Mac Pro upgrade - ran into a problem

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jfalberti

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Well, I upgraded the processors in my Mac Pro last Saturday to two 5355 quad cores.  Before doing that, I upgraded the firmware and my machine now reports that it is a 2,1 instead of a 1,1.  Processors went in fine, and machine recognizes them and all eight cores.  This brings my final configuration up to:

2 5355 quad core Xeon processors @ 2.66 Ghz
24 GB RAM
ATI Radon HD 4870 GPU with 1 GB VRAM
1.25 TB Fusion drive


OS X 10.9.2 (Mavericks)




All was running well and I put it through it's paces for the rest of the day with no problems.  Then the next day (yesterday) I decided to install a Windows 7 VM under Parallels Desktop 9.  I gave the VM the following configuration:

4 cores
8 GB RAM
100 GB disk.

Install went fine, and completed in about 30 minutes.  Then I started loading the updates.  I thought they would never end.  It took at least 5 hours and countless reboots to get Win 7 up to date, but again, everything ran fine.  I decided I wanted to run Windows Performance Index and see what Windows thought of the hardware I installed it on.  It all started well and good, but towards the end of the tests, the fans in my Mac Pro switched to high gear, and I thought it was going to take off, it was so loud.  I tried to cancel the WPI, but the Mac had frozen solid, and I ended up having to manually power off. I let it sit for a while, and when I powered it back on, it booted, but the fans were still running at full speed.  I did some research and found that probable cause for the fans was the SMC needed to be reset.  I reset it, and the fans are running normally again now, however I haven't attempted to bring Windows back up for fear it will happen again.  Any idea what went wrong or any suggestions?  Any help is greatly appreciated.


 


Joe
 
From what I know about G5's and Mac Pros, there's a utility only available to authorized Mac repair centers that "sync" (I can't remember the name) the cores to the motherboard, causing a more stable Mac. Since you just replaced the cores, you would need to do that.

I'll look up the name of the disk and the actual name of the utility Mac repair centers use when I get home, but I'm pretty sure that changing the cores is the problem.

EDIT:

The diskette is called "Apple Service Diagnostic" or ASDCD using the utility CPU Thermal Calibration. However, it's technically not "legal" to get your own copy unless you are an Apple Certified Technician.

Some say that the Apple Hardware Test will do the same thing, but it's undocumented http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1509

It will, however, tell you if there is a problem with anything in your computer.

I think that the main problem is the CPU Thermal Calibration is all screwy because you replaced the processors, but that's just my opinion.[this post was last edited: 4/8/2014-16:50]
 

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