macfidelity

Stumbled upon a strange problem / bug today during a conversation in ##mac at irc.freenode.ne

Seems like some users do have horizontal lines in certain cases on their displays. This is not a display-hardware related issue at all.

Basically it looks like it is an issue happening on some Macs with revision 1 ATI Radeon X1900 XT graphics cards.

Quote from macworld.com:

Specifically, if your Mac holds a revision 1 ATI Radeon X1900 XT graphics card, you could see these horizontal lines. They seem to appear more often when your graphics card is running hot. It tends to do so more often under Leopard than Tiger because Leopard taxes the card to a greater extent, thanks to its many swoopy graphics effects.

If you can extract your graphics card â �� �� you have a Mac Pro, for example â �� �� switch off your Mac, ground yourself, and do so. Check its cooling fan â �� �� in all likelihood itâ �� ��s caked with dust. Use a can of compressed air to blow away that gunk. While you have the Mac open, take a gander inside and see if there are other clumps of dust that might be blocking its fans. If so, clean them out.

If that doesnâ �� ��t solve your problem (or you have a model such as an iMac that doesn’t let you access its innards), contact Apple. There are reports of Apple swapping out rev 1 cards, which display this problem, for revision 2 cards that seem to work without incident.

• 10.5 ::: Image capture app
• 10.5 ::: I fucking hate AFP in Leopard
• Applescript ::: Heavy load in XCode

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 21st, 2008 at 4:42 pm and is filed under Hardware, mac. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.