Sleep/Wake problems with a Mac Pro 3,1

[Essence_of_War]

I have a Mac Pro 3,1 (Early 2008) running yosemite with a 3rd part SSD and a Mac Edition HD7950 that has suddenly developed an issue.

Whenever it is set to sleep, it now shuts down and it can't be restarted without resetting the SMC (remove power cord for 15 sec, replace for 5 sec, then power on). This is more annoying than anything else. If I'm walking away for a short time, I can just lock it and set the display to sleep, and if I'm walking away for a long time it has a 3rd party SSD so it boots quite fast anyway.

I'm worried that this is a symptom of a PSU or logic board problem that could cause other issues. I could imagine, for example, that a bad PSU might silently corrupt data, or corrupt attached time machine back-ups or something else.

I tried to take it to the Apple Store to diagnose it, and had a really unpleasant experience. As part of making the online appointment, apple collected my unit serial number, correctly identifying it as a 2008 Mac Pro and I indicated that it was having start-up/sleep issues, and then when I brought it to the store, the genius bar told me that not only were they not allowed to bring the machine into the back, they weren't allowed to do anything at all to it except provide me with a list of 3rd party certified repair techs. It would have been really nice to know that before I dragged it to the store.

Is it probably OK to just work around the symptom, or should I try to figure out if it is a PSU/Logic Board problem and replace one or both? :\

Other than this, I'm still really happy with the Mac Pro, and I don't have any need to replace it (it still runs the latest OS, still runs all of the applications I need it to, and I'm happy with performance as well).

 

[slashbinslashbash]

I'm sure you could pick up a used PSU or logic board pretty cheaply. I have a 1,1 and have never had any issues like this. This seems like a rare/random enough issue that I don't know if you're going to find any help for this topic outside of Google.

 

[Essence_of_War]

I've poked around a bit, I've found decent prices for the power supply, and an ifixit guide that seems like I could do that on my own, the logic board seems trickier. I've found a vendors/service-providers that will do it for ~$500 which seems pretty reasonable to me, but also kind of a lot of money for a problem that I'm working around without much trouble.

 

[slashbinslashbash]

I've poked around a bit, I've found decent prices for the power supply, and an ifixit guide that seems like I could do that on my own, the logic board seems trickier. I've found a vendors/service-providers that will do it for ~$500 which seems pretty reasonable to me, but also kind of a lot of money for a problem that I'm working around without much trouble.

Well crap, you can buy a whole system (sans hard drive) for $425 on eBay. Sell off the parts you don't need (CPU's, GPU, RAM, case...) and I'm sure that would reduce the price of the mobo and PSU to $200 or less.

Or rather, just buy the eBay system, swap HDD's (and maybe GPU/CPU's if they're better) and use it, and keep your old system for spare parts. That way you won't even have to perform the complicated surgery of swapping the mobo or extracting the PSU.

 

[Essence_of_War]

Yeah, that was basically what I was thinking. Throwing ~$500 to chase a bad logic board that isn't actually doing anything but inconveniencing me seems like a sucker bet.

Honestly, though, even dropping $500 for a sidegrade + old system for spare parts isn't terribly attractive to me. I think maybe the best bet is to just start saving for a real upgrade.