As the temperatures here in the North Eastern United States have risen so have my Mac Pro hardware crashes.
There seems to be a direct correlation with internal temp and hard system freezes. This mostly occurs when playing certain computer games (Age of Empires III, Redline, and WingNuts 2).
When I experience the system freeze, a hard reboot results in only a black screen.
After a long search of the interwebs, I found mention of this little fan controller utility that seems to have solved the problem: smcFanController.
I created two profiles, one for normal daily use and one for gaming with the following settings:
Normal: Power Supply = 600 RPM All other fans set to 500 RPM Gaming: PCIe/HDD = 1468 RPM All others same as above
Then I just switch my profile accordingly. I’ve been running with this setup for the past week and haven’t had a single crash. Prior to that I would have several during any particular gaming session.
Hopefully, this helps someone else fix their crashing Mac Pro.