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Mac Pro 1,1 Flashed 4870 failing (?) with Starcraft2

N

neilg

macrumors member
Original poster
Nov 6, 2002
52
101
uk
I'm running a Mac Pro 1,1 with a flashed ATI HD4870 - everything has been fine since getting the card back in March - played HL2 and Torchlight with nice framerates and no problems.
I bought Starcraft 2 today, partly to give the new card a proper workout.
Everything looked great to start with — smooth graphics, nice lighting effects etc. then I started to get flashing lines and angular artifacts appearing all over the screen.
Now, thing is, this is what happened to my old X1900 XT when playing WoW. At first just slight graphic glitches and flashes but, over time, getting worse more quickly until the game became unplayable within minutes of starting it up. Getting the HD4870 fixed this and I was able to play WoW no problems after that.

I'm just wondering if this means my card is (already) on its way out - deteriorating like the X1900 did - or if it's something else in the computer that might be showing signs of stress?
I haven't seen anything here about the HD4870 failing on Starcraft.

Any ideas would be helpful. Thanks.
 
Which ROM did you use to flash? I know that one of the most prevalent ones floating around was for XFX's XXX 4870 which was actually bios overclocked a little bit. I found it to be a little unstable at times when running the most graphics intensive games (i.e. when I gave Crysis a go) because I'd used it to flash my XFX non XXX card. The problem went away when I used the Catalyst driver to clock my card at stock levels instead in Windows. In OSX I never really played any graphics intensive games. WoW being the only game I ever really played in OSX and a quick play through of Portal 2 when Steam came out for Mac.
 
neilg said:
then I started to get flashing lines and angular artifacts appearing all over the screen.
Click to expand...

There's a very good chance that the card is overheating.

Try getting one of the many SMC editors and cranking up the PCI bay fans a bit. Try 1200 RPM for a while (it's a bit noisy) and see what happens.

Maury
 
hi guys - thanks for the replies.

Spanky Deluxe - I don't know what the Rom was - I used Cindori's ATI Flash app to flash the card (In true Apple user fashion, I took the pre-prepared route involving little technical knowledge on my part) but I suspect it wasn't an overclocked Rom just a basic one - I'll see if Cindori can let me know.


Maury - thanks for the tip - i've downloaded a smcFanControl and got my fans working harder - i also cleaned and reattached my card cooler - i think i was running the thing at way too hot for a while now - i suspect i've fried this card but i bought another anyway and even buying two cards it's still cheaper than the Apple-branded option.
Maybe I'll wait to see what the guys can do with the 5770/5870 options - apparently, these may run cooler anyway.

Thanks all.
 
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