Early 2008 Mac Pro for home use

Hello guys,
I've been using usual Windows PCs at home (watching movies through HDMI, playing a few games - Counter Strike and random racing games), browsing internet, working in PS and Light room etc, but mostly for watching HD movies. But I was able to get myself Early 2008 Mac Pro - 10gb memory, two dual core intel xeon processors, 256 Ati Radeon graphics cards and 1tb ssd hard drive. Now I wanted to know how good is Mac Pro for home use? As I said I don't do many things with my windows based PC and wanted to switch to faster, quieter mac pro. Any opinions? How good it is as a home entertainment center?
P.S. Counter strike is available now for Mac, so I don't really care about other games.

dump the 2600XT and there I would pay for a Mac Edition AMD 7950, else PC card
1TB SSD is unusual gift
even though 8 cores it is 6 yrs old and most things don't use 8 cores that much, it predates the i7-920,
USB3 has to be added if you want it or put USB3 on your LAN router is what I do.
It does not get the official nod of support from Apple for Windows 8/8.1 but it does if you want run 7 or 7 Pro (dual cpu support)
FBDIMMs have gotten better and cheaper if you want or need to, many do, often due to early death.

Similar Messages

Where and what type of solid state drive should I buy for my early 2008 Mac Pro Desktop??

where can I buy and what type of solid state drive should I use to upgrade my early 2008 Mac Pro Desktop??

Rick,
When you get a chance.... DSLReports is off line: their SQL server decided to take its indexes and access to data. Power. Not enough of the right kind of UPS. Same happened to StorageReview's "Drive Reliability Database" about 8-9 yrs ago.
dslreports.com is offline
Fri Apr 20 09:05:55 EDT 2012
SSD: Loading CS5 plus other little monsters might matter.
Lots of small I/Os
latency of 1/100th where nanoseconds replace those "long" milliseconds
System: Small and fast.
DLLoyd even goes for short-stroking drives to get and maintain highest I/O
The new 10k VRs hit 200MB/sec - I still use them and still find them useful, long lasting, feel responsive with whatever I ask of them. I know they get criticized and "cost too much"
Just bought a new WD Black and yes it is better than the 2008 model I was using.
600GB 10K $200 vs $150-220 for WD Black. your choice
I can destroy a 7.2k drive, I have brought ever 10K drive back after a simple WD Extended Test in Lifeguard.
I don't really care about $$/GB or I wouldn't have just bought Intel 128GB $149
Database: the pros put the index in memory and page fix (virtual volumes in memory; cache; hold disk drive index in memory). Caching storage has been around for almost 40 yrs.
Today you can use SSDs as front end cache to hold DB indexes and frequent data for web servers and such adn use slower secondary storage.
SSD + SAS + 4TB storage
Separating the system from data: #1 must
Having data on array: been what I use
I put a large photo library on 2 x 10K VRs vs SSD and couldn't tell much difference (SSD is soundless of course) But my WD Blacks make as much noise and run 15*C hotter than those 10K (not what you expect?)
While 10K and 7.2K are in the 140-180MB/sec range, they are in 3.0 to 12.0 ms seeks, not 0.01 ms.
People wonnder why shrink a drive to 2.5" (or why not go down to 1.8".
How long does it take to reposition a disk head? how often? the 10K VR travels on outer tracks at 70 MPH. Really trying to fly off into space.
It uses one step to find the "zip code" and then another DSP to find the "house."
True of any high density perpendicular recording mechanism.
And of course while the Raptor-X tried to find a home with famers, Cheetah buyers, the WD 10K line has more of a home where servers and small form factor drives - and 100s of them - can fit in a rackmount server I imagine.
Anyway.... if SR and DSLReports can drop out of site due to power and hardware failure and loss... we can learn some and hope to protect our own data and investments.

With Boot Camp, should I install the 64 bit version of Windows 7 (Home Premium edition) OR the 32 bit version when installing onto an early 2008 Mac Pro operating OSX Lion with a 1 TByte internal HDD?

With an early 2008 Mac Pro I'm about to add a second internal drive (1 TByte SATA) and initially install OSX Lion onto the new drive. Then to partition this new HDD via Boot camp. But my question is whether I am best advised to purchase the 64 bit version of Windows 7 (Home Premium) or the 32 bit version of Windows 7 (Home Premium) for the Windows sector of the disk What are the differences, and will I notice a difference in performance?

In chart from wiki, (scroll down to "Comparison chart") check the maximum CPUs supported.
You don't see this on MSoft's 1st searched for chart hit. This is one reason you will regret not paying for Professional+ if you get Home Premium 64 as I did for Mac Pro early 2008.
Home Prem Task Mgr sees 4 processors vs. the 8 that are seen by Pro+.
Costs more than a Mac upgrade to Lion if you make that mistake.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions

2nd Optical-Drive for Early 2008 Mac Pro: Suggestions Required

I am hoping to add a second optical-drive to my Early 2008 Mac Pro. I notice that there are various SATA ones available for Early 2009 Mac Pro's onwards (e.g. the LG GH24NS90) but according to OWC (Other World Computing) these ones are apparently unsuitable for earlier Mac Pro's.
The current optical-drive in my Mac Pro is a Sony AD-7170A.
Can anyone suggest a suitable optical-drive that is still available as new (preferably available in the UK).
Thanks,
Yan Lee

The SATA optical drives will work fine in a 2008 Mac Pro. I just installed this model:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16827136259
I already have a Blu-Ray SATA drive in my other tray, so I've done this a couple of times now.
You have to run a SATA data cable through to one of the two ports on the motherboard - it involves removing the first two drive trays and the front fan. The cable goes up behind the top left corner of the compartment, together with the black cables feeding the optical ATA connectors. You CAN use an L-shaped (90 or 270 degree) SATA cable, but I've found that a regular straight cable works OK too - it is a tight fit behind the fan, but it should fit. The trouble with the L-shape is that it blocks the other SATA port. You can also look for low-profile SATA cables, which have slightly smaller heads.
You'll also need a molex-to-SATA power adaptor. Don't forget to remove the front bezel from the drive - I do this by attaching everything to power, don't slide the optical enclosure back into the space yet, power up the computer, eject the drive using its eject button, and then slide the bezel up and off. You can then slide the enclosure into the space. Turn the computer off to put the fan and drives back in.
Matt

External desktop drives for early 2008 Mac Pro: USB 2.0 or 3.0 question

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 (OS 10.6.8).
I currently have a 1 TB Fantom Drive with USB 2.0 that I use for the Time Machine. I want to get the second external drive to use as a boot drive so I can install & boot from Mountain Lion to use Maya 2014 3D application software that requires the Mountain Lion OS. For all other applications, I want to stick with Snow Leopard (10.6.8), which works well for me.
Most of the searches I've done for external drives have USB 3.0. Some have USB 3.0/2.0.
Questions:
1. Will one of the USB 3.0-only external drives work with my early 2008 Mac Pro 3,1, which is only equipped for USB 2.0? If so, would I need some sort of adapter? (I realize that the speed would still be USB 2.0 speed.)
2. Or do I need to get the USB 3.0/2.0 external drive (which is more expensive)? I am assuming this would not require any adapter.
3. Will I be able to boot from the external drive with Mountain Lion?
Thanks for any help with this.
S

First, many thanks to both Grant Bennet-Alder and The hatter for their fast responses to my questions. I really appreciate this information. Based on your suggestions I did some research in order to better understand the proposed solutions.
Grant Bennet-Alder wrote:
You can add a PCIe card to get these interfaces:
eSATA
USB-3
1. Does one need to get a separate PCIe card for each interface, or is there one PCIe card for multiple interfaces?
The hatter wrote:
Installing or cloning OS X should be done on SATA II drive bay or external and then moved to the PCIe - depends what card you buy, and some issues are with arrays (no need for system on one).
2. I went to http://www.everymac.com/systems/apple/mac_pro/faq/, which says, "By default, a single 3 Gb/s Serial ATA -- sometimes referred to as SATA 2.0 or SATA II -- hard drive is installed in the first of four bays for all models." I interpret that to mean that SATA II is a in the first bay located on my internal hard drive. Can I create a partition here and install Mountain Lion as a separate system, and then move it to a PCIe SSD?
3. Or, can I install it on my external Falcon Drive (which has a Partition Map Scheme : GUID Partition Table, and which, I believe means it is not a bootable drive). Following that installation could I then move it to the PCIe SSD and boot Mountain Lion from there?
4. Or, if partitioning is an option, can I just clone it to the Falcon Drive for backup?
My apologies for my ignorance. This is not my forte. Thanks for any help you can give.

Compatible graphics cards for the early 2008 Mac Pro 3,1?

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro 3,1 with the 2.66Ghz Quad core processor that is running Lion. I had an ATI Radeon Card in there that didn't last very long (I've read not great reviews about them recently) and now I need a replacement that will be compatible with my system and that will last me longer than my previous card did. The problem is I don't know what my options are. Can anyone reccomend me a viable replacement? I do video/audio production so something high end would be nice.
Thanks,
-RH

There are some good ideas, comments and tests just how much difference and in what applications.
The differences between 2.5GT and others are less than you might think.
There is no-compromise performance for some areas of CS6 and CUDA with ML and GTX 570 or above. The new EVGA GTX 660-Ti FTW w/ 3GB $330 looks to be very popular and that is the "mid-range" today, compared to $400-500 where GTX 680 sits or ATI 79xx series.
If you have to use 10.6.8 that is a bigger factor and some cards require 10.7.4 or later.
The 5x70 were average cards when they came out. There is no reason to have a system where early boot is totally dependent upon firmware and couldn't do basic video. Anyway some people are willing to swap out the 5770 and keep it just for debugging.
As to the original question: can't tell if you were interested in asking if a MacBook Pro Retina or something else... kind of hard to argue. A 12-core 3.33GHz with 48GB and 5 internal hard drives - it is hard not to do whateer you throw at it esp. if cost is not the primary concern but work is and it is suppose to pay for itself.

I need an "Open CL compatible graphics card for an early 2008 Mac Pro with 1 gig of V-Ram", any recommendations? Thanks.

I need an "Open CL compatible graphics card for an early 2008 Mac Pro with 1 gig of V-Ram", any recommendations?
Thanks.

BlackList:
Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, Compressor 4: Graphics card compatibility
WhiteList:
Final Cut Pro X, Motion 5, Compressor 4: Using OpenCL-enabled graphics cards
OpenCL graphics cards available now, for any Mac Pro model, for a reasonable cost:
Apple 5770 US$250 Avail: in stock
Apple 5870 US$450 Avail: 2-3 weeks

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, 8 gb ram with a Dell 27" display and a 42" LG TV. I am thinking about upgrading the stock ATI Radeon 2600 graphics card for better resolution, preferring 2 dvi outputs. Does anyone have any suggestions on the best card?

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, 8 gb ram with a Dell 27” display and a 42” LG TV. I am thinking about upgrading the stock ATI Radeon 2600 graphics card for better resolution, preferring 2 dvi outputs or 1 dvi and 1 vga vs 1 dvi and a mini. I don't do a lot of Final Cut Pro, gaming, etc. I am interested in best value for the graphics card.
Does anyone have any suggestions on the best graphics card for these larger displays for the best value?
Thanks,
Kevin

I recommend you install nothing older than the Apple-firware 5770, about US$250.
RE: Mac Pro Replacement Graphics cards
1) Apple brand cards,
2) "sold in the Apple store" cards, and
3) "Mac Edition" cards ...
... show all the screens, including Boot up screens, Safe Mode, Installer, Recovery, debug screens, and Alt/Option boot screens. At this writing, these choices include:
1) Apple brand cards:
• Apple-firmware 5770, about US$250** works near full speed in every model Mac Pro, Drivers in 10.6.5
• Apple-firmware 5870, about US$450
2) "sold in the Apple store" cards
• NVIDIA Quadro 4000, about US$1200
• NVIDIA Quadro 5000, about US$2500
3) "Mac Edition" cards -- REQUIRE 10.8.3 or later:
• SAPPHIRE HD 7950 3GB GDDR5 MAC Edition, about US$480** Vendor recommends Mac Pro 4,1
• EVGA GTX 680 Mac Edition, about US$600
The cards above require no more than the provided two 6-pin aux power connectors provided in the Mac Pro through 2012 model. Aux cables may not be provided for third-party cards, but are readily available.
If you are Meet ALL of these:
• running 10.8.3 or later AND
• don't care about "no boot screens" etc AND
• can re-wire or otherwise "work out" the power cabling, THEN:
You can use many more cards, even most "PC-only cards"

What upgrade graphic card do i need for a early 2008 mac pro

I have a early 2008 Mac Pro. ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 MB is what i have now. What is a good upgrade graphic card to get.

The GTX 780 6GB runs fine on the dual PCIe internal power cables -- as does the GTX 680 and Radeon HD 7950. The same can't be said of the GTX TITAN or GTX 780 Ti or Radeon R9 280X -- all of which require an auxiliary power feed to avoid a nasty power down of your tower at the worst moment when too much wattage is demanded of the Mac Pro's factory power supply.
Did I mention that the GTX 780 with 6GB of GDDR5 matches the 6GB of GDDR5 in the TITAN?
The one fallacy to my 'sweet spot' award has to do with OpenCL. In case you hadn't noticed, the AMD Radeon GPUs smoked the NVIDIA GeForce GPUs running Photoshop's OpenCL accelerated Iris Blur filter and rendering LuxMark's OpenCL accelerated Room scene.
- http://www.barefeats.com
So depends on budget, whether you want a PC card for less but no "early EFI boot screen" prior to drivers loading, and what apps and needs you have.
The one thing for sure is that 2600XT should have been retired ages ago and even more so with 10.8.3 and above, it could be trouble or just... PITA/POS.

Early 2008 Mac Pro - Can't load Boot Camp drivers for Win 7 64

Trying to install Win 7 64 bit on my early 2008 Mac Pro. I downloaded the Boot Camp drivers 4.0.4033 and installed them on a USB drive but, for some reason, when I try the install them during the process, I get a message that my hardware is not recognized. Skipping the driver loading process, I am able to install Win 7 but when the system trys to restart to continue the install, I get a message "disk error, press any key to restart". Pressing any key does not get me anywhere. I went through the Win 7 repair process and again tried to load the drivers with no luck.
Any thoughts would be appreciated.
Thank you,

That article was also my starting point and I have followed those steps again and again and again. I haven't slept, I haven't done anything other then try to make it work for more hours than I can count. I came here for help because that solution is not working for me.
The region and keyboard type settings simply don't have the Apple keyboard layout listed. As I said, someone on the Fusion forum tried to follow the article's instructions too and he managed to get it working because he COULD run setup.exe (Boot Camp Drivers) on his machine, and I CAN'T. Yes, it is all explained in that article... but the drivers WON'T INSTALL, I get an error message saying "This version of Boot Camp is not intended for this computer model".
First you said it wasn't physically possible for me to install the drivers, then you said I should just follow the article. Well, the article clearly says "Install the Boot Camp Windows device drivers in the virtual machine" which you just said couldn't be done! I want to cry. I should have just bought a second laptop, this is too painful.

Need help with graphics card options for an early 2008 mac pro

Hello,
   I have an early 2008 mac pro with 2 x 3.2 GHz quad core Intel Xeon and 6Gigs of ram, currently running with an Nvidia Geforce 8800 GT with 512mb.
    It is also running 10.7.2.
   I would like to either add a video card on top of the one I am currently running or replace it completely if necessary.
   I do video editing on the Mac, no gaming and only a small amount of photoshop, and as the resolutions get larger I would like to have my machine keep up.
   My questions are,
     1. What cards would you the community suggest?
     2. Can I add a whole other card to my system or do I have to replace the current one?
     3. If I can hold two cards what special accomidations would be needed in regards to final cut performance if any?
    Thank you for any help you would like to give.
Rob

The two main cards for mac pros are the apple versions of the ATI Radeon 5770 and 5870.
The 5770 requires one aux power adaptor and the 5870 requires two. So generally you could only have one 5780 or two 5770's.
Video cards which don't require aux power should be able to coexist with these cards so log as it's all within the power supply maximums of course.

Early 2008 Mac Pro + nVidia 8800: Never going to work?

This forum is littered with threads about early 2008 Mac Pros with the nVidia 8800 card - none of them positive.
I was unfortunate enough to wait for Apple to release such a machine and buy it. Graphics performance is dire given the hardware available. The machine routinely crashes with the window manager hang problem (the user interface just locks up, yet network services etc. still work), in the way familiar to anyone blighted by this particular bug; just run the Folding@Home client on your machine if you want to experience the joy. Or screensavers, sometimes, so I've had to turn those off. And I've had to turn off monitor power saving too, because I too suffer from the 'monitors sometimes don't wake up' bug. And of course I can't sleep the machine either, because firmware upgrade or not, it's still not reliable. And after all this, still the machine crashes.
SSH to the machine; try to restart cleanly; even 'sudo reboot' won't restart it. Apple have achieved something I've never seen out of any Unix or Unix-like operating system, ever; the kernel is unable to kill its own processes.
There have been no indications from Apple that I've seen on these forums over several weeks that the problem is even being acknowledged, let alone tackled. Latest reports indicate that even the 1st gen Mac Pro owners are suffering if they install the 8800.
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1460752&tstart=0
My machine rarely makes it through the day without a forced reboot due to the window manager hanging. I can't do any work on it. I can't rely on it. I can't enjoy it. I can't even use it for web browsing without fear of it hanging.
There seem to be no facts about this at all. So all I can ask for is opinions. Does anyone have any offering of hope that early 2008 Mac Pros might ever work properly with 8800 cards? Y'know, little things, like actually being able to handle graphics? Or sleeping the monitors? Or, heaven forbid, sleeping the whole machine? Or should I just send it back as unfit for purpose?
Yours, tired and exasperated... :-/

I posted this in some other blog (forum), I should have posted this here also but I hope this gives you and all with these problems hope!! I also ran some fish tank test some else posted to get the folding problem to happen and I can not get it to happen at all now, and since my 8800 went in I get NO LOCKUPS, SCREEN FREEZES, shaky blurry video when I boot, so far NOTHING, IT JUST WORKS!!!!!!!!
Now that I think about it the person who said to use the fish tank program had a bad 8800 and maybe you do also!! here is the link to that:
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?messageID=6965475&#6965475
I purchased my first mac pro early 08 2 months ago (amazon.com).
2 quad core 2.8's, 2 gig apple 4 gig OWC total 6 gig ram,2-WD raptors (1st mac 2nd boot camp winxp 32 bit), apple care.
I had all my problems with the ATI card (I always purchased ATI, never Nvidia, for all the PC's I built) a couple of times I bought the first ones out, these had all kinds of problems until good drivers that actually worked were released (usually 6-12 months after the release of the card).
So I try not to buy routers, graphic cards, etc.. for at least 6-12 months, but back to my 2600 card!!
When I received my mac the graphics would freeze, I did a lot of online reading only to find out the ATI 2600 was the problem, the cure was to hook up 2 monitors to the card (and that worked!!).
Then they came out with the firmware update, now my main monitor would after 2 days on a reboot be scambled (samsung syncmaster 213t, NEVER had ANY problem with it before on any PC I had, so I knew it was not the monitor) to fix the problem I had to either turn power off to the syncmaster or resetting PRAM (worked for a couple more days, then the same problem).
I called apple and they sent a tech out within days to replace the ATI card, the replacement did the same thing after a couple of days, so I called Apple back and they took a bunch of info from my computer (BTW not much at all loaded in the mac side) and said to call back in a week, so I called back a week later and they said they were going to exchange the card for either another ati 2600 or the Nvidia 8800, I said 8800 and a day later on a saturday I received it, swapped the card and NEVER HAD ANY PROBLEMS at all!!
So I don't know if the ATI card has problems with certain monitors or they are just poorly made (maybe AMD is mad with Apple that Apple did not use AMD processors).
I have read others that swapped with the 8800 and their problems went away also!!!!
Maybe some have no problems with the 2600, but I would not recommend it to anyone, if you can avoid the 2600 GO WITH THE 8800, the drivers will get better (and the 8800 will eventually outperform the ATI)and you will not be sorry.
Apple is awesome, they are 2nd to none, their is no other company like this anymore that I have dealt with in a long time (not just because they gave me a 8800), like I said in the beginning of this post I always purchased ATI cards and would have kept it if it would have worked but 2 doing the same, ATI [AMD] has lost my support until they prove otherwise.
I recommend Mac's to everyone now!!
good luck and let me know it any of this has helped!!!!!!!!!!

Installing OS and Apps on SSD boot drive on early 2008 Mac Pro while keeping all other data from old iMac on hdd

So I've just got myself a early 2008 Mac Pro with a OCZ RevoDrive 80GB PCIe SSD to replace my old iMac which is slowly but surely giving up on me. I want to put my OS (mavericks) and some/all (whichever is possible/easier) apps, both apple and 3rd party, from my old iMac, onto the SSD but keep all my other data on the 2TB HDD, also from my old iMac, in the mac pro. Can anyone tell me how to do this/if its possible? (not massively tech savvy so simpleish language and steps would be handy!) Thanks!

How to use an SSD with your HDD
If you are going to use an SSD as a boot drive together with your existing HDD as the "data" drive, here's what you can do.
After installing the SSD you will need to partition and format the SSD using Disk Utility. Then, install OS X on the SSD. After OS X has been installed boot from the SSD. Use Startup Disk preferences to set the SSD as the startup volume.
Open Users & Groups preferences. Click on the lock icon and authenticate. CTRL- or RIGHT-click on your user account listing in the sidebar and select Advanced Options from the context menu. You will see a field labeled "Home dir:" At the right end you will see a Change button. Click on it. In the file dialog locate the Home folder now located on the HDD (HDD/Users/account_name/.) Select the folder, click on Open button. Restart the computer as directed.
When the computer boots up it will now be using the Home folder located on the HDD.
Another more technical method involving the Terminal and aliases is discussed in depth here: Using OS X with an SSD plus HDD setup - Matt Gemmell. This is my preferred approach because I can select which of the Home's folders I want on the HDD and which I don't want. For example, I like to keep the Documents and Library folders on the SSD because I access their content frequently.
Be sure you retain the fully bootable system on your HDD in case you ever need it.

Why are there so many problems with the early 2008 Mac Pro ???

Hi everybody out there using Mac Pro's early 2008,
I found out there is a lot of problems with the early 2008 Mac Pro.
My early 2008 Mac Pro has been repaired ones under warranty and now it stopped working again ! Also see under: Mac Pro early 2008 no chime and does not start up. Why is this ????
It worked well for about 2 years and then it just fails and i had this failing issue twice already !!! Is this just a BAD Apple product or how do you think I need to approach this. Let’s face it, these machine don’t come cheap and you at least expect them to work without problems for 4-5 years. What is happening here ???
Cheers, Kavango

go to a black screen after 15 minutes or a couple hours
That is probably an indication that you need to find a new graphics card.
RE: Mac Pro Replacement Graphics cards
1) Apple brand cards,
2) "sold in the Apple store" cards, and
3) "Mac Edition" cards ...
... show all the screens, including Boot up screens, Safe Mode, Installer, Recovery, debug screens, and Alt/Option boot screens. At this writing, these choices include:
1) Apple brand cards:
• Apple-firmware 5770, about US$250** works near full speed in every model Mac Pro, Drivers in 10.6.5
• Apple-firmware 5870, about US$450
2) "sold in the Apple store" cards
• NVIDIA Quadro 4000, about US$1200
• NVIDIA Quadro 5000, about US$2500
3) "Mac Edition" cards -- REQUIRE 10.8.3 or later:
• SAPPHIRE HD 7950 3GB GDDR5 MAC Edition, about US$480** Vendor recommends Mac Pro 4,1
• EVGA GTX 680 Mac Edition, about US$600
The cards above require no more than the provided two 6-pin aux power connectors provided in the Mac Pro through 2012 model. Aux cables may not be provided for third-party cards, but are readily available.
If you are Meet ALL of these:
• running 10.8.3 or later AND
• don't care about "no boot screens" etc AND
• can re-wire or otherwise "work out" the power cabling, THEN:
You can use many more cards, even most "PC-only cards"

I have an early 2008 Mac Pro, which has re-booting problems. Also what does the spinning beach-ball indicate?

Hi, I have an early 2008 Mac Pro which has re-booting problems.
Processor speed is: 2.8
Memory: 2GB 800 MHz DDR2 FB-DIMM
2 x 28GHz Quad Core Intel Xeon
I am running OSX Yosemite Version 10.10
My Mac Pro keeps re-booting. Last year I had to replace my graphics card. My original card was the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 255MB, and that is what I have now. At this precise moment my Mac Pro is running perfectly, except that it is slow and the spinning beach-ball keeps appearing. I have managed to do some work with the disk utilities, verifying, cleaning and partitioning. Some errors were found and when it was cleaned this seemed to help my Mac Pro to function properly. Although I am able to use my Mac Pro now, from day to day I still experience re-boot problems. Also quite unexpectedly my mac dictionary has an error, it closed itself down and will not open at all, I had the message to say that a report will be sent to Apple.
I have tried starting my computer with an external hard drive fitted via a USB cable, I use for back-ups. This worked and I was able to wipe my hard drive clear and replace all info from the back up I had done only a few days ago.
This worked for a few days and then the same problem started again.
I am beginning to wonder if I need to buy a new hard drive.
If there is anyone who has some answers to help me solve my problem, I would be most grateful.
Robert

When you have the beachball activity, note the exact time: hour, minute, second.
These instructions must be carried out as an administrator. If you have only one user account, you are the administrator.
Launch the Console application in any of the following ways:
☞ Enter the first few letters of its name into a Spotlight search. Select it in the results (it should be at the top.)
☞ In the Finder, select Go ▹ Utilities from the menu bar, or press the key combination shift-command-U. The application is in the folder that opens.
☞ Open LaunchPad and start typing the name.
The title of the Console window should be All Messages. If it isn't, select
          SYSTEM LOG QUERIES ▹ All Messages
from the log list on the left. If you don't see that list, select
          View ▹ Show Log List
from the menu bar at the top of the screen.
Each message in the log begins with the date and time when it was entered. Scroll back to the time you noted above.
Select the messages entered from then until the end of the episode, or until they start to repeat, whichever comes first.
Copy the messages to the Clipboard by pressing the key combination command-C. Paste into a reply to this message by pressing command-V.
The log contains a vast amount of information, almost all of it useless for solving any particular problem. When posting a log extract, be selective. A few dozen lines are almost always more than enough.
Please don't indiscriminately dump thousands of lines from the log into this discussion.
Please don't post screenshots of log messages—post the text.
Some private information, such as your name, may appear in the log. Anonymize before posting.

Early 2008 Mac Pro for home use

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