[UPDATE, SOLVED] GTX 1080 may be crashing sims?

[Josami]

Hi! A couple of months ago I started a topic about a FLIP simulation crashing after reaching some frames. I decided to open a new topic because after a lot of research I finally found what the problem was and it had nothing to do with my GPU and had not experimented a Houdini crash in the last two or three weeks. First of all I want to tell you that the problem got worse than what I wrote in my last topic. In the beginning the problem had to do with FLIP sim crashing at certain frames. It could be 1/3 into the simulation or, more commonly 2/3 into. I only could do low res simulation. That was weird and because of that began to think that it was a hardware limitation problem. Then, after learning more about checkpoint files and kind of giving up on solving the problem, I decided to try some render. Again I wasn't able to go over 50% with medium quality settings. So I took my PC to a technician and start working with him.

He did some hardware cleanup, replaced my GPU thermal paste and chage it to a different slot, and clean my ram sticks and change their order. After those adjustments I finally could finish my sims and even render! I did several simulation tests and run a render that went on for more than eight hours straight, which was great news. However, after I picked my PC and plug it in in my house, the problems came back. I started to think it had to do with my UPS or my socket not delivering enough power, so I tried to connect it on different rooms in my house. One thing to notice is that, at least, at this point Houdini was returning me an actual error code, which was: Command Exit Code: -1073741819. It is a windows error. I found some topics in this forum and sidefx's, but unfortunately none of them included any solution. Windows forums talked about some incompatibility issue caused by audio drivers. Maybe because constant crashes and the core problem being stressed, my PC started outisde of houdini and went through many blue screens with many different errors.

New things I tried: followed the instructions about audio settings, used directx in order to look for any incompatible driver (NoMachine Audio one popped up, so I uninstalled it after reading in some site that it was cpu expensive), tried both sim and render in houdini and in the background (which was a lot more unstable). So I decided to open my case and test every ram slot and run test stress. After several hours I discovered the problem was, indeed, my ram. My configuration had 128gb ram, however, I first bought a 4x16gb kit and then add another 4x16gb same model, same frequency, same everything, but different kit. Despite of being the exact everything, those kits were not tested together and so run through incompatibility issues when working together. If I put my old kit, everything went fine; If I put my new kit, everything went fine; but as soon as I combine them, the problem arose.

So, just to sum it up: my solution to several houdini crashes and windows crashes, and error Command Exit Code: -1073741819 was ram incompatibility. I should have bought a single 4x32gb kit instead of 2 4x16gb of the same model and frequency.