Mac Pro overheating
Twice in the last two days, I found my desktop unresponsive. The second time also had the fans running wildly. So far, everything points to something causing the CPU to overheat.
Coincidentally, I noticed the latest version of Chrome getting stuck with 100% CPU on my laptop, also running MacOS.
Google searches [1] and [2] pointed to occasional reports of Firefox or Chrome causing MacOS to run wild, most likely relate to sites running Flash.
Two steps seem to help so far – installing smcFanControl and Temperature Monitor to better control over heating and making sure I do not let Chrome running by itself when I am not at my desk, or at least, not running any site with Flash.
Let’s hope this will be enough. I am not looking forward to another cycle of troubleshooting random heat related crashes.
Update 1: Nevermind. Temperature seemed stable most of the day until I came home from dinner and found the Mac overheating yet again. Oddly – the past two overheating incident happened around that time as well…. sometime between 6:00 and 7:00 pm. Maybe another clue.
Update 2: Video card and motherboard are both dust free. Since these overheating episodes started suddenly on Friday 11th, lets start by uninstalling recent updates. First to go are Chrome and Flash.
Update 3: Getting better and better. Running the Disk Utility uncovered several issues with the disk itself, which had to be repaired after booting from the Mac OS install CD. Although the repair was claimed a success, rebooting afterwards resulted in a hard shutdown as soon as I used ‘Spaces’. Only one thing left at the moment – reinstalling MacOS and start from a clean slate.
Update 4: So much for that. Another meltdown after about a week running smoothly. I switched to Windows to see if the crashes are really related to Mac OS and sure enough, it didn’t take more than a day before another meltdown happened. Fantastic – this means I am looking at an issue with the motherboard, power supply or video card.
Switching to comments for more updates.
Someone at the Apple store suggested I try two things before bringing the machine to them.
1- Reset the motherboard by holding the power button while the machine starts up, until I hear a beep. That did nothing since the machine had another meltdown within minutes of starting up.
2- Power down, remove the RAM modules and make sure they were free of dust. The amount of dust gathered *under* the vertical boards holding the RAM modules was shocking.
Unfortunately, this resulted in video corruption and more meltdowns.
After another reboot, the Mac seems stable although with only one out of the two monitors visible.
All this points to a failing video card. Yet another one – this is my third video board on this machine in three years.
Are they that fragile or do I have a problem of heat and dust ? Probably dust looking at what I found in there.
I need to schedule a good scrubbing every few months.
Update 2 – After leaving the machine in the hands of the Geniuses of my local store, it was returned with a new video card.
Third busted video card in three years. I am wondering what is wearing them down so fast.
Coincidentally, the power supply of my second monitor died as well. Maybe I have a power problem after all.