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Audio Decoding KILLS MacPro (2009) green factor

handheldgames said:
Well... I picked up a copy of xp from the IT room I was boxing up today. Guess I should have grabbed vista? Changed out a HD and I'm installing a boot camp xp installation.

I never boot camped as Ive always had an abundance of wintel hardware laying around.

Well I installed and wound up with a disk error. Fun.
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If possible, just install it to a separate drive. No Boot Camp partitions to mess with (though you'd still need the disk for the drivers and software to map the eject key for the optical drive).

Can you get your hands on a suitable drive at least temporarily?

If not, BC's fine, but so far, Win7 needs the update (3.1 of BC) for official support, though others have already gotten it running. Not sure of the difficulty using 3.0. Vista may in fact be a little easier due to this, but I've not done it, so I can't be sure. :eek:

XP's better than nothing, but Vista or Win7 would seem to make more sense (faster too, as the updates won't take as long; far less of them in Vista or Win7).
 
Well, wait. Do we know what software it is? What if it's the monitor itself or some lower level system routines the monitor calls that's busted or conflicting with other apps? Then all it's doing is pretending to be a space heater and you can run what you like without consequence.

;)
 
The same results can be obtained from the command line, istat menus and hardware monitor.

That was one of my initial tests. Had to make sure I wasn't getting bad results from one app.

I'm looking forward to the desktop iMac 2.8 quad i7 space heater edition to come out next month!

Btw. I entered this bug over at ADC 2 weeks ago.
 
handheldgames said:
The same results can be obtained from the command line, istat menus and hardware monitor.

That was one of my initial tests. Had to make sure I wasn't getting bad results from one app.

I'm looking forward to the desktop iMac 2.8 quad i7 space heater edition to come out next month!

Btw. I entered this bug over at ADC 2 weeks ago.
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It might help if others report it as well. A single report might give them the impression it's more of an anomaly, and can be pushed to the bottom of the list for more common issues (due to a small pool of software personel working the bug reports).
 
nanofrog said:
It might help if others report it as well. A single report might give them the impression it's more of an anomaly, and can be pushed to the bottom of the list for more common issues (due to a small pool of software personel working the bug reports).
Click to expand...

It seems that each and every 2009 Mac Pro is effected by this bug.. Whether they are running Leopard or SnowLeopard.

When this issue happens:

2009 Mac Pro: CPU Voltage goes from around 2.91 Watts to and jumps to 78.4 Watts. :eek::eek:

Vs

2008 Mac Pro (2.8x8) CPU Voltage goes from: 11.75/11.75 and jumps to 23.3 / 13.7

Talk about a Major power hog and Energy waster!!!
 
handheldgames said:
It seems that each and every 2009 Mac Pro is effected by this bug.. Whether they are running Leopard or SnowLeopard.

When this issue happens:

2009 Mac Pro: CPU Voltage goes from around 2.91 Watts to and jumps to 78.4 Watts. :eek::eek:

Vs

2008 Mac Pro (2.8x8) CPU Voltage goes from: 11.75/11.75 and jumps to 23.3 / 13.7

Talk about a Major power hog and Energy waster!!!
Click to expand...
How many reports on this have they gotten though?
I'd think many would mistakenly think it's a well known issue, and need not be reported.

BTW, how did you come to your calculation of 78.4W?
 
nanofrog said:
How many reports on this have they gotten though?
I'd think many would mistakenly think it's a well known issue, and need not be reported.

BTW, how did you come to your calculation of 78.4W?
Click to expand...

Not sure how many reports they hit as most macpro users are unaware of what's going on under the hood. I'm a hardware nut by nature....


I found the watts used in istat menu and hardware monitor. It's listed under power in istat. The 2.8x8 idles around 9.5 watts for CPU a an CPU b. (running sl server).
 
You always needed "supercomputing" power on a Mac to do what a typical PC could do in its sleep, so it makes sense that playing music on a Mac Pro would throw its CPUs into high heat mode. Try playing a Flash movie, 8 cores may not be enough! LOL... Seriously Apple, this is not rocket science. Remember the days when we had computers like the IBM PC, Commodore 64, and then the revolutionary 7.14 MHz Amiga. Now we have multiple cores running at over 3 GHz and we still max out the CPUs just to play music? We could do that back in 1985 with a CPU that had 0.06% the processing muscle of today's Mac Pro.

I'm looking forward to hearing a solution, or at least what's at the bottom of this problem.
 
Well I dunno about that. I don't get any significant heat increases on my 2006 Mac Pro. So it's just the Nehalem boxes.
 
Well, I've looked at this thread a few times and finally tried this...
my '09 2.26 octad, in the last 22 min. or so, playing 6 songs in itunes went up from 36 C to 52/53 C on CPU A (~40C right now on CPU B) wattage is reporting around 27-32W on CPU A, 25-31 on CPU B... Turning off iTunes (for the 1-2 min it took to write this) Wattage @ 4.25 and -.25 respectfully.....:eek: temp 45 and 33 and dropping...
well well interesting isn't this?

so now I know my cpus get hungry with music... I wonder if this will get fixed... or if it'll be like the screen snow issue which "should be fixed in the next update" (so tech support told me back when I was running 10.5.6 in march... 10.6.1 and still no fix:mad:)
 
handheldgames said:
Not sure how many reports they hit as most macpro users are unaware of what's going on under the hood. I'm a hardware nut by nature....
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That's my point. Users don't have to know how it works, but for Apple to be aware of the issue, they need to report it. Otherwise, it will go ignored due to no reports or so few, they put it towards the bottom of the proverbial pile. ;)

handheldgames said:
I found the watts used in istat menu and hardware monitor. It's listed under power in istat. The 2.8x8 idles around 9.5 watts for CPU a an CPU b. (running sl server).
Click to expand...
Ah. That's actually rather nice. :)

If at all possible, can you repeat this, and give the CPU utilization % as well?
I'm thinking it might be a way to determine that the controller is highly active rather than the cores, as indicated by power use. ;)

AZREOSpecialist said:
That was my attempt at humor. I only do it once a year, so you are all safe until January 1. :)
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NOOO... Just over 2 months... that's too soon. :eek: :p :p
 
Another quick observation..... When the CPU is being cooked by Adobe FLASH, it appears that it prevents Sleep from kicking in as the system thinks its in use....

I guess we can this side effect the Wake n Bake... :rolleyes:
 
My Nehalem Octad has the same problem when I let it idle in EyeTV. I do nothing but let the app run and it will kick the Boost fans up to 1900 rpm and CPU A temp goes to 53°C. I'm not using iTunes at all and I'm not surfing or doing anything else on the machine. I guess it is a bug in the Quicktime software. I'm pretty sure EyeTV uses Quicktime. I'm not very knowledgeable on software so I can't really tell. But I have shut down all other apps and the bug is definitely coming from EyeTV.
 
gugucom said:
My Nehalem Octad has the same problem when I let it idle in EyeTV. I do nothing but let the app run and it will kick the Boost fans up to 1900 rpm and CPU A temp goes to 53°C. I'm not using iTunes at all and I'm not surfing or doing anything else on the machine. I guess it is a bug in the Quicktime software. I'm pretty sure EyeTV uses Quicktime. I'm not very knowledgeable on software so I can't really tell. But I have shut down all other apps and the bug is definitely coming from EyeTV.
Click to expand...

Webcams and streaming video have the same effect. Could be QuickTime but flash Animation is also effected, but wasn't that rewritten for sl? This isue also happens in 10.5.8.

Perhaps core video or core audio?
 
gugucom said:
My Nehalem Octad has the same problem when I let it idle in EyeTV. I do nothing but let the app run and it will kick the Boost fans up to 1900 rpm and CPU A temp goes to 53°C.
Click to expand...

Maybe the cooling system can't handle the 3,33GHz Nehalems?
I've never seen my Pro speeding up the fans beyond the normal values of 600 and 1100 RPM, even after hours and hours of rendering on all cores with compressor.
 
Transporteur said:
Maybe the cooling system can't handle the 3,33GHz Nehalems?
I've never seen my Pro speeding up the fans beyond the normal values of 600 and 1100 RPM, even after hours and hours of rendering on all cores with compressor.
Click to expand...
Would you be willing to test that theory, by running the same test/s described above?

Then post the temps and core %'s, and any fan observations. It would be really helpful. :)
 
Transporteur said:
I would like to, but unfortunately I don't have an EyeTV. :(
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That's fine, and I wouldn't expect you to rush out and get one either. :p

I was thinking more along the lines of Flash, iTunes,... listed in the past few posts. Software that's included in the OS or free applets that can be added, such as Flash to a browser.
 
nanofrog said:
That's fine, and I wouldn't expect you to rush out and get one either. :p
Click to expand...

I appreciate that. Very generous. ;)

Ok, here we go.

Running apps:

VMWare 2 running OS X 10.6 server
Parallels 4 running two instances of Windows XP
VLC playing 720p HD video
iTunes running a mp3 file in loop
QuickTime running Apple Keynote 2009 in HD
Safari watching this -> Klick

relevant CPU usage:

QuickTime Player: 9%
VLC: 33 - 36%
iTunes: 2.9%
Flash Player (Safari plug-in): 77% when tab is not visible, 230 - 246% when visible

Temps:

Ambient: 33°
CPU A: 53°
CPU B: 42°

Fan speeds:

Completely unchanged, which means 600 for exhaust, intake, 670 for power supply and 1100 for BoostA/B and PCI.

My system is 10.6.1 with all updates, my Mac is in my sig. Base model octad.
 
Transporteur said:
Maybe the cooling system can't handle the 3,33GHz Nehalems?
Click to expand...

That is very unlikely. Mac Pros have always been designed for 130 W TDP. With the new booster fans in the heat sink the capacity should not be lower but on the same level as before. The Gulftown CPUs will also have a higher TDP and they are supposed to go into the same socket and case design.
 
gugucom said:
That is very unlikely. Mac Pros have always been designed for 130 W TDP. With the new booster fans in the heat sink the capacity should not be lower but on the same level as before. The Gulftown CPUs will also have a higher TDP and they are supposed to go into the same socket and case design.
Click to expand...

The 2.66 behaves almost identical to the i7 975. I've walked into the local apple store and was able to get identical behaivor. I've freaked out a couple biz reps showing them the "feature". Or is this a dirty secret. Lol. You can install istat menu as a dashboard component without restriction.
 
Transporteur said:
Running apps:

VMWare 2 running OS X 10.6 server
Parallels 4 running two instances of Windows XP
VLC playing 720p HD video
iTunes running a mp3 file in loop
QuickTime running Apple Keynote 2009 in HD
Safari watching this -> Klick

relevant CPU usage:

QuickTime Player: 9%
VLC: 33 - 36%
iTunes: 2.9%
Flash Player (Safari plug-in): 77% when tab is not visible, 230 - 246% when visible

Temps:

Ambient: 33°
CPU A: 53°
CPU B: 42°
Click to expand...
Can you split it up?

One application and the % and temps for it I mean. ;) This seems to be the way other have been testing from what I've gathered by the posts.

Thanks. :)
 
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