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I am running a Mac Pro 2008 as of the last week I have been shutting down the machine instead of sleeping it due to the 10.8.2 sleep bug that had been floating around. Today I went to start it and no video period, and the USB / the system appeared to be unresponsive wired mouse and keyboard and the usb hub had no sign of power. I have tried 2 different displays connected to each of the different DVI ports. The Mac starts with a Chime onetime it did two. The display never turns on or gray, just no signal.

I have tried resetting the NVRAM/PRAM and resetting the SMC, still no video?

After the resets the machine appears to be not crashing, normal hard drive boot up activity, start up chime, and the caps lock light is able to turn off and on, was not able to verify system is in fact booting OS X though, I think it is, will verify later.

Has my graphics card failed? What else can I do to try and get the video back?

When I went to verify if the system was running, it booted up normally everything working fine. The Mac Pro had been left unplugged from Friday 5pm til about 6PM on Sunday.

Just restarted the Mac Pro and it looks like the Graphics card is back to the same conditions as talked about earlier, although this time I was able to verify that the Mac Pro is still running by remotely logging in. As shown in the screen capture below, the "About This Mac More Info..." shows a missing graphics card name as well as a complete lack of Info with the the Graphics/Displays section of the "System Information" Application.

What a missing graphcis card might look like. As shown in the screen capture below, the "About This Mac More Info..." shows a missing graphics card name as well as a complete lack of Info with the the Graphics/Displays section of the "System Information" Application.

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  • From your edit a few hours ago, it definitely sounds like some sort of latent hardware issue. Most likely graphics card still from initial symptoms. If it is not too much trouble you might make a Genius Bar appointment and take it in, at least to have proper hardware diagnostics run. These issues can certainly be intermittent as hardware is slowly failing.
    – bispymusic
    Commented Mar 4, 2013 at 21:59

2 Answers 2

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Your graphics card is probably going bad. Open the chassis and make sure the card is properly seated and fastened in. You can also attempt to VNC if enabled to make sure that the card is in fact the issue.

The good news is these cards can be gotten pretty cheap online nowadays, certainly much cheaper than replacing an entire logic board.

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  • Ya I hope I left screen sharing on pretty sure I did, at the time I did not have a second system to connect to it with.
    – MrDaniel
    Commented Mar 2, 2013 at 3:19
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    If you have an iOS device you can also connect to the same local network and run a free network scanning utility like Fing to see if the Mac Pro is receiving an IP address (and therefore booting up fully).
    – bispymusic
    Commented Mar 2, 2013 at 3:43
  • Good call I could also check the IP list from the wireless AP
    – MrDaniel
    Commented Mar 2, 2013 at 3:54
  • How would I tell from VNCing in that the graphics card is in fact the problem. Check "System Profiler", Console, and see if the graphics card is missing or giving errors?
    – MrDaniel
    Commented Mar 2, 2013 at 23:28
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    If you can VNC at all, it's a fairly good indication that it's either graphics card, video cable or the display itself. You can also go into System Profiler and check under Graphics and PCI Cards. But if you were able to VNC in, you know it's not the actual computer that's the problem, but one of these additional pieces.
    – bispymusic
    Commented Mar 2, 2013 at 23:56
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It seems that there have been problems with these cards and Apple is still fixing them. I found this article about the ATI 2600 (http://www.itproportal.com/2011/02/21/apple-extends-warranty-mac-pro-video-cards/) which stays that Apple will replace the cards if they are a part of a bad batch they've identified. I hope that helps.

-K

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