Need help with 2009 Mac Pro, time machine, OS, possibly GPU

Ok so I have a mac pro with the ATI 7950 Mac edition.

I updated to 10.10 and safari would freeze my system for long periods of time on certain websites like funimation.com and text boxes would cause micro freezes of the system.

So I figured it was an issue with the install. So i clean installed on another drive and I was having the same issue. Which I think means it is hardware related or that yosemite has an issue with this card or something of the sort.


So I try to restore from time machine to the day before i updated to yosemite.

So i wipe a third drive and try to restore to it. It goes through he process and starts to restart at 60% and now has been in stuck in the spinning circle below the grey apple on the boot screen.

If i put into a yosemite drive it says it is 10.9.5 on the other drive but I am completely unable to load into it. I've tried to restore about 4-5 times nothing working. I've even manually transferred the files from the backup drive to the drive I want to make 10.9.5 and it still will not start up.


Now i've tried to install 10.9.5 onto two different drives and I have no way of clean installing Mavericks because I figured time machine would do what it is supposed to do.

What can I do with the computer? I do not know if it is an issue with hardware on my computer or an issue with the OS or an issue with drivers. I am completely stuck and the Mac Pro is an extremely large paper weight right now.

Please help if you can

Figure I would let people know how I fixed it (not really a fix)

But it appears to be an issue with either AMD drivers and Yosemite or specifically to the Sapphire 7950 and Yosemite, or just my computer in general.

But downgrading from Yosemite to Mavericks worked. I found my 10.6 install disk and installed that on the drive and then upgraded to mavericks, then attempted a restore which did not work. Then I reinstalled Mavericks with saving the user folder.

This worked and I am now running 10.9.5 on my Mac Pro and Safari has zero issues.

Does anyone know what could cause this issue? And is anyone else seeing this issue?

Has anyone else come across this issue?

I updated my Yosemite drive to 10.1 and safari still locks up the computer under certain websites (funimation.com)

It sucks because I can't access any of my Documents or Keynotes that I've done in school on my Laptop since it is running Yosemite.


I'm almost positive this has to do with the 7950 GPU (the official Sapphire one).

Does anyone else have a Mac Pro 2009 with the 7950 that is running Yosemite and having this issue?

h9826790 said:

Never go to that website, but Safari not working well on my 4,1 with 7950 Mac Edition on Yosemite as well (including 10.10.2 beta). No prolong freeze, but some micro freeze (up to few seconds) for some website.

My solution so far is to use Chrome as the main browser. The new 64bit Chrome works very well. And I found that I quite like their way to handle zoom.

Click to expand...

Hey would you be able to test that website under safari with the newest Safari Update and let me know if it locks the UI up?

h9826790 said:

It freeze (the whole UI, except the mouse) for about 4 seconds when loading.

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Sigh that is what I have going on as well except mine forces me to either restart or hope the UI will come back and I will be able to close safari.

This is pretty bad and I hope Apple actually fixes it.


Thank-you

Yeah this seems to be solely an issue with Yosemite and the 7950 drivers.

I am running mavericks on my Mac Pro still because of this which makes documents and presentations annoying because I have my MacBook Air too which makes it so i can't share the files via the iCloud Drive.

I've noticed other's having this issue on the apple support forums but not as bad as mine is. I basically have the hold the power button down and restart when I go to certain websites.

Youtube with the HTML5 extension freezes it too. I had to revert to Mavericks after I had installed Yosemite.


This is a shame and I almost want to buy a new GPU

h9826790 said:

Safari 8.0.5 (10600.5.3.1) in 10.10.3 Beta seems fix the issue a bit, at least Safari now can open FUNimation without freeze (as long as don't use smart zoom).

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Woah seriously? That is great news as I haven't been able to use pages or other features on my Desktop as I switched over the the drive on my laptop.

Hopefully they fix it more because I want to get better FPS in some of the games I play!!

Do we have any idea when 10.10.3 comes out?

DougTheImpaler said:

The Safari issue is mostly (though not entirely) fixed for me with 10.10.3. On a thread on Apple's forums, it seems like we narrowed it down to Radeon HD 7xx0 series with Yosemite and Safari. Coincidentally, 10.10.3 public beta includes new Radeon drivers and since updating today the issue seems to be much better.

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Well that is definitely great news, because the drivers for that card are absolutely abysmal and was worried they would never be fixed since I don't believe many people own that GPU.

DougTheImpaler said:

After using it for a couple days, there's still definitely a little stuttering in Safari, but I still believe it to be less than what there was in 10.10.2.

Edit: if you're running the 10.10.3 beta, be sure to use Feedback Assistant to send feedback. I have done so, including a screen recording of a page freezing the machine while a page loads and stutters while typing in text boxes.

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I reverted to 10.9.5 because it would lock my computer up completely for about 30s when yosemite first came out.

As long as it isn't dreadful as it was I'll be happy.

DougTheImpaler said:

It's not that bad but it's still an annoyance. I've also kicked around the idea of reverting to Mavericks but I'm very attached to texting from my Mac to my Android using friends and family. My mom is the only iPhone user I text frequently. Lol

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Yeah I have my laptop for texting from my computer thankfully. But I hope they fix it even further. Because originally it basically screwed my computer any time I went to type on Reddit or look at the funimation website (which i was using for streaming anime).

I hope things get better because it's really annoying how much I spent on the GPU just to have Apple basically screw it over. There is no way they didn't know about the issue prior to launch as well.

Anyone running the latest beta that can tell me if it's gotten even better than the previous beta version?

Not sure if anyone else is paying attention to this anymore. But it seems like the update has not fixed the funimation website at all for me on my computer.

I updated to the latest OS X on one drive as some said it was partially fixed.


When i first went to funimation.com the pages worked fine which i was hoping it would happen. Then flash needed to update.

Since I have updated flash I've been running into the same issue of my computer locking up for 10-30s without me able to do anything to bring it back except for sit and wait. So i am not sure if this has to do with flash, funimations website or OS X.

I have a feeling that it is OS X because trying to type into reddit text boxes also freezes the computer for 2-3s every now and then. I can type 3-4 words before the words show up on the screen.

Does anyone have any idea what could be causing this? I really do not want to have to lug this thing to an Apple store and pay a ton of money for them to go "dunno"

DougTheImpaler said:

It's not that bad but it's still an annoyance. I've also kicked around the idea of reverting to Mavericks but I'm very attached to texting from my Mac to my Android using friends and family. My mom is the only iPhone user I text frequently. Lol

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Hello DougTheImpaler, have you seen it be better with the live implementation of 10.10.3?

I am still having the horrible lag on sites with text input boxes and with sites like funimation. It's getting to the point where I may bring it to an Apple store but I'm not sure what good that would do.

crjackson2134 said:

Working flawlessly on that page for me.

However, typing into ANY web text box I get delays. It's very annoying.

Click to expand...

So odd, do you have the same GPU as I do? I would really like to pin this down, and I believe there is a very small amount of people that have a 2009 Mac Pro with this specific GPU.

I've held back on upgrading since I like safari the most and this is starting to really annoy me.

Hopefully Apple fixes this in the near future.