past observations<\/a>, here is what I believe happened :<\/p>\n1- For some reason, the external USB drive I was using for my monthly offline snapshot backup caused random shutdowns. Looking at the logs, it seems most crashes happened right after a Time Machine backup while the external drive was plugged in (although there was no error in the logs – simply a shutdown message).<\/p>\n
2- I also experienced sudden shutdown while playing 3D games under bootcamp (Fallout and World of Warcraft). These were related to driver and heat issues.<\/p>\n
3- These random crashes took a toll on the video card. Which in turn, added a stream of video glitches and more random shutdowns.<\/p>\n
I believe this cycle happened about once a year, resulting in having to replace a faulty video card each time.<\/p>\n
Conclusions ?<\/p>\n
– Video cards for MacPro are sensitive to sudden shutdowns and may need to be regularly replaced (which is an issue for an aging 2008 MacPro).<\/p>\n
– Gaming on a MacPro can be hazardous for the machine itself. Better set up a separate PC for games and dedicate the Mac for more serious tasks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
No random crash since the replacement of my video card a few months ago. Based on past observations, here is what I believe happened : 1- For some reason, the external USB drive I was using for my monthly offline snapshot backup caused random shutdowns. Looking at the logs, it seems most crashes happened right after a Time Machine backup… <\/p>\n
Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[123,1],"tags":[132,148,149],"class_list":["post-291","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-tips","category-uncategorized","tag-crashes","tag-mac","tag-macos","xfolkentry","clearfix"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8frwa-4H","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alquier.org\/laurent\/sites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alquier.org\/laurent\/sites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alquier.org\/laurent\/sites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alquier.org\/laurent\/sites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alquier.org\/laurent\/sites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=291"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.alquier.org\/laurent\/sites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/291\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.alquier.org\/laurent\/sites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=291"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alquier.org\/laurent\/sites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=291"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.alquier.org\/laurent\/sites\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=291"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}