On Saturday night, we had a brief power cut. It only lasted a few seconds, resulting in a hard shutdown of my workstation. This is the workstation that I've not actually fully shut down in over a month. I experienced a problem where the machine wouldn't start up. I managed to get it running, but it took many hours of hair-pulling.
It may be a power issue. I'm not sure.
Just like last time, I spent about five hours working to get the machine back on. I'd reset the CMOS to blank the machine's BIOS settings, which would automatically start the machine up. I could recover BIOS settings, but the machine would default to the built-in display instead of the RTX 4090 GPU. I'd go into the BIOS and switch back to the GPU, but the machine would then fail to start back up.
I updated the BIOS firmware, which hopefully is a long-term fix for the stability problems since it's now known that the Intel Raptorlake processors don't have stable defaults for their power draw.
Eventually, as if the machine was resigned to being reset to death, it decided to come back on.
That's a big relief, but I have no faith that the machine will be fit for purpose. I will send it back to SCAN for investigation, but I don't want to be without a machine. I also don't have the box required for safely shipping back to base. I'm thinking about getting a new machine with the same type of case and then using the new machine's box to ship this machine back. We'll see. That's a lot of cash, and it's about a year earlier than it should be upgraded. I'd want a faster GPU for any "next" machine.
If I did need to send this machine back, I do still have a backup - the previous machine runs an i7 with the RTX 2080 Ti. I wanted a reminder of the performance difference between machines:
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| Athena - i9, 64GB RTX4090 - 18 seconds |
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| ISAC - i7, 32GB, RTX 2080Ti - 2 minutes 25 seconds. |
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