Z800 Problems

[ViciousBliss]

Hi Everyone,

Several months ago I got a Z800 offlease and it's been running pretty solid up until the last couple weeks. It's started to erratically shut off at random. Sometimes it will start up in a usual amount of time and other times it will attempt to start and fail for half an hour before it stays on. Up until yesterday I could get it to stay on for hours, but now it won't stay on for more than a few minutes at best.

Doesn't matter what I'm doing. It'll shut off with only PT running and sitting idle. It would always lose the date and time and my settings if I ever took the power cord out while it was unplugged. This was also when I unplugged everything else and switched to the old computer so maybe it wasn't just the power cord. I didn't have the budget for a new video card, so I had to use this Asus EAH 5450 Silent 512M DDR2 card I had laying around that I never installed in the other computers. Sometimes in more cpu-intensive sessions Pro Tools would freeze up when opening the GUIs of certain plugins, usually something by Waves or Pro Q2. PT also functioned much better if I closed and reopened the program before opening a different session.

I've run all the diagnostic tests and everything passed. Tested the power supply and it got the green light. But I've read that doesn't mean the supply is good. I've tried to find out if this video card is a problem but there isn't much info out there. Everything else I read points to the power supply.

Otherwise the machine has way more power than my old DX4860-UR15P. With the DX it can barely handle 3 Seventh Heaven Pro reverbs along with a few ProQ2s, 4-6 VCC, and 20 of the cpu efficient Waves plugs. The Z800 can do that without breaking a sweat. Still think I'll need one of the Soundgrid Servers because I could see the Z800 having a lot of trouble running a 96k session of over 50 tracks where I'm using a lot of NLS.

Thanks for any help, it's much appreciated.

[sw rec]

First problem, if it won't store the date, then the little battery on the motherboard is dead. A $5.00 fix, but I doubt if that's the entirety of the problem. Does it ever generate a crash log? You can google the error code and have a better idea of what's happening. Last time I saw this happen, the mobo battery was dead, but the error code on the blue screen of death pointed at an overheating problem. The heat sink compound between the processor and cooling device had dried up. Easy fix. Hope this helps a little!

[ViciousBliss]

Originally Posted by sw rec

First problem, if it won't store the date, then the little battery on the motherboard is dead. A $5.00 fix, but I doubt if that's the entirety of the problem. Does it ever generate a crash log? You can google the error code and have a better idea of what's happening. Last time I saw this happen, the mobo battery was dead, but the error code on the blue screen of death pointed at an overheating problem. The heat sink compound between the processor and cooling device had dried up. Easy fix. Hope this helps a little!

Thanks for the info. The date and all stores as long as I don't remove the power cord after powering it off. I did look up the events under the system log and it didn't generate much more than noting the crash(doubt I'd be able to keep it on long enough to recheck now). The Z800 never feels all that warm or hot when I've checked after a crash. It sounds like it's laboring to boot up.

[albee1952]

Originally Posted by ViciousBliss

Thanks for the info. The date and all stores as long as I don't remove the power cord after powering it off. I did look up the events under the system log and it didn't generate much more than noting the crash(doubt I'd be able to keep it on long enough to recheck now). The Z800 never feels all that warm or hot when I've checked after a crash. It sounds like it's laboring to boot up.

First thing you need to do is change out the battery and then reset everything in BIOS(the dead battery will cause all BIOS settings to default in ways that are almost certainly NOT how you need for today)

[YYR123]

Originally Posted by albee1952

First thing you need to do is change out the battery and then reset everything in BIOS(the dead battery will cause all BIOS settings to default in ways that are almost certainly NOT how you need for today)

Yep, another solid fix

[ViciousBliss]

Just wanted to update. I decided to plug the Z800 back in after a few days off and everything was solid(all cords were removed and used on the other computer). Then when PT crashed and it needed to restart, I put all the recommended bios settings back in and the thing hasn't randomly shut down on me at all(hyper-threading is on though). I swear the cpu performance is better on all my sessions, they weren't maxing out as easy as before I plugged it back in. I got audio to play back for a while with up to 25 H-Reverbs, each with their own aux track, at 96k the other day with just a stereo file and master fader. I didn't send audio to all of them, so I'm not sure how much less cpu they use if nothing is passing through. The only warning notice I got was that I may need to replace the cmos battery if the date and time don't hold. The windows settings weren't set to automatically fetch the date and time. It's held since I powered this back on.