[geeks] The Woes of Mac Pro

[Shannon Hendrix]

On Aug 18, 2008, at 14:44 , Mark Benson wrote:

> Firstly a heads up to all Mac users using 10.5.4 on Intel, there  
> would appear to be one or more bugs in the NVIDIA OpenGL drivers.

Apple is behind nVidia, and is missing important fixes in the 8800  
driver code and OpenGL bits.  I think some of them were fixed in Linux  
and Windows drivers about a year ago.

I've heard rumors that Apple might turn driver maintenance over to ATI  
and nVidia.

I'm not sure they gain anything but doing that work themselves, since  
they seem perpetually behind in bug and feature fixes.

> I have had multiple instances of my Mac Pro (4x 2GHz, 2GB RAM, 4  
> hard drives, GeForce 8800GT) locking solid for a few minutes, the UI  
> screwing up then it coming back to life with the GUI totally  
> FUBAR'd. It's got flashing lines, stripes, garbage all over.

Same here.  4 x 2.66, 8GB RAM, 4 drivers, 8800GT.

The GUI would go away, redrawing started working only intermittently,  
things got really slow, parts of the GUI would fail to repaint while  
others did, etc.  Lot's of texture corruption or incorrect textures  
copied, etc.

Frequently I had to force power off, but sometimes after awhile it  
would "come back".

Something I saw which you don't mention, was a series of app crashes  
in nvidia drivers or opengl, always at or near the same places.

As I said, a re-install to 10.5.4 appears to have fixed most of my  
problem.

I've been busy with work though, so I've not been doing a lot of  
OpenGL games or anything like that.

Still, so far it seems much better.

> I'm not the only one either, there seem to be a lot of folks  
> reporting this on Mac Pro, MacBook Pro and iMac running NVIDIA 8x00  
> series cards/chipsets.

Apple almost always denies well-known problems, sometimes to the point  
of Air Force level insanity.  No QC problems and no Groom Lake base.

> Just wanted to make y'all aware of that in case it happens to you  
> and you panic that maybe you machine is suffering a hardware fault.  
> It's probably not. I tried mine in Vista a few days back and sat  
> playing Mass Effect for a good hour and had no kickback in Windows.  
> Roll-on 10.5.5 and a fix, hopefully...

Yeah, I'm really hoping for an nVidia update.  Need it bad.

> Second, recently I moved my desk around and had to take all my stuff  
> off. I took the opportunity to get the canned air out and blow the  
> dust out of the Mac Pro.

I've started doing that more often, once I realized that more dust  
collected in there than I thought.

I find that the airflow shrouds really get in the way of a good dust  
blow out.  It's particularly hard to get all the dust out of the CPU  
cooler because you can't easily reach it.

It helps to start by blowing from the front and work back.

I'd like to see future Mac Pro machines allow removing the airflow  
shrouds to make cleaning easier.

> While doing so I pulled the RAM boards out to blow them off and  
> clear the rear/lower fan assy. of dust. I plugged them back in again  
> and thought nothing ore of it, until I opened Activity Monitor and  
> noticed I suddenly only had 1024MB of RAM. I shutdown and reseated  
> the boards and all is well. Why am I telling you this? Well the  
> boards *seemed* to be seated (I checked whn I put them back  
> initially, I know I did) and they were not. Again, just a heads up  
> incase any fellow Mac Pro users have any woes.

I discovered that too.

The issue is that the memory boards make a sound just pushing into the  
slot, which can make you think they are fully seated.

You want to hear a nice thump as it bottoms out in the slot.  That  
usually means a good connection that won't work loose.  It might be  
nice if they had included a slot lock.




-- 
Shannon Hendrix
shannon at widomaker.com