Q: Mac Pro keeps logging out since El Capitan

We're not obsolete yet:

Vintage and obsolete products - Apple Support

I haven't experienced a windowserver crash since installing 10.11.2 Beta 24 hours ago.  Usually it crashes once or twice an hour on El Capitan.

Early 2009 Mac Pro, Dual GT120 video cards, dual 30" Cinema HD displays.

There's hope!

if you insist

http://www.technobuffalo.com/2015/11/01/these-apple-products-will-be-considered- obsolete-in-december/

I don't wish to go off on a tangent but I feel bound to express my disappointment that my two Mac Pros will be considered obsolete by their manufacturer. It has always been my practice to buy quality and to make it last. In these days of excessive consumption, I can't help but think that is the right approach. The great thing about these Mac Pros is their longevity. Filled up with Ram and equipped with a decent SSD, mine should be perfect for my needs for years to come.

Very interesting ... thanks for providing this reference although it is not yet official. Presumably, sometime during November Apple will update the following:

Vintage and obsolete products - Apple Support

We should probably wait until December before "throwing in the towel" on our multi-display early-2009 Mac Pros. There is at least the possibility that Apple or nVidia or a clever user will uncover the reason why our systems are unstable, but after December Apple will have "plausible deniability" to cease development for our systems.

I'm in agreement with jjrodgerthat we purchased our systems to last and mine still seems to have plenty of life left in it. So, I can either:    

•     Remove the extra display so the system will be stable running El Capitan, or

•     Retrograde to Yosemite, or

•     Accept the high risk that a multi-display system is likely to logout, restart or crash!

After December, Apple will presumably abandon our systems, which is their legal right and which they do routinely and relentlessly. We should not be surprised that after seven years our systems are abandoned  ... only that they are inoperative.

So most posts I have see here are with the 2009 Mac Pro 4.1, has anybody tried the firmware update to 5.1?

sfrv, I think you are wrong in assuming we all have 2009 MacPros. I for one have a 2008 3.1, and I suspect others have older (and newer) machines.

I still suspect it is a lack of support for Nvidia, rather than ATI, cards at the root of the problem, largely driven by "political" forces at the top of Apple and Nvidia at the moment. I think the absence of Nvidia options in Apple offerings across the board since 2015, with the discontinuation of the 27-inch non-retina iMacs, is telling. And Apple has developed its own video acceleration hardware for its portable computers, or uses the built-in Intel chipsets, so BOTH ATI and Nvidia no longer have THAT part of Apple's business.

I note the proprietary video card slot on the new MacPros will make it difficult for 3rd party manufacturers to make lower priced offerings for the machine, or offerings at all, and all other Apple machines now don't have separate graphics cards anyway in them.

I've turned off separate spaces on my MacPro, and my El Capitan system is rock stable now, which has a dual ATI Radeon HD 8770 running two Apple Cinema displays, with a third being run by an older PC  Nvidia GeForce GT 240.

I was intending to replace the Radeon card and perhaps even the old Geforce with two new Nvidia cards (Geforce GTX 750Ti s), but watching this thread develop, I have held off on that purchase, and are thinking of finding a low power new Radeon with similar performance to the new GTX 750Ti's, although it means the end of dreams of fast CUDA performance on the machine, but it might mean the return of separate spaces in my workflow..

I work mainly in 3d graphics on my computer, and there is one advantage I have noticed in El Capitan, which is the support of the new 3d API "Metal" at the Finder level, so my 3d objects in .obj, and other standard formats now have picture previews, and open up in preview/quickview as rotatable 3d objects, even large datasets, which is very impressive, and it all seems very fast on my machine.

I'm wondering whether my next machine won't be a Mac at all, but a Hackintosh running the dual version of the chipset in the current MacPros, although I have seen nobody doing it yet publicly, maybe Apple have expressly not supported this option, and we will have to wait for some creative Russian programmer to get around it.

As a "3d person", for a long time there I have been PC based of necessity, but MentalRay's significantly faster performance under non windows OS's had me change a few years ago to Mac, and I love it - my older Hp workstation (xw8600)  which was my bread and butter machine under Windows 7 64 for a long time, now runs a rock stable cut of Mountain Lion, and is still very productive.   http://appleinsider.com/articles/15/01/23/how-amd-and-nvidia-lost-the-mobile-gpu -chip-business-to-apple-with-help-from-s…

A small aside to this thread - I am a newcomer to actually posting on these Apple boards (rather than simply using the info as a result of a Google search) and one thing is troubling me, namely I cannot click "This helped me" on messages, and have it mark my appreciation. It just comes with a popup explaining what "This helped me" means.  ***? I'm on a Mac in Safari. Maybe it works on other browsers, but I don't have the time or inclination to find out.

I've enjoyed reading, and got information, from most of the posts in this forum's thread on this topic, yet trying to register that on the board seems futile. And the fact that most posts are not acknowledged with "this helped me" numbers (most are zero) shows that others are maybe having this problem also.

Only the original poster can mark a post as helpful/this helped me or solved.

Ahh, that explains it!

I find that both telling about Apple, and funny. I wonder what their system will do with my observation, if anything, and whether it will make it to a discussion point for a committee.

And thanks again to all those unacknowledged people who have contributed to this discussion, and Illaass.

Issue is specific to older Nvidia GPUs in combination with other GPUs.

Will be up to either Apple or Nvidia to fix. Apple should do it.

MY Mac Pro has the firmware upgrade to 5.1 and dual monitors crashes/logout consistently.

MY Mac Pro has the firmware upgrade to 5.1 and dual monitors crashes/logout consistently.

I don't think this is limited to just Nvidia and AMD. I have a new 2015 Macbook Pro 13" with an Apple Thunderbolt display that was exhibiting the same problems. I disabled "separate spaces" over the weekend and so far it's been stable. We also had the same behavior on another brand new 2015 Macbook Pro that was just updated to El Capitan in the office.

The funny thing is last week I actually came back to my computer and caught it getting stuck trying to logout, it seems Safari had crashed in the background and was unresponsive. Interestingly enough this prevented El Capitan from randomly logging the system out:

Only thing that has worked for me so far no logouts, crashes or any problems but no boot screen:

I installed the NVS 510 card has 4 Mini DisplayPort 1.2, Using:

Philips FTV 48" TV mini dp to hdmi cable

Acer H236HL Apple MiniDP to DVI Adapter X 2

VGA DisplaySamsung 24" Apple MiniDP to VGA Adapter, but orders 2nd mini dp to hdmi cable.