Ok... my Mac smells of weed

Hi there Joe:

I'm suffering the same problem at my recording studio. Some kind of warm plastic smell
surrounds the control room about twenty-thirty minutes after startup. I've got comments
from my clients too, even complaining about headaches related to that almost toxic-like smell.

I'll tell you what we've found out after spending hours on forums looking for answers
and peeking by myself (yes,, you're right, we're not the only ones):

We opened the Mac Pro case, and started taking out everything which is "permitted" by
Apple, thats the Ram raiser cards and the optical drives bay, completely, and let the mac
pro to get some "fresh" air for a while, while we tried to find out where the smell came from.

Some parts were quite suspicious: obviously, the ones which got warm after startup. That's
the CPU,, (we couldn't peek too much there,, you can't just see it directly, but you can smell..)
and it didn't smell that way, the ram riser cards didn't smell bad either. The lowest part
of the Mac didn't smell bad at all..just plastic.. so we just took look to the upper part of the computer..

When you take out the optical drives, you can see two "semiplastic" black pieces (excuse
me for my English, I'm Spanish) .. and they're used to work as a top when you place the
optical drives bay back inside your mac, and to give some "space" to the Power supply unit
wires (black wires), which pass next to them. Those black pieces had some of that smell,
as well as the whole upper section of the mac... but "sniffing" with caution.. WE FOUND OUT
the smell came from the power supply unit.. I'll tell you exactly where:

if you take a look to your MacPro from behind, and try to see inside the PSU (hard!), you see at its
top some kind of blue screws attached to a circuit board, and next to them, on the upper
right corner, you'll see (hardly),, some kind of white sillicone,, or something like that..
which covers the joints of that upper circuit board with another one which goes all the way down
till the bottom of the PSU and connects to a lower circuit board. Just into that other joint,,
there is a lot of that sillicone yet again... and exactly from those two points inside the PSU,
where that white paste is placed, is where all that skunky smell comes from.


Solutions?? on my case,, I'll have to change my PSU, but unfortunately, Apple Store Spain doesn't
work directly with Canary Islands, and dealing with my Apple "LOCAL DEALER", is a
"LOCAL THRILLER" instead... 😉 ...Therefore I'm using a method to override the bad smell,
by getting more noise on the room. I'm using SMCFANCONTROL, a free app for the mac pro
which lets you to control the airflow through every one of my Mac's Fans, and I run them
at their TOP for 10 minutes every two or three hours,, and the smell dissapears for that
time.. that's what I call a very very BAD WALKAROUND.. but, it's the easiest way for me
to solve that problem.

On your case.. I guess you'll have a better access to an Apple Store and you'll be able
to send it to tech support... so they'll figure out what is the best solution for you..
a PSU replacement, even brand new Mac Pro 😉 (kidding),, or something like that.


Excuse me for this long post,If it helps you to find out where the smell came from
and to get a solution for that,, it will have worth it!

Regards,
Luis

There have been other people who had Mac Pro that smelled. At first thought it was a new burn-in but as I recall I think one was attributed to excess thermal paste.

I can detect a slight odor at times in the afternoon as the room heats up and it has been running for 8 hrs.

Maybe it absorbed odor.

I keep a small ($150) air purifier to draw air out of the room but far enough away that even a "quiet" air purifier can be annoying. The cat sleeps in my desk chair at night and the room would otherwise have cat odor.

Even if isn't there when under heavy work, and not from cpu I would inspect it for dust built-up, use the canned air. Do you have a new 8800GT also? I didn't find anything helpful in the other thread.

If you mean a kind of sweet smell, every Mac Pro smells like that when new, and sometimes even after a few months.

I guess upon reflection, it does smell a little like weed, but it actually a little bit sweeter.

I think it's the thermal paste. I have an original Mac Pro, and after the logic board was changed (it was done on-site, and I saw how the technician took the processors from the old board and put them on the new one, adding a big slop of paste) it started smelling. After a couple of months it stopped, but now that it's summer, and hotter, it smells again sometimes.

Kirk

This is funny that I found this post. When I first bought my Mac Pro, My roommate and I both noticed the smell. I thought she was smoking and she thought I was. We ended up deciding it must have been the neighbors or something and the AC was pulling it into the house. Guess my Mac was the culprit the whole time!

"If you mean a kind of sweet smell, every Mac Pro smells like that when new, and sometimes even after a few months. I guess upon reflection, it does smell a little like weed, but it actually a little bit sweeter."

Ah ... the proverbial new-Mac smell. Nothing like it.

I guess the marketers at Apple have come up with a new tool to help them corner the market by borrowing a page from the auto manufacturing company playbook. A couple years back I read somewhere that the "new car smell" is actually, and has been for several years now, a man-made chemical compound sprayed into cars before they leave the manufacturing plant.

Maybe Apple has come onto something here ... but I think they could have found a scent that smells less like an illeagal susbstance. LOL

@ Joe !!

thank god someone else has said this ! i thought i was going mad.... my clients were convinced i had a stash somewhere, one of them almost started looking for it and some of them wink at me when i say there's no grass in the building!

one of them started calling my place 'the weed rooms'... no joke.

its always on longer sessions, so must be to do with heat, the thermal paste theory seems to stand up to me... but no doubt it smells of green, and eerrr i would know.

<Edited by Moderator>

Do a search on eBay for Jade East cologne. That stuff will kill the smell of anything

Ha ha!

I have an original G4 that sat on a shelf unused, and I used to hide my stash in it.

Maybe you "forgot" something?

This is so weird! I'm convinced my Mac Pro smells of a sort of melted chocolate! No one in my family believes me! I quite like the smell!

Nathan