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MP 1,1-5,1 Mac pro 5.1 OCLP Monterey - freeze and boot loops issues

A

alex_anathem

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 8, 2024
14
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Hi all,

I was a complete newbie in this field a few weeks ago. I work as a sound editor in postproduction studios, and as all the Macs were replaced lately I got my hands on a Mac Pro 5.1 that went unused in the studio. I want a music production desktop computer and this seemed like a cool project.

I did all my research and setted it up with a RX580 and a Sonnet Fusion SSD M.2 4x4 PCIe Card, inside which I inserted 4 x Samsung 970 EVO Plus 500Go NVME disks. I did a RAID 0 with 3 of these for a data/work disk, and kept one to install MacOS on it.

I installed Monterey on it using OCLP and installed some of my softwares. It all worked pretty good, I even got some time to start some music on an Ableton project and work on it a few hours, among the span of a few days.

From time to time, the computer would suddenly freeze completely (nothing mooving on the screen, impossible to do CMD+OPT+ESC...), and I have to shut it down by hand. After this, it's always stucked in a boot loop, where I can hear the chime but nothing seems to boot.

I usually end up to be able to boot again, after resetting NVRAM or SMC randomly, but I'm not even sure its what helps. Right now while I type this message the computer is stuck in this bootloop.

I feel like I've did the hard job and I'm almost there, but something's still not working.

Could anybody help me?

Thanks a lot !
Alex
 
Do you still have a Mojave SATA disk from which you can boot from? I would boot using a supported version macOS and try to discover whether the freezes and boot loops occur with supported macOS after removing PCIe cards, etc. What is your RAM configuration?
 
What slots are your PCIe cards plugged into?

I just had a problem with small response delays, then when I rebooted, the boot process went like molasses. Turns out my NVMe card was right below a graphics card, blocking too much air flow. The M.2 heatsinks were hot to the touch, causing the M.2s to slow down in safety mode.

Your symptoms could be caused by hot devices. And your MacPro reboots when those devices cool down. Playing around with resets may just buy time for things to cool down.
 
Have you updated to latest firmware version 144.

What OS where you on before you updated to Monterey?
 
Put the boot ssd on its own PCIe card.

You can buy them on Amazon for £15
 
alex_anathem said:
Why?
Click to expand...
I read that your boot SSD is not part of the raid group but is on the same PCIe card.

You can eliminate possibility of the raid card interfering with boot process.

Apple removed the ability for Mac OS to boot from a raid volume.

This card works well. It is £9 plus delivery.

Also check the Ram sticks are all the same. You can look in System Report under Memory. I had a issue once where a faulty Dimm would trigger a freeze.

Check the RTC clock battery, if it hasn't been replaced then its almost 14 year old !!

Good luck troubleshooting!
 
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Because nvram reset seems to help (maybe), check the firmware / nvram health status.

For example with the tool in my signature.
 
alex_anathem said:
The M2 is under the GPU so everybody can cool down.
Click to expand...
I assume you mean this:

Slot4 empty - possibly covered
Slot3 empty - covered
Slot2 Graphics Card
-- empty space --
Slot1 NVMe Card

If the above is correct, then the NVMe card has good cooling - should be fine. I ran into trouble with this config:

Slot4 empty - covered
Slot3 1st Graphics Card
Slot2 NVMe Card
-- filled space --
Slot1 2nd Graphics Card

In the above config, the backplate of my 1st graphics card was actually touching the heatsink on my NVMe card. Very limited airflow, and the heatsinks were hot to the touch. I was lucky not to get crashes.

Your Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 sticks - were they freshly purchased, or ones you had sitting around? If they were made before 2020, they may need firmware updates to play nice with macOS.

Sonnet has an M.2 compatibility PDF linked from your product page, and it continues to get updates. They recommend checking for firmware updates on all Samsung sticks (notes 1 and 16 in the PDF).
 
krakman said:
This card works well. It is £9 plus delivery.
Click to expand...
Well I can't work like that because putting my GPU above my M2 NVME card deletes a slot for me. So I need the last one to put a USB C card at the end.


krakman said:
Also check the Ram sticks are all the same. You can look in System Report under Memory. I had a issue once where a faulty Dimm would trigger a freeze.

Check the RTC clock battery, if it hasn't been replaced then its almost 14 year old !!
Click to expand...
I'll check that once I get back in the computer. I should just check that all RAM sticks has the same model?
How to check RTC ?

reader50 said:
I assume you mean this:

Slot4 empty - possibly covered
Slot3 empty - covered
Slot2 Graphics Card
-- empty space --
Slot1 NVMe Card
Click to expand...
Yep that's it! The slot 4 is ready to be used but is now empty as I assumed my USB 3 card could cause the problem and has been removed for testing purposes.

reader50 said:
Your Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 sticks - were they freshly purchased, or ones you had sitting around? If they were made before 2020, they may need firmware updates to play nice with macOS.
Click to expand...
They were freshly purchased. I remember I had checked their firmware after installing them and they had the correct one to work well with MacOS. I had read about that issue before purchasing them.
 
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alex_anathem said:
I'll check that once I get back in the computer. I should just check that all RAM sticks has the same model?
How to check RTC ?
Click to expand...
After all these years, just easier to replace. It is a coin battery BR2032, not CR2032, which can’t handle the heat very well. Be careful with metal clip. It can be finicky. If it breaks, you’re in a pickle.
 
Bigwaff said:
After all these years, just easier to replace. It is a coin battery BR2032, not CR2032, which can’t handle the heat very well. Be careful with metal clip. It can be finicky. If it breaks, you’re in a pickle.
Click to expand...
Okay so I just replaced it, I still can't get the Mac to boot, but at least I know it's not the battery...
 
It seems like there are two PCIe devices not tested yet. Your RX580 and Sonnet 4x4.

Try booting from a SATA drive, with the Sonnet removed. And try with whatever GPU the 5,1 came with. I'd personally try both. Then if boot stabilizes, add new hardware back in until the problem recurs.

The new Sonnet card would be my guess, because besides itself, it's got 4x drives on it. If any one of those went bad, it can hang boot.
 
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A thought if you're short on PCIe slots. Especially if your RX580 proves to be the boot culprit. You could consider a Radeon Pro WX7100, which is a single-slot card. Around $80 on eBay, has 8GB. Performance falls midway between an RX570 and RX580. That would get you back a slot.

The downside is fan noise - the fan runs more to handle the smaller heatsink. I got one, and can confirm it works fine with Sequoia. Currently not installed, as I had enough slots after all. And the noise bugged me - though I also suspect my case fans. Still diagnosing.

If graphics performance isn't a priority, there's also the Pro WX5100 (8GB) or Pro WX4100 (4GB), which use successively less power, so presumably less fan noise. All single-slot cards, supported by OCLP, but I haven't tested either. There are later single-slot Pro cards too. Anything that uses 130W or less is usually a single-slot.
 
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I am creating a boot disk with Mojave on it to do some testing.

I'm pretty sure the RX580 works well with that kind of setups, because this one has always been in some MacPros in the studio I'm working in and has been used in several Open Core systems. That validates its viability in my system, right ?

Because I want to use this computer for music and audio production, fan noise is a problem (the one I already have seems already too much), and performance also is, because I need several screens with good resolutions and VST Plugins sometime eat a lot of GPU power.

When I have my Mojave system ready to go, what can I do to be sure everything is good in the computer itself, so I can be sure that the problem resides in one of my PCIe cards ?
 
alex_anathem said:
When I have my Mojave system ready to go, what can I do to be sure everything is good in the computer itself, so I can be sure that the problem resides in one of my PCIe cards ?
Click to expand...
Remove as many PCIe cards as you can. ie - start with just a graphics card. We don't know yet what's failing, so everything is a suspect until its ruled out. Assuming you have another graphics card, I'd test with either, one at a time.

Any combination that yields stable boot is a victory. It would validate the 5,1 is not at fault, and you should be able to quickly narrow down the real culprit.

The RX580 in general works well. But your particular RX580 is a suspect until it's ruled out. Any device can die without warning. I'd unplug the optical drive(s) for example, just in case one of them is the traitor.
 
Okay, I'm left with the RX580 only, and a regular Mojave is being installed on a SATA SSD. Optical drives were already out.

I already splitted the SSD in 4 parts, so I assume next step would be to prepare an OCLP Monterey boot and install it on another partition?
 
If your Mac Pro boots stable from SATA with just the graphics card, then the Sonnet (or one of the M.2s) would be the prime suspect. If that were the case, I'd remove two of the M.2 sticks, reinstall Sonnet, and try booting again.

It doesn't matter if all RAID sticks are present. If one or more are missing, your RAID just doesn't mount. You can safely boot-test with RAID members missing, until you find a bad stick. Or if the Sonnet prevents boot, even with no sticks installed, you have your suspect.
 
reader50 said:
I assume you mean this:

Slot4 empty - possibly covered
Slot3 empty - covered
Slot2 Graphics Card
-- empty space --
Slot1 NVMe Card
Click to expand...
Yep that's it! The slot 4 is ready to be used but is now empty as I assumed my USB 3 card could cause the problem and has been removed for testing purposes.

Why is your GPU in Slot 2 and not Slot1?

Why is your NVME Card in slot 1?

If you swap them around then Slot 3 will no longer be covered by the GPU???

Or is the GPU a 2.5 slot card?
 
Slot 1 and Slot 2 are the fast x16 slots.

I had to move my NVMe card to S1 myself. These cards typically do not have a fan - they rely on airflow across passive heatsinks. And if there is a card directly above it, you get overheating. The M.2 drives slow down to molasses speed.

Most modern graphics cards take up the absolute full 2-slot space, leaving no room for airflow between cards. To make matters worse, most non-Pro graphics cards today have side-fans instead of a blower at the back. They require breathing space vs the next card.

So if you put your GPU in S1, you effectively lose access to S2. Sometimes a really small card can still go in S2 and only partially obscure a single GPU fan.

I've actually ended up with my RX580 in S3, covering S4 and intruding into the HD bays. Turns out they make SSD adapters low-profile enough that SSDs will still fit in Bays 2,3,4 and share space with my 2.25-slot RX580. There isn't an obvious speed hit from using an x4 slot, not even in the Heaven benchmark.

And I still have Bay 1 for a real HD. With S2 free for ... something. Something small enough to live under a graphics card backboard.
 
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