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CoffeeMonkey

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 23, 2003
108
0
Last month, I purchased the Radeon x800 Mac Edition, and while it looks beautiful most of the time, I've found that when my computer is running more than 5 hours, I start getting green speckles in odd patterns all over the display. (They are gone upon reboot). This happened right around the time that 10.3.8 came out, so I wrote it off as a driver issue that would eventually get fixed.

I finally got on the phone with ATI support (a toll call, btw). They've never heard of the problem, but they think it is a problem with the card, and said I could send it to them for repairs. But they didn't know how long it would take, and they didn't have any useful suggestions as to what I would do for a video card in the meantime. (I no longer have the original video card).

Fortunately, CDW has a great return policy and is sending me an RMA to return the card for refund to them within 10 days.

So what do I do?

Should I borrow a Radeon 9600 from a friend and wait until the x800 becomes available again (its on backorder until late March)? Should I replace the x800 with the nVidia card (tempting since I am none too happy with ATI)? Should I trade down to the 9800?

To be honest, the only thing I really use the x800 for is WoW, and while the graphics boost is nice, I'm not having any more fun playing the game than I did with the 9600 (which is still a ton o' fun).

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
 

Sun Baked

macrumors G5
May 19, 2002
14,937
157
Overheating video card?

Big problem on the earlier ATI cards in the G5 -- so they heard quite a bit about it from Apple -- but not really any consumers.

If your frame rates went up, there is a chance that 10.3.8 made more use of the card than previous version, allowing it to overheat.

---

We'll probably see more of these post around the beginning of summer...
 

daveL

macrumors 68020
Jun 18, 2003
2,425
0
Montana
Sounds like you would be perfectly happy with a 9800 and save some bucks, too. I'd go for the refund.
 
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