MP 1,1-5,1 Broken Logic Board?

[jannikmeissner]

I guess, this might be the end of the road for my trusty old Mac Pro. I have a 2009 Mac Pro that first came to life as a 2.26Ghz 8 Core and is now running 2 3.06Ghz Intel Xeon CPUs and a flashed AMD Radeon HD7970.

Since it doesn't run on the most recent version of OS X that easily anymore, I had taken on to run Linux on it, and still kept using it, currently as my main machine (mostly because It can run three external monitors at once and has enough power to spin up a few VMs).

Thursday morning, when starting it up, it greeted me with all three connected screens glowing in a different colour… After that it kept crashing during boot und displays a pattern of stripes on the screen in the EFI, for example the boot screen selector.

Thinking it was the GPU that had died, I express ordered an RTX 2070 (since I'm not running macOS). With the new card I can boot and run fine (no stripes or image errors), but the system crashes as soon as I wake it up from suspend mode.

Putting the AMD card back in, it again displays the stripes everywhere and boots into a beautiful uniform colour and then crashes to a black screen.

Did anyone else have this before? If so, was it your CPU daughter board, logic board or PSU that had failed, perhaps alongside your GPU?

I am not sure yet if its a good idea or not to try the GPU in another system…

If it helps, I'll attach a few photos later, but its hard to see, since taking a photo of the screen has its own distortions.

 

[tsialex]

Seems you have more than one problem simultaneously, GPU that died and backplane or PSU problems.

Wake from sleep KPs are usually caused by dying PSUs. You need start your diagnose with an Apple OEM GPU to run AHT and ASD.
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PSU problems related to sleep are:

1. not waking at all, but power on led still blinks,
2. shut down totally while sleeping, with power on led off,
3. powers down/don't go to sleep when you ask to,
4. KP/crash while sleeping and shows in the logs,
5. KP/crash while sleeping and don't show in the logs.

 

[Snow Tiger]

What is the status of your LED diagnostics lights ? There is a button on the upper left portion of the backplane board that needs to be pushed constantly to activate the results .

Best to install an EFI Card while performing this , as one of them is a GPU OK indicator . I'd recommend a EFI GT 120 or EFI ATI 5770 .

Here are your diagnostic LED info :

Upper bank :

OVTMP CPUA
OVTMP CPUB
PSU PWROK
5V STBY
3.3V ( No light installed )
1.5V ( No light installed )
1.05V ( No light installed )


Lower bank :
SYS PG
PLT RS ( No light installed )
X1 PG ( No light installed )
EFI DONE
GPU OK
5V ( No light installed )
RSM RST ( No light installed )

During normal operation , the PSU PWROK is green , the 5V STBY is amber , the SYS PG is green and the EFI DONE is green .

The two CPU LED will normally blink red upon connection and disconnection of the power cord . If they stay on , then a CPU overtemp is occurring . The thermal paste would then need to be replaced or maybe there is a processor failure .

GPU OK should light up during start up , but I think you are required to have an EFI card . I think it also stays lit if there is an EFI graphics card installed . But its been so long since I last checked .

There is no indicator light for the Northbridge chip overheating . This is a prime suspect these days for Nehalem cMP instability .

If everything looks OK , run both the OS and EFI versions of the appropriate ASDs with the GT120 or ATI 5770 installed .

 

[jannikmeissner]

Thank you! I'll try those and see from there.