Luminous Landscape Forum

Equipment & Techniques => Computers & Peripherals => Topic started by: BernardLanguillier on April 24, 2010, 11:39:52 pm

Title: Cheapest upgrade even?
Post by: BernardLanguillier on April 24, 2010, 11:39:52 pm

Dear all,

I have been using a Mac Pro first gen 8 core workstation for about 3 years. Overall very happy about it.

For a few months I had been experiencing annoying stability issues symptomized by:

- chronic inability to boot, the machine would start booting and then automitcally reboot before reaching the log-in screen,
- sudden auto-shut down without recognizable pattern, often early during sessions but not always.

I had started to feel that the machine had perhaps devlopped fundamental H/W issues justifying a round trip to Apple for repair, but was concerned that because of the non repeatible nature of the issue they might not be able to debug the situation, which would have required a costly replacement.

I was luck enough to find the likely cause of the problem last week. It was the air exhaust grid of the ATI graphic card behing plugged with a 2 mm thick layer of dust...

Users with similar issues might want to check that out. It requires removing the graphic card from the PCI ports (which itselfs first requires to dis-connect the small power cable from the graphic card), cleaning and then putting it back in. A 5 mins operation at worst.

Good luck.

Cheers,
Bernard

Title: Cheapest upgrade even?
Post by: imagico on April 25, 2010, 04:48:30 am

Quote from: BernardLanguillier

I was luck enough to find the likely cause of the problem last week. It was the air exhaust grid of the ATI graphic card behing plugged with a 2 mm thick layer of dust...

Dust has been a common nuisance for me in the past but not so much recently due to several measures:

• When building a computer i avoid all small fans (apart from the dust they are noisy and unreliable anyway).
• Every time i do maintainance/upgrade work on the hardware i use the vacuum cleaner generously.  There are special antistatic ones for this but a normal household vacuum works fine for me.
• My main work computers are in an acoustic isolation enclosure with front and side panels removed for free air flow.  The enclosure filters out most dust already so there is very few dust even after months of continuous operation.

Greetings,

Christoph

Title: Cheapest upgrade even?
Post by: francois on April 25, 2010, 05:35:19 am

Thanks for sharing your experience Bernard. I've seen many "old" G5s suffering from similar problems. G5s and MacPros are very easy to open and clean. FWIW, I've seen Macs Mini and also MacBook with the fans stuck by dust.

Title: Cheapest upgrade even?
Post by: dandeliondigital on April 25, 2010, 02:22:52 pm

Hi Christoph,
This is fascinating. Care to elaborate?

So long for now, TOM,

Quote from: imagico

My main work computers are in an acoustic isolation enclosure with front and side panels removed for free air flow.

Title: Cheapest upgrade even?
Post by: imagico on April 27, 2010, 05:00:52 am

Quote from: dandeliondigital

Hi Christoph,
This is fascinating. Care to elaborate?

Not really much to say about it - it's a home made box made from chipboard - size for two midi towers and some extra gear.  Air cooled with two air ducts at the long sides and four 120mm fans providing the air flow.

Greetings,

Christoph

Title: Cheapest upgrade even?
Post by: Hening Bettermann on July 10, 2010, 05:20:55 pm

Thank you for sharing, Bernard!