Having some fan issues & trying to diagnose. Which Fan is "Boosta" and which is PCI. I assume "Boosta" is the fan that is in the front of the mac pro that blows towards the PCI cards and that "PCI" would be the fan on my PCI video card?
Model Identifier: MacPro5,1 (Mid-2010)
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.6.8)
x704 wrote:
Having some fan issues & trying to diagnose. Which Fan is "Boosta" and which is PCI. I assume "Boosta" is the fan that is in the front of the mac pro that blows towards the PCI cards and that "PCI" would be the fan on my PCI video card?
Model Identifier: MacPro5,1 (Mid-2010)
Processor Name: Quad-Core Intel Xeon
Processor Speed: 2.8 GHz
Boost A is a fan inside the CPU case which has cooling fins on the outside and sits behind the RAM slots. If you had two CPUs there'd be a Boost A and Boost B. The PCI fan is the one that blows into the PCI slot area from the front. You can see it when looking through the front grill; it's in the center vertically and is set back a bit from the grill. There is also a fan mounted on the video card itself but that's not the PCI fan.
What kind of issues are you having?
Ah, thanks for clarifying the fan identities. I did not realize there was a fan inside the CPU casing but makes sense... I'm having trouble with fan noise spinning up and never going away. Been having this for about 1/2 a year. Sometimes fans will spin up on cold boot (sitting in cold room overnight) and never go back to normal or spin up during light use.
As a test, after I was finished yesterday night (fan wasn't acting up... thankfully) I left mystation on all night. It was idel with 99% of CPU inactive. This morning I woke up and sure enough, noisey fan... so looking at istat pro, it listed Boosta fan as 0 rpm and all other fans in the 600-800 rpm range (normal). For tempurature it listed everything in 20's C except for CPU & Mem Bank A2 which had dashes besides them. Odd!
Okay, then I went into "Temperature Monitor" and tried to see readings. It's missing readings for: CPU, Memory banks, Northbridge and smart disk. When I go into preferences it shows these as greyed out options and says "This sensor is no longer connected".
I put my station to sleep for a few seconds and then turned it back on... fan problem went away but sensors still not showing.
So... sounds like I have a sensor problem? But where and is there any way I can fix it or does this entail an expensive trip to the apple store (out of warranty)? Any thoughts or suggestions are appreciated!
Odd indeed!. I'd suggest looking at http://support.apple.com/kb/ht3964 and following the instructions for the Mac Pro since one of the symptoms is fans acting weird.
Mac Pro Fan identification
