Safari freezing, restarting Mac Pro 5,1 with Sapphire Pulse 580 GPU

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Safari freezing, restarting Mac Pro 5,1 with Sapphire Pulse 580 GPU

I have a mid-2012 Mac Pro (yes, I know it's legacy but it's still a good machine) with the recommended Sapphire Pulse 580 8GB GPU and dual mini 6-pin to 8-pin power cable installed. (3.2 GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon, 32 GB 1066 MHz DDR3 (2 x 16), Mojave 10.14.)

Everything is working well apart from Safari beachballing, freezing and restarting the Mac Pro. I can't identify the source of the issue but suspect it's something to do with some web graphics/media tech conflicting with the GPU. Twitter is one website that always causes a restart. I've tried other browsers (Firefox, Chrome) and haven't (yet) come across the issue with them.

Unfortunately, it's not possible to do a safe boot with this GPU but the same issue is happening in both my admin and day-to-day user accounts. I've tried disabling and uninstalling Safari extensions and system add-ons like Little Snitch, resetting PRAM and the SMC, Disk Utility repair, Onyx, EtraCheck (no major issues), TechTool Pro (no issues), reinstalling Mojave and, finally, a clean install on my Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB without migrating data.

Any ideas? Switching the default browser is an obvious workaround, yes, but this is clearly a bigger issue that I'd like to get to the bottom of before it causes any more problems.

Posted on Aug 21, 2019 2:56 AM

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Answer 1

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Is-there-a-vet-in-the-house Author

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Aug 23, 2019 3:28 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

I think I may have found the solution. On the back of the Sapphire Pulse 580 8GB is a tiny switch to toggle between gaming mode (default) and compute mode. The documentation that came with the card is minimal and Windows-orientated but includes a slip of paper about the switch. I remember trying to find specific installation instructions for the Mac Pro online – which wasn't easy – and they said to switch to compute mode.

I tried to find any mention of the switch online today but found nothing. So, on the off-chance it might be connected, I switched back to gaming mode and, hey presto, no restarts. It's early days but it's looking promising. I'll come back with any update.

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Answer 2

Aug 21, 2019 9:21 AM in response to Is-there-a-vet-in-the-house

If you have Etrecheck, please change its preferences to "allow full disk Access" and run again, and post its report using the built-in mechanism inside the program to share and copy the report, then use the third icon form the right (ToolTip: additional text) to post the entire report.

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Answer 3

Aug 21, 2019 10:42 AM in response to Is-there-a-vet-in-the-house

This is one reason your Mac is slow to respond:

Drives:

disk0 - Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB 500.11 GB (Solid State - TRIM: No)

Performance:

System Load: 5.01 (1 min ago) 4.72 (5 min ago) 3.81 (15 min ago)

Nominal I/O speed: 6.07 MB/s

File system: 36.90 seconds

Write speed: 60 MB/s

Read speed: 257 MB/s

a good rotating drive can hit 100, yours is at 60.

when an SSD drive does not have TRIM enabled, it will fill with deleted data, and writes will slow WAY down.

sudo trimforce enable

https://www.lifewire.com/enable-trim-for-ssd-in-os-x-yosemite-2260789

When finished enabling TRIM, restart in Safe Mode. The disk Utility pass done during startup will clear a whole lot of deleted data and make Writes faster.

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Answer 4

Aug 21, 2019 11:33 AM in response to Is-there-a-vet-in-the-house

Top Processes Snapshot by CPU:

Process (count) CPU (Source - Location)

photoanalysisd 98.00 % (Apple)

Other processes 31.48 % (?)

nsurlsessiond 22.83 % (Apple)

cloudd 19.53 % (Apple)

bird 12.86 % (Apple)

This is way way out off line.

Are you using something really OLD to do photo analysis work? This should be being done on the graphics processor (GPU), not CPU.

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Answer 5

Aug 22, 2019 7:31 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Thanks for your suggestions, Grant, and for ploughing through the EtreCheck report. I've enabled TRIM and, early days, but the Mac Pro does feel faster – but it didn't resolve the issue. Re your second reply, from reading around it seems photo analysis may have been down to Photos treating my library as new and scanning for face recognition. Either that or running the App Store version of WhatSize yesterday which hasn't been updated for years.

Booting in safe mode doesn't work – even with automatic login – as the 580 I have isn't Mac edition but I booted from a Mojave rescue SSD I have and ran Disk Utility repair from there. I also tried Safari while booted from that drive and it also beechballed, froze and restarted. Back with my normal startup SSD, I tried turning dark mode off via System Preferences but it didn't help.

It's strange that this issue is restricted to Safari and no other browser: I've tried Firefox, Chrome and Opera and had no problems at all. I also have Adobe Creative Cloud installed, which should be pushing the GPU far harder than Safari, but have had absolutely no issue.

I found the following thread on MacRumors' forum that I think is related but haven't gleaned much from it bar the OP saying in post #151 that the issue was resolved by replacing the Mac Pro's power supply. Does that make sense and is there a way I can test my power supply before going down that route?

http://bit.ly/325YrFp.

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Answer 6

Aug 22, 2019 11:26 AM in response to Is-there-a-vet-in-the-house

Of all the Diagnostic reports, almost all are "High CPU Use" and ONE is Adobe.

There has been know problem with adobe updater causing crashes. You should check with adobe to make sure you have the solution for that one.

Report of replacing the power supply:

That report is a correlation that the problems stopped when the power supply was replaced. It could slow be that adobe updated their problem software and his problems abated. I do not see a cause and effect there, and I would not replace a power supply based on that anecdote.

Typical failure when you overdraw System Power is that your Mac does an immediate emergency power off to save itself. That is unlike what you are describing.

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Answer 7

Aug 30, 2019 1:18 AM in response to Is-there-a-vet-in-the-house

Yep, that was the solution alright. I haven't had a single issue with Safari and any of the websites that would normally have beachballed, frozen and restarted the Mac Pro. The issue didn't start immediately on installation of the GPU so must have been caused by a Mojave update.

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Answer 8

Aug 21, 2019 10:00 AM in response to Grant Bennet-Alder

Hi Grant. Here's the report:

EtreCheck (full disk access) Report

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Safari freezing, restarting Mac Pro 5,1 with Sapphire Pulse 580 GPU

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