My Mac Pro spontaneously restarts

I also got SMC fan control, bumped the minimum speed up 50% for all fans, haven't had a restart since, but I also opened the machine, pulled things out and dusted thoroughly at the same time - so I'm not sure which method fixed it. I'm betting that dust build-up can cause a spike in heat that the fans can't keep up with, so it restarts. If it still doesn't restart in a week or so I'll turn off the fan control and see if the problem comes back.

I'd say it's probably mainly the fan speed! Because before I installed SMCfancontrol, I cleaned a ton of dust off the CPU and RAM, and it still did the shutoff - mainly when I was putting a load on them, like rendering in after effects.

So, to this day I have had NO shutoffs while using SMC!!

I work my macpro hard using 3ds max, After Effects and Premiere and it doesn't restart under heavy load. Sounds like the fan speed is the culprit in some cases, but there must be close to a dozen proposed solutions on this board. Like a few others posted, mine has it's restarting fits duing the first 30 min or less. Once I realized that I have done like another user posted and resorted to just leaving mine on non-stop and it hasn't restarted in around 2 months so far. I'm making a list and as soon as my workload allows me to shut it down, I'm going through all the proposed solutions on this board in hopes of solving it.

I checked and I didn't see a kernal panic report in MacOS even though it restarted in MacOS also.

Firehawk911: you hit the nail on the head. There are a number of potential solutions and tried every one of them with the exception of replacing the logic board. I replaced the power supply, obsessively monitored the fan speed with SMCfancontrol, replaced memory, gave the interior a thorough cleaning, even replaced hard drives—all to no effect. My 8-core machine still restarted whenever the mood struck it. At that point, I just gave up and bought a brand new 12-core machine, which is an absolute beast. I will, however, be giving the 8-core machine to a cousin of mine to see if there's anything he can do with it. I told him, if he can bring it back to life on a consistent basis, then the machine is his. I hope he can.

Michael

I tried all kinds of things over several months, and nothing solved the problem. Then I tried Olly Arnold's solution: "In System Preferences>Energy Saver select Restore Defaults." And my Mac Pro has not randomly restarted now for several months.

After about a year with no problems (after baking my video card and throwing away two RAM chips), it's back. Same thing: spontaneous restart within 2-15 minutes after waking up from sleep, and often gets stuck in a restart cycle after that. No kenral panic, no error messages, nothing to indicate that the OS realizes that something went wrong.

I finally found a solution for my problem - my MacBookPro started having these (not so) random restarts about once every few days and several times on some days immediately after I (IT department of my company) installed new 2x8 GB rams.

Upon lots of research and debugging I found that the new RAM the IT guys installed in my Mac are 1600 Mhz and are not actually compatible with my MBP. My MBP is compatible with 1333 Mhz RAMs and after replacing with a new set of 1333 Mhz 8GB RAMs, I don't have these re-start issues.

Hope this helps someone. It would be great is one could tag the appropriate posts as "solution posts" and move them right next to the question(first post on the thread) since there seem to be quite a few solutions.

My restarts happened after I had my screen replaced by Apple. First time I got it back, the machine would crash every time I started After Effects. So I brought it back and they replaced the screen a second time. Now everything seems normal, until a sudden random restart. And when it first comes back, the resolution is wacky, as if it were starting back up in 640x480. Then it goes back to normal.

So I think there's a video component involved with at least some of these issues people are having.

Well for me it looks like it was nothing but dust build-up. I turned off SMC fan control about 2wks ago and still no restarts. So it was either the dust or maybe just a bad connection that got better when I opened it up and dusted it.

Judging from other posts, it looks like the restarts could be caused by just about anything.

I had this problem of random restarts within the first few minutes of waking or starting up the Mac Pro come up recently. I removed the USB cable for an Epson scanner and also reset energy saver preferences. Since then no more restarts. Not sure which solved it but it's worth trying the energy saver reset. Also eliminate any external devices to isolate the problem.

Read all posts and did clean install and left energy saver preferences to default and seems to solved the problem of radom shutdowns.

I have a Macbook pro with update 10.8.5 everytime I go to a application mainly GarageBand my computer reboots what should I do about this.?

I have a Macbook pro with update 10.8.5 everytime I go to a application mainly GarageBand my computer reboots what should I do about this.?

D-Time instead of posting at the bottom of a very old thread, your problem would probably get much more attention if you started your own thread for it.

Allan

DiTime, I would also suggest that you post your question in the Macbook Pro section,

this thread is for the Mac Pro desktop machines