After a long absence due to my Mac Pro being unstable, I'm back.

I found that my poor Mac would spontaneously restart. With so much other stuff going on, I just left it in the too-hard basket. It seemed to me to be temperature related - it'll run fine first thing in the morning for a while, restart, run fine for a little bit more, then just give up … like some component was over-temp. I did setup my phone to record video of the temperatures when it restarted, but the CPU temps didn't seem unusual.

I did discuss the issue with the US eBay seller that I had bought the 6-core Xeons from, who suggested a few things, but went quiet when I asked about warranty.

I managed to get the Mac running with just CPU-A … as CPU-B was missing the fans ran constantly. But it allowed me to a full backup finally! As the eBay seller had gone quiet, I bought a single Xeon locally - seemed to fix the problem … enough to do the macOPS High Sierra firmware & software update … but then it returned.

So I then thought it could be the processor tray itself. I ended up buying another Mac Pro 2009, just for the tray. And what do you know … the problem was resolved! So it turned out to be the processor tray.

I ran the Mac Pro I bought for parts with the suspect processor tray and the stock 4-core 2.26GHz Xeons it came with (my Mac Pro had the 2.66GHz Xeons, in storage somewhere). It seemed to be fine - bargain, two Mac Pros! But then it started having the same issues. So definitely the processor tray. I could only find one tray by itself on eBay in Australia … AU$175 … fair enough … but it's "water damaged, signs of rust, but works fine!" … nah, that's okay. There's a bunch in the US but these are all upgraded, which I'm not really fussed with. Even if I could get a single CPU tray, I'd be happy.

I'm going to see if I can repair the tray so I have a second Mac Pro I can use - this article on xlr8yourmac.com seems a good starting point.