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"Pixelfreeze" with 8800GT

H

hkarlsen

macrumors member
Original poster
Aug 26, 2005
30
0
Hi there, just posting some proof and thoughts before opting for a new machine.

I was one of the first to get 8800GT, and have had problems from the start, which have gotten worse with time.

-It started with an "Apple freeze". The grey apple logo got distorted and frooze, a hard reboot always got me all the way into OSX.

- Then I got heavy non-pixelated freezes in Final Cut Pro. Hard reboot only solution.

Then I removed my 8GB of OWC ram, and I thought for some days that it had helped. But I have had several pixelated freezes and apple logos since. In Windows, I can game for 1 minute (HL2 or any given game) with newest drivers installed, before I get a much worse pixeldistorition than in OSX.

Now im installing OSX on the original apple shipped disk and just waiting for the error to return. This problem is almost identical to this one https://forums.macrumors.com/threads/419100/, only I have 8800GT instead of the ATI one.

How many more with 8800 GT are experiencing problems like this? Sorry for poor quality pictures.
 

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I am sure Apple is more than willing to trade your defective card.

Have you controlled that the power cable from the logic board to the graphic card is firmly secured?

Tried re-inserting the card in the PCI Express v 2.0 slot or changed to the other slot?

Reset PRAM?
 
I have checked the cables and reinserted it, but not changed the port or reset the PRAM. Will do so now, but my hopes arent exactly high :)
 
Game for 1 minute and then pixel distortion - this sounds like the video card is overheating. Is the fan in the card spinning? Maybe there is a windows app that can tell you the temperature the GPU is reaching, if it is very high then perhaps the heat sink is not properly connected to the chip/s on the graphics card. Getting the card replaced is probably the best option. I hope you can get it resolved soon. I had a faulty mac pro with a 8800gt and it would very briefly flicker black every few minutes regardless of what I was doing, but that was the least of that machine's problems so it might have been due to the logic board or something else!
 
thanks everyone. Reinstalled OSX, and removed all third party hardware. Same errors. Calling apple tomorrow
 
Just informing that I delivered the machine in for service at a local apple certified store today (no official Apple stores in Norway). I called Apple and got my reference number, so it got accepted right away. The error would ofcourse not appear just before I delivered it, but I transfered a mobilecamera shot of the error to my desktop. According to the guy at the store, that was smart since if they could not provoke the error, they would perhaps service the machine anyway. Will keep you posted, they expect a 2-3 week wait :/ Back to my blazing fast Powerbook G4...
 
It's probably underspec'd memory running higher than it should.

Try underclocking the video RAM on your 8800 by a few megahertz.... 5 or 10 should probably serve to do it.
 
Having same sort of issue

I've been having a similar issue with my 8800 GT. I haven't seen anything on the Mac side, but when I play games on the Windows side, it would get all pixelated and freeze, forcing me to hard reboot. I have the latest drivers from nVidia installed and would run the monitor to watch my temps while I played. It would never get higher than 75 degrees while playing (though I don't know if that's a high temp or not; it would start out before playing the game at about 63). Some days I can play for hours with no problem, other days it'll only last half an hour before freezing.

I haven't tried to make sure it's connected securely yet, and I don't know what VRam/PRAM is. I also don't know about underclocking ram. Any ideas?
 
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