Serious problems with Mac Pro amplified by upgrade to Catalina.

Grant Bennet-Alder,

I wish to thank you for your help and for all the information you shared with me. It has helped me better understand the problem with my computer. In addition to the information you have shared I have also found abundant information on the Internet that makes it clear that a certain percentage of Mac Pro computers presented a manufacturing defect related to their graphics card that simply can't be repaired. I won't waste any more time trying to fix or repair this issue but thank you and all others who posted on this thread for your help.

Smokerz,

I have already done all that you suggested. I recently re-installed Mac OS (not Catalina but Mojave) and used the re-installation as an opportunity to remove all software that wasn't absolutely necessary leaving me with basically Adobe's CC, Microsoft Office (I have upgrade to the latest version, which is 2019 for Mac), and a few other apps.

Let me share that this computer has behaved this way since the day I purchased it. I owned a Mac G5 (large aluminum) and it performed flawlessly for many years. I then moved to a Macbook Pro 17 that I used in clamshell mode attached to an Apple 30" Cinema Display and an external keyboard. This notebook also performed flawlessly. They were both used with one or more of the external drives I mentioned above and I never experienced a problem with either one. I also own a Mac Mini and a Macbook Pro 13, both being stable and reliable. The Mac Pro is the only computer that crashes and freezes having caused me to loose important data.

Also in answer to your question I have not swapped the Apple-branded internal SSD inside the Mac Pro or altered it in any way. The computer is today as it was when I purchased it. Curiously I have upgraded both the internal battery and the SSD inside my Macbook Pro (the original SSD had a 500 GB capacity and I upgraded to a Sandisk 2 TB SSD) but it remains stable and reliable.

I don't believe the problem is related to the external drives. Research I have done on the Internet has revealed an abundance of articles that show the problem is related to a bad graphics card inside a large number of Mac Pro computers.

Thank you in advance.

Grant Bennet-Alder,

I did run Diagnostics and it didn't find any problems. Immediately after I ran Diagnostics and re-started my Mac Pro and it crashed a short while after. Diagnostics is obviously an unreliable tool or at least one we can't completely trust.

One thing I noticed is that my Mac Pro is crashing and re-starting on its own when left unattended. I initially thought it had something to do with the Screen Saver or the Energy Saver function so I changed the Screen Saver 'Start after' function to 'Never' and 'Turn display off after' function to 'Never'. I DID NOT change the 'Put hard disks to sleep when possible' function and left it checked (I believe this was the factory's default setting). The two changes in settings didn't seem to have any effect on the re-starting problem because immediately after I made the changes and left the computer unattended it crashed and re-started again.

I noticed a panic report was produced after the re-start. It does have a bunch of characters in the beginning just like all the others but I noticed a few more legible characters at the end that I will try to post here. In case you are able to read it I would appreciate your feedback if anything makes sense to you.

Thank you again for your help.

Grant Bennet-Alder,

I figured it out. The 'additional text' button you recommended opens a window that only allows 100,000 characters to be added.

I copied and pasted the Kernel Panic Report to BBBedit to check the character count and it shows the report has 2,873,232 characters (nearly 3 million characters).

This is the reason the 'add additional text' isn't working.

Guy Jenkins,

I get far more than the 4+ freezes per day you reported and I also experience the same automatic reboots. I noticed the reboots tend to happen more frequently when the computer goes into screen saving mode but don't know if the two issues are related. This has been happening since I purchased the Mac Pro and the issue is unique to this computer - I have several other Macs and not a single one displays any of these problems.