Mac Pro overheating, taking it to a 'Genius' tomorrow

[Feek]

I posted this on the Apple support forums this morning.

I bought my Early 2008 Mac Pro second hand towards the end of the summer last year and I noticed a couple of times that if I shut the computer down and tried to turn it back on again that it would click when I pressed the power button but not start. I found the only way to make it restart was to pull the power cable out and plug it back in again, then it'd restart. Sometimes I'd have to do this two or three times before it'd start working.

Over the winter, this problem vanished and I thought nothing of it, I don't actually switch the Mac Pro off very often, I normally sleep it.

A couple of weeks ago when it was very warm outside, it did it again but it stopped once the weather cooled down.

Last night, I put the system to sleep and a few minutes later I needed to get back on the computer so I tried to wake it up and it just clicked once and nothing happened. The only way I could get it started was to remove the power cable, wait a short while and plug it back in again.

So it looks to me that whenever the room temperature hits around 25C that my Mac Pro gets grumpy and won't restart. I use iStat Menus and the ambient system temperature still never really gets above 24-25C.

I've got an Apple 8800 graphics card, the default supplied graphics card (can't remember what that is!), 10Gb RAM and four hard drives in the system but to be fair, it did it last year when I only had the 8800, a single hard drive and 2Gb RAM installed.

It's as though a thermal cutout is getting the hump and refusing to start until I pull the power cable and reset everything.

Is this 'normal' behaviour or should I be getting it looked at under Applecare?


The couple of replies I've had seem to indicate that it's not normal at all (which is what I expected) so I've booked an appointment over at Lakeside tomorrow evening. Lugging the beast from the car to the store won't be easy.

So my posting and general online presence may be reduced for a few days even though I have the laptop.

[Dazzy_G]

I despise the apple store in lakeside... i wish they'd never opened up.

[Feek]

I don't mind the store, it's just that it's so far from the car park :(

[Dazzy_G]

parking next to vue could be an option, walk past the restaurants up brompton walk and you are practically there

[Feek]

Which entrance is that? I normally go in the covered parking round the back by Marks.

[Dazzy_G]

Coming out of Brompton walk takes you past Star Bucks, and its pretty much in the centre.

Probably a bit further than the multistory behind m&s when i think about it

[divine]

Sounds like the PSU is overheating and only letting you turn back on once it has cooled down a bit. That'd be my guess.

[Feek]

Coming out of Brompton walk takes you past Star Bucks, and its pretty much in the centre.

The bit behind M&S is pretty central as well, either side though it's quite a long walk to the Apple store when carrying a heavy desktop unit.

Sounds like the PSU is overheating and only letting you turn back on once it has cooled down a bit. That'd be my guess.

Yes, me too. It's not too dusty either as I gave it a good blow out a couple of months ago. At least I've got the extra Applecare so they can do whatever they need to fix it as it's over a year old.

At the moment my room temperature is 27.3C, the ambient in the Mac case is 25C and I've got PSU temps of 69C and 66C. CPUs are between 41C and 54C because I'm encoding some video and it's only hitting a couple of cores hard.

[Feek]

All done, unit has been delivered to the store. They guy said that this will be quite difficult to diagnose because it's heat related but he's ordered in a logic board, PSU and airport extreme card (because my wireless doesn't see anything more than about two yards away). The down side is that because they're very busy he said it could take up to seven days.

Hopefully it'll be fixed though and if they use the PSU and Logic board, it'll be like new!

[Feek]

All done, PSU and airport card have been swapped and I'm collecting it tomorrow. It's a shame they didn't call me earlier though as I could have picked it up on my way home from work.