On May 9, 2012, at 10:54 AM, LuKreme wrote: > On May 8, 2012, at 17:20, objectwerks inc <c...@objectwerks.com> wrote: >> it was almost $290 -- money I did not need to spend if I had done a better >> job keeping it clean. > > Jason may be right that the power supply is failing, but as another data > point my 8800 failed in much the same way in my MacPro, and my computer gets > pretty regular dusting. It also seemed to be a heat issue, and I also had two > video cards. > > I replaced the 8800 with a 5750 and everything has been fine since. At the > time, I was told that the problem was probably caused by running two video > cards, but there was no evidence that was the case. The 5750 is powerful > enough to run both displays without effort, so I don't run the second card > any more, however I've heard that on the MacPro1,1 the card misbehaves if you > try to use three displays. My desk isn't big enough for 3x24" displays. So > I've not tested this. > > Modern computer parts are pretty good about shutting down before they damage > themselves, so I'm not sure your dust was the cause of failure necessarily, > though the repeated heat issue could have been.
The Apple ATI Radeon 5770 showed up today. My Mac Pro is a 2008 (early) (3,1) model* and the new card was easily installed. It only uses one of the auxiliary power leads (the previous Nvidia Quadro 5600 used 2) so probably uses less power overall. If the power supply has become marginal, the lesser load of the new card should help. Though I don't think the power supply was the main part of the problem. If it had become marginal, removing the ATI Radeon 2600XT card and the (pretty much unused e-sata card) should probably have allowed the Nvidia card to run alone, at least for a little while, due to the lesser strain of one less video card. (or maybe not) The new card works fine in conjunction with the ATI 2600 XT card. I run 4 displays (2x30" Cinema, 1x24" Cinema, and one older 20" 1600x1200 Viewsonic I happened to have from an older system no longer used) so the 2 cards are somewhat needed. The new Radeon can drive 3 cards but not 4. Given that the old Nvidia card had so much dust clogged in the ducts, that it was basically close to 100% clogged, I am still inclined to think that it was a thermal problem with the card, due to lack of ventilation. If not a strict overheating at once, then repeated (over a long period of time) getting to the edge of its allowed heat, over and over, degraded the card. If someone wants to pay the shipping, I'd be glad to send it to someone who wants it. Another advantage of the new card is that my machine is quiet again. I had jacked up the fan speeds to try and reduce the internal heart in the whole computer and they were running pretty fast. The new card also outperforms the 4 year old card, and I no longer trigger an OpenGL Nvidia bug that Apple acknowedges but seems to do nothing about that started happening with Lion, and which would cause the Safari web processes to crash on many many websites (including icloud.com and github.com), and would also cause iPhoto to crash often (the Safari crashes were 100% on affected websites, the iPhoto not 100% but very common -- always with the same stack dump at the core). I am also going to clean out the dust more often than I did in the past, which was almost never (not never -- whenever I rearranged the office I did it). After 15 years of building servers (24x7 reliable ones) as well as various PC type things, and seeing thermal failure in the past due to lack of ventilation, I will make more effort to not strain the system with excess dust. No matter the actual cause, excessive dust can exacerbate thermal conditions which lessens reliability and/or life-span of equipment. Chad * I originally ordered a Mac Pro 2007 (2,1) model in Dec of 07. It had the earlier Quadro 5200 in it (I did not need it but the company had cash in the account and there were no lesser high end cards [prosumer level vs Quadro Pro level] at the time for Mac Pro) It developed an issue in the summer of 2008 which Apple's techs at the local Apple store traced to a bad memory riser. After a week of waiting for one from the Apple supply system, and no riser showing as available, they said screw-it and ordered me a brand new Mac Pro 3,1 model with the then current Quadro 5600 (I went from 512mb RAM to 1.5GB RAM on the card) as a replacement. So I ended up with the newer faster machine at the same 3.0ghz speed. My only real cost was having to upgrade my OWC memory and OWC allowed me to trade it in so I only had a couple hundred $ outlay to trade up to the 3,1 Mac Pro at Apple's expense. _______________________________________________ MacOSX-talk mailing list MacOSX-talk@omnigroup.com http://www.omnigroup.com/mailman/listinfo/macosx-talk
