Is there a Flame Debug Log equivalent for Mac OS? I need to prove to Apple that Flame set ups have fried my card so I can get a new video card before Apple Care runs out in 6 days LOL. All the work is NDA so I can’t run the Flame setups in question to show them. All signs point to the card being toast but running basic Mac Diagnostics, it shows no errors.
I’ve been working on a monster Flame set up for almost a year and after many long renders plus heavy computational load, my Mac is overheating a lot but ONLY with monster Flame set ups. Now when running heavy Flame setups it’s randomly restarting, sometimes with fans on a full, erratic video display artifacts like all green or “Digibeta shuttling squares” (reference for all you old timers). I need to run heavy setups to repeat the behavior and provide logs that empirically demonstrate the issue.
Many thanks in advance!
Mangelo
PS Back in the day this shot would be run through a render farm, but now many of us are islands working remotely from home. “Sign O’ The Times” that I’m running it all through a single maxed out iMac Pro 2017:
I hate to suggest this, but have you vacuumed out your tower and de-linted the front holes? Every MacPro we own has gone through overheat and hard shutdown situations. Turns out those massive fans pull in massive lint/dust.
Update, now running iStat Menus, Mac Fans Control, Activity Monitor and Console on a second monitor to try and track issues. Then I can screen shot the monitoring data and if possible pull logs if I can get the setups to cause the hardware to overheat. It is of course intermittent, like all issues you try to reproduce when needing support LOL
Anything interesting show up in the system log just before/during the fan spin up and restart?
The Console app should let you browse through the current log as well as some older log files. If you have made a note of the dates and times of the crashes then you should be able to look back and see if anything jumps out in the log files that might help diagnose the issue.
I’m working through Console now, never really used it, to unpack what’s possible, as this seems like exactly what I need.
I’ll update you all, as I’m sure I am not alone with these kind of hardware issues resulting from Flame work. The ability to track and share empirical data with support entities is valuable!
I’m certain Apple could care less about Flame logs. And if you are getting kernel panics (likely what is happening if the fans are going full tilt and the machine restarts) then it is probably something at a lower level than what Flame would be logging anyway. So, the system log is probably your best bet to try and get answers.
Look the word “panic” as the system will usually write a kernel panic message to the log when it happens. It will provide a traceback that should mention the process that might be related to the panic - sometimes this helps, sometimes not. I’m not an expert in reading kernel panic reports but often you can get a general sense of what is going on by what is mentioned in the report.
Good luck! I hope you can get a remedy for the situation.
Looks like you already found iStat menus, that’s your best bet.
Apple has a very long history of designing their max thermal loads for graphic designers and not post artists. You’ll have an uphill battle there.
The trash can was notorious for that. And I fried a Macbook from 2013 with Premiere. That one they even ended up fixing out of warranty but only because there was a recall on that generation. Frequent heat cycles had cracked solder points and the system was randomly crashing.
Yeah my trash can was insane! Game changer once I started cleaning it regularly for airflow but eventually too much heat and fried it LOL.
I found a console crash log when iMac Pro spontaneously restarted then came back on at login screen with fan full blast, I’m guessing to protect the card. Didn’t see anything in log to that effect, but Im not versed in any of their codes, gonna share with Apple when I go in tomorrow.
