Can a bad video card cause a Mac Pro to spontaneously restart?

[snipper]

Hi all,

I use a Mac Pro 3,1 / early 2008 with a 'PC' card (MSi Twin Frozr III, 2 GB) so I can use it with the large desktop of a 40" Philips BDM4065 '4K' / UHD monitor at 3840x2160.

It began restarting spontaneously a few weeks ago. After that, this happend more and more often, up to half a dozen times a times a day, often in small series.

So I de-attached the SSD and internal backup HD and replaced a set of 3 HD software RAID set I used before the SSD, to test if it was the software. It still restarted by itself.. so it must be the hardware.

I checked the LEDs next to the RAM risers. Only thing abnormal is the 7th LED not lighting up, meaning that the EFI doesn't recognize the graphics card. Since it's a non-flashed PC video card, this is to be expected.

Still, since I put in the 'official Apple Mac' NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT, the machine hasn't restarted by itself. Not once in two days now. Therefore my question is: Can a bad video card be the reason this Mac suffers from spontaneously restarts?

 

[chrfr]

Can a bad video card be the reason this Mac suffers from spontaneously restarts?

It could. The computer may be having a kernel panic and restarting itself as a result.

 

[snipper]

Thanks for chiming in.

If so, should I be able to trace this back in the logs? (I'm not very familiar with the possibilities of the system log files but if this is a possibility then I can investigate this)

 

[Yahooligan]

Bad GPU can absolutely cause a crash/reset, even with Apple GPUs. Launch the "console" app and look for kernel panic logs in "System Reports."

Replacing the GPU and no longer seeing any restarts is pretty conclusive evidence.

 

[Sharky II]

The GPU forcing restarts is one of my 2010 MacBook Pro's favourite things to do

You'll usually find some reference to nVidia or ATI in the kernel panic log.