Hello forum members, today I received a Mac mini G4 and connected it to the monitor with a DVI/HDMI cable and when booting, the monitor turned on and there was an Apple logo for a couple of seconds, but after that, pixels began to flicker on the screen and stripes appeared. After that, the screen blinked a couple of times and displayed a black screen. The monitor remained on. The cable can transmit up to 30 hz. What should I do?
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Mac Mini G4 Black Screen
- Thread starter Atarist777
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My guess is the VRAM went bad and the unit is not repairable (or you could replace the logic board but that's kind of the whole system).
If not maybe the monitor is feeding back a resolution to the graphics card that it can't support? When you say the cable can transmit 30Hz, I assume you mean 4K @ 30Hz? Note that the graphics on that vintage of Mac Mini can only support ~ 1080p (technically max. 1920x1200 @ 60Hz or various resolutions up to 135MHz). If you happen to have a monitor that know will support lower resolutions, you could try testing it just to confirm it doesn't work better.
Curious, what do you plan to do with this?
Does your monitor have VGA input? Or did you go DVI->VGA->HDMI->monitor?
Either way it is interesting that worked but DVI->HDMI->monitor didn't. Your description of the display patterns sounded like a VRAM issue to me. That this worked suggests the resolution mismatch as the issue and going through VGA sidesteps it.
As someone who still has a soft spot for my now departed Mac Mini 2009, I am still curious what you plan to do with a Mac Mini G4...