.
... Is that fluctuation (that gaming engenders) worse or better for the components? No idea. Not aware of any genuine studies either.
Gaming benchmarks are often artificial, although they do vary, and they are also designed to push the computer more than gaming. This is on the assumption that if the components stand up to the benchmark, they'll be fine with the games.
Playing DX12 games at max settings (Rise of the TR) makes my dual 980TIs run just as hot as rendering.
Rendering in DAZ Studio is the sole reason my 2011 HP 8460P Elitebook notebook got a cracked motherboard circuit. I render much less now but also the 2012 HP 8470P Elitebook is much superior to handling renders than notebooks that used earlier model Intel CPU/GPUs. And the same is true for each suceeding generation of Intel CPU/GPUs.