Brand new Mac pro 2013 freezes up frequently

Hi

New to the apple forums as of today, as I've never had any problems whatsoever before this with any apple products.

At work I was mildly put excited when the brand new Mac Pro arrived, but my problems started immediately.

I will be quite thorough here to get the problem through, so please bear with me.


Applications I use at work are the following :

Latest updated version of OS X Mavericks

Adobe creative cloud package

Final cut pro studio

Cyber duck FTP

MPEG streamclip

Microsoft office 2011

Vlc media player

Perian codec pack

Spotify


Hardware:

Mac Pro late 2013 basic model upgraded to 32gb memory

27" apple thunderbolt screen

Wacom intuous 4 USB connection

Apple keyboard

Apple mouse USB

G-raid 3 external hard drive


All necessary tools for me as a graphic and multimedia designer, and spotify for inspiration ;-)


Got the machine, installed the then adobe creative suite 6 version, as we hadn't upgraded to cc yet.

First system crash while installing FCP Studio. Oh well. Manual reboot and continued getting the machine up and running.

Started to work and the the machine freezes from 1 up to 10 times a day. A manual reboot necessary every time. I can move the mouse pointer but nothing else works most times.

After a couple of weeks with the same problem, we upgrade to adobe cc hoping this might fix the problem. Nope.

Same problem continues. Most crashes occurs while working in Photoshop, but also with the machine being idle. Just copying data from one drive to another. When the screen saver kicks in. I can't of course remember what, if any, adobe programs is running in the background every time it freezes up, I'm no Sheldon ;-)

But the adobe cc home application is of course always running. I also get blank pull down menus from time to time, and have to quit and reopen photoshop every time to get the menus back.

So after a couple of weeks I try reinstalling the machine, to get rid of the factory preinstall of mavericks. After a day of getting it up and running, the same problems continue. I contact apple support, we go through the usual hardware tricks of resetting nvram etc, of course nothing helps. They agree something is wrong and leads me to their Norwegian preferred system specialists humac. Machine is delivered and they clean the hard drive and use their diagnostics on yet another clean install. Two weeks of testing, no errors found. I pick the machine up again, reinstall mavericks and my necessary software. 30 minutes maybe of work and the fun starts again. Of course I erase the drive before each new installation of mavericks.

Call the service center, and of course some installed software is the cause of this...

Call apple support again, (Torunn Skaar, you are a gem :-) and we gather system data through an apple system collection tool I can't remember the name of. Their diagnostic is that this is cause by adobe software, and advise me to try the machine without adobe software installed. I can of course sit and watch my screen without do anything sensible for some days and maybe copy some data back and forth, and I am quite sure that it will work without adobe software on it as well. Will give it a go come Monday. But the exact same software and hardware works great on an older version of the Mac Pro and on a MacBook Pro with mavericks. No firmware upgrades available for any, of course all new drivers for each one iu used.


So please, all adobe cc users with the new Mac Pro in here, could you confirm that this isn't a working combination, or if it is my machine. I've already lost weeks of work and I feel like throwing this visually beautiful new machine out the window. I'm quite sure up to fifty percent of the users of this machine have adobe software installed on it, and we can't all have this problem ?


Any insight here would be greatly appreciated.


Thanks

Paal

Mac Pro (Late 2013), OS X Mavericks (10.9.3)

Posted on May 16, 2014 9:50 AM

Reply
10 replies

May 16, 2014 12:13 PM in response to paal.leverton

The warranty entitles you to complimentary phone support for the first 90 days of ownership.

If you bought the product in the U.S. directly from Apple (not from a reseller), you have 14 days from the date of delivery in which to exchange or return it for a refund. In other countries, the return policy may be different. If you bought from a reseller, its return policy applies.

May 16, 2014 12:45 PM in response to innocentius

Thanks

I, like many others, prefer the good old FCP studio to the new, in my opinion, downgraded version of FCP X.

I could manage with the software supplied with the adobe cc bundle, premiere and after effects, but I love the good old studio package.

However, I am quite sure the problem is with the adobe software and the new Mac pro hardware, which I can't work without. Photoshop, illustrator, indesign and flash are all tools I use all the time. Photoshop and illustrator are everyday tools in my job, and there just aren't any substitutes for these applications.


Thanks again, though

May 17, 2014 12:46 AM in response to paal.leverton

I'm having the same problem wiht a new MacPro bought a couple weeks ago and Adobe CC software (MacPro is 6 core, 64mb ram, D700 gpus).


Have been having very frequent freezing as described by the original poster when using Adobe Premiere pro CC and Speedgrade CC. These are the only Adobe products I've used so far since just getting the mac pro.


The regular freezes have occured when pushing the processing hard on the machine, so my theory is that it's overheating -- but these are standard, routine tasks and the entire point of the mac pro is to do heavy lifting.


Wondering if the machine I have is a lemon, or if there's an oveheating desing flaw? Curious how common freexing is on the new MacPro.

May 20, 2014 9:00 AM in response to paal.leverton

MPG: http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html


GPU glitches: http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2014/20140419_1-yet-another-videoCard-bug.ht ml


Compressor: http://macperformanceguide.com/blog/2014/20140514_2-Compressor-issues.html

May 27, 2014 12:42 AM in response to paal.leverton

When the new Mavericks 10.9.3 update was released a couple of weeks back, I performed yet another clean install, running a minimum of necessary software. This actually seems to have helped. I've also reduced the usage of the GPU in Photoshop, which was my main problemchild, and I haven't had a crash since. There are still GPU glitches, but I'm crossing fingers hoping this will be the end of it.

Thanks all for your input so far.

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Brand new Mac pro 2013 freezes up frequently

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