Radeon 9600XT in my Quicksilver

On advice from Intell a while back, I finally bought and got around to installing a Radeon 9600XT in my main Quicksilver.

I did so by taping off pins 3 and 11, and using the "fingers" off an old PC ISA card to bring the ADC from the socket on the Quicksilver logic board to the tab on the Radeon card.

Functionally, the card is fine. It drives my 17" Studio Display and and a 20" 1620x1050 LCD just fine. The USB ports on the Studio Display even work. The only quirk I find is that the power button on the display will no longer power up the computer.

I'm not sure that I'm getting the full capabilities of the card, however. Under 10.5, system profiler IDs the card correctly but says that Core Image is "software" and Quartz Extreme is not supported. I'm also not getting the GUI "goodies" that usually come with these features, such as the translucent menu bar and the "ripples" when adding a widget to the dashboard.

I tested the card in one of my MDDs before soldering the ADC jumper onto it, and all of these features worked correctly.

Is there an extension or kext that I need to check for in the 10.5 install on my Quicksilver to enable these features?

And, one other thing...is there an OS 9 driver for this card?

Okay, I think that I have found my issue.

A while back, I went through and disabled some extensions on this computer(by moving them into a new folder named "unused extensions") to dry and make the Leopard install less bloated.

One of the things I ditched were all of the ATI extensions, as at the time I was not using an ATI card nor did I have any plans to(famous last words). I went through and put all the ATI kexts back in place, although things still aren't working exactly right.

In any case, I fired up another computer running Leopard in target disk mode(in my case my new 12" PB-thanks Grockk!) and booted my QS off of that. Upon booting, I found that Core Image and all the associated "eye candy" were working correctly.

I'm going to try doing a 10.5 re-install on the Quicksilver, and hopefully that will fix things.

After dumping all the ATI kexts back into the extensions folder and still not getting anywhere, I had the thought that maybe I should try repairing the permissions(I was also getting errors on startup about extensions not being correctly installed).

I attempted to repair from within Leopard, but waited over an hour and it was nowhere close to being finished. So, I rebooted into Tiger(on a separate physical volume in this computer) and repaired the permissions in Leopard from there.

On rebooting, it works perfectly. I now have the translucent menu bar and all the other core image goodies.

weckart said:

This is not a good idea as Tiger will not set the right permissions for a later version. You should repair using the right version and ideally revision.

You only need to repair permissions for the Extensions folder:

sudo chmod 755 /System/Library/Extensions

sudo chown -R root:wheel /System/Library/Extensions

reboot holding Cmd+F to force a rebuild of the kext caches.

Click to expand...

Ooops, thanks for the information on that, as I was not aware of that being a problem(although it makes sense).

I hadn't had any problems yet, although admittedly I've been away from the computer since Sunday and didn't have a lot of time to test things before leaving.

Tiger repaired a bunch of permissions-not just in the extensions folder-so it sounds like I probably should do the repair again from Leopard. When I get back home(on Friday) I'll probably boot it off another computer running Leopard in TDM and repair the permissions from there.

Okay, I'm not sure what's going on, but this has been bugging me for a few days now(I seem to have horrible luck with video cards in this system).

Friday morning, I booted one of my Powerbooks in TDM and booted the QS off of the hard drive in the Powerbook. The QS booted fine, and I set it up to repair the permissions and went off and left it for the day.

When I returned that afternoon, I(seemingly) could not get the computer to wake from sleep so forced a reboot. I still got a blank screen.

The computer will boot fine with another card installed(GEforce 2 or GeForce 4MX). In fact, as best as I can tell, it boots fine with the Radeon installed. The ADC display also powers up, and the USB ports work on it.

The only other computer I have available to me at the moment is another Quicksilver, and the card produces the same symptoms in that computer.

I, unfortunately, don't have a PCI video card at the moment to go into system profiler and see how the computer is reading the Radeon card. I'm also having issues with trying to SSH into it to do the same.

I've tried cleaning the contacts on the card, cleaning the AGP slot, and retaping pins 3 and 11.

There's no obvious physical damage to the card.

Any thoughts on what could be going on?

Intell said:

Maybe the card died. Do you have another display to test it with?

Click to expand...

I only have the one ADC display, but have tried multiple displays on the DVI out...my normal set-up for the computer uses a 17" ADC Studio and 20" LCD(same monitor either via VGA or DVI depending on what card is in the computer).

I've tried it with just the 20" connected and no ADC, as well as a couple of random 17" LCDs I have lying around-either directly via DVI or a DVI-VGA adapter.

Well, I managed to SSH in, and System Profiler did not show the card being present at all. I guess I can conclude that the card is likely dead.

Either I'm having a string of bad luck, or this Quicksilver has a really nasty appetite for cards other than GeForce 4 MXs.

Intell said:

Maybe it has a failing power supply or logicboard that causes it to kill video cards. I suggest using only expendable video cards in that particular machine.

Click to expand...

I decided to crack open the PSU, and found a single capacitor with a "puffy" top on it...could a fault like this cause voltage spikes or other issues that could kill a video card?

I probably should hook the PSU up to my oscilloscope and see if I can see anything funny, although I doubt I could catch a spike.

For the mean time, I've replaced the PSU with another out of my parts stash, although I may try to replace the bad cap in this one.

Intell said:

A dirty power source could kill a video card.

Click to expand...

Okay, now you have my curiosity up.

As I mentioned, I'm out of town at the moment and away from most of my parts stash as well as my oscilloscope. As soon as I get back in town, however, I'm going to hook the "bad" PSU up to the scope and see what it looks like.

Of course, since my scope is analog and has no storage function, I don't know that I'd be able to see a spike, but at least the output should say something.