[Laurence]

I recently purchased the new 2.8GHz Mac Pro and in its first two weeks I've had two lockups. The strange thing is that the mouse still moved, but the interface was completely dead otherwise. The mouse would change from cursor to spinning wheel every once in a while, however nothing else seemed to do anything on screen. Even weirder... when I finally held down the power button to turn off the machine the Mac went off, but the display still had the image of my entire desktop. Of course the mouse was now motionless, but the screen stayed for over a minute. At first I thought that maybe the Mac was OK and it was my monitor that was bad, but as soon as I turned the machine on again the monitor cleared and it booted up properly. I looked in the console and this is what happened right before shutdown...

Feb 24 21:58:29 Mac-Pro kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Feb 24 21:58:29 Mac-Pro kernel[0]: 0000000b
Feb 24 21:58:41 Mac-Pro kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
Feb 24 21:58:41 Mac-Pro kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Feb 24 21:58:41 Mac-Pro kernel[0]: 0000000b
Feb 24 21:58:53 Mac-Pro kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
Feb 24 21:58:53 Mac-Pro kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Feb 24 21:58:53 Mac-Pro kernel[0]: 0000000b
Feb 24 21:59:05 Mac-Pro kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
Feb 24 21:59:06 Mac-Pro kernel[0]: AFPSleepWakeHandler: going to sleep

Since its all graphics related it seems that either I have a defective card or there are still some issues to be worked out in the drivers. Has anyone else experienced anything like this with the 8800GT video card? The last line about going to sleep was probably due to me pushing the power button for too short a time to shut it down once.

[glideslope]

Have you done the Leopard Graphics Update under Software Update? I believe it tweaked the Mac 8800 drivers. I had 1 incident similar to this prior to the update. Nothing since. At the time I thought it was more of a Boot Camp issue V. 2.0.2 as it happened during the installation of XP Pro on my XP HD after the restart into OSX for the 1st time.

If you run XP make sure you have the new Nvidia drivers installed v. 169.21.

[Laurence]

I do have all the Apple updates, including the boot camp 2.02 update. Now that I think about it I believe Parallels was open both times the lockup occurred, although neither time was that the foreground application. One time I was running the Tomb Raider Anniversary Demo version, the 2nd time I was reading my mail in Mail.app.

I hear about the ATI drivers causing lockups everywhere, but not as much about the NVidia drivers. Maybe its a problem at a lower level in the OS that just seems to manifest itself more often while running the ATI drivers???

[glideslope]

Possibly. A day after my install of XP on a WD SE16 500 I did replace my OEM Seagate 320 with another WD SE16 500g. Complete reset and reinstall. No issues to date since then. This was all in the first 3 days of ownership 2/17-2/19. Although there are threads that seem to rule out any issues with the OEM 320 drives. I purchased both my SE 16's from a 3rd party. No issues with Boot Camp since.

Good luck.

[buckthorn]

I'm seeing something very similar. I had system lockup on Friday (today is Monday), a failure to wake from sleep this morning (had to reboot), and another system freeze this afternoon (had to reboot again). I'm on a month-old Mac Pro, OS X 10.5.2 (plus the recent graphics upgrade), and the NVidia 8800 GT. Log lines just before the crash read:

Mar 10 14:53:06 booker kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
Mar 10 14:53:30: --- last message repeated 2 times ---
Mar 10 14:53:30 booker kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Mar 10 14:53:30 booker kernel[0]: 0000000b
Mar 10 14:53:30 booker kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Mar 10 14:53:30 booker kernel[0]: 0000000b
Mar 10 14:54:45 booker kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Mar 10 14:54:45 booker kernel[0]: 0000000b
Mar 10 14:54:45 booker kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception! status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
Mar 10 14:54:45 booker kernel[0]: 0000000b
Mar 10 14:54:57 booker kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!

[Simon]

Originally Posted by Laurence 

I recently purchased the new 2.8GHz Mac Pro and in its first two weeks I've had two lockups. The strange thing is that the mouse still moved, but the interface was completely dead otherwise. The mouse would change from cursor to spinning wheel every once in a while, however nothing else seemed to do anything on screen.

I experienced the exact same behavior recently on my 2.4 GHz MBP. I had never seen this before. This MBP has an Nvidia 8600M GT so seeing that it happens on both MBPs and MPs I was wondering if maybe this could be an issue with the Nvidia drivers. Specifically if it was introduced with the latest graphics update.

[Juneappal]

I have started getting this behavior also. Never had it until day before yesterday. Now had it thrice. It first happened a few hours after I installed the latest update to word. Related? Just in case, I am not leaving office apps pen in the background anymore.