Early '08 MacPro lockup

[4God]

I did a search (although my search may have been less than perfect) and didn't find a thread on this, so here goes...

Twice in the last 10 days my MacPro has locked up while browsing Safari. Fans go full speed and sounds like it's going to fly away. I have to hard shut down and when I do, the power light blinks off and on. No sequence, just off and on. I do a power reset by unplugging the tower for 30 seconds and pressing the power button to clear memory. Startup and all is good. I can't find anything in the logs that indicate a memory issue or possible graphics card problem.

Any suggestions?

P.S. I'm using an early '08 MacPro (2.8 8 core) with a WD SSD boot drive, 8 gigs of RAM and have the ATI Radeon HD 3870. I also ran Rember to test memory and that said everything was good.

 

[bokdol]

are there any screen artifacts when it locks up?

 

[4God]

No, just freezes. I did get some weird lines once a couple of days ago when I slept the computer. The lines just appeared for about 1 second as it went down.

 

[4God]

Could it be my graphics card is getting ready to die? Could it be a software issue?

 

[bokdol]

i had screen artifacts and then a lock up before. i hoped it was not the mobo. so i cooked my graphics card at 400 degrees in the oven. and now it's back to normal. if you see screen artifacts it's usually a graphics problem. (from my experience since the old ibooks. do you have apple care? if you do. try to record the problem on video and take it to the apple store.

 

[4God]

Out of Applecare so that's not an option. May just upgrade the card anyways to the 5770. Maybe even upgrade some RAM while I'm at it. Probably cheaper than leaving my Mac Pro with an Apple Store Genius and having them tell me to replace one or the other anyway.

 

[ashman70]

I believe I saw an EFI update that addressed issues with fans, check the apple support site, it may be what you need.

AM

 

[4God]

I believe I saw an EFI update that addressed issues with fans, check the apple support site, it may be what you need.

AM

Thanks, but I saw nothing regarding my early '08 machine. I have the latest firmware update already. Not sure what it would have to do with it locking up while using Safari?

 

[bokdol]

b and h photo had the best price for 5770 card that i could find. also look at newegg for the macpro ram.