2008 Mac Pro Crashes! No reason!

[truuvp]

Ok so all the sudden my mac pro has began to shut down on me. At first it would just lock my screen up and say "please hold down power button to restart your computer". now i will be watching a movie or working in final cut studio 3 and my computer just shuts down! this is very frustrating. any suggestions before i take it down to the apple store tomorrow?

thanks,
truuvp

 

[rhett7660]

Have you added anything? Have you installed any new software or hardware?

 

[JollyRogers]

Look at the log files to get a hint of what it is. It's under system profiler and look in Logs then system. You will see the crashes in there probably by kernel panics and dumps. The last error is usually the culprit. I would suspect video card if you haven't changed anything lately.

 

[HyperX13]

Had similar thing happen to me. Turned out to be a ton of dust in the ATI card. Took it out, blew it out and it worked.

 

[nanofrog]

Had similar thing happen to me. Turned out to be a ton of dust in the ATI card. Took it out, blew it out and it worked.

Thick/heavy dust on a heatsink is like a blanket (thermal insulator). At some point, it gets heavy enough that a temp sensor will get hot enough to shut the card off (most, if not all, modern cards have them).