Nvidia 6800 AGP in G5 vram issues/artefacting

[trondl]

I have a DC 2.0 2003 G5 with 8gb ram and ATI 9600 pro running 10.5.8 from ssd.

Last year I bought a 6800 DDL Ultra that had seen alot of use, and it showed wavy vertical lines and caused a grinding halt before login in osx.
Single user boot gave me a desktop but stil a bit different wavy artefacting.
ASD 2.5.8 returned vram issues.
I gave up and returned to the 9600 pro.

Now, I bought a cheap 6800 DDL GT that was still in the box and in mint condition for cheap, and it too showed exactly the same symtoms, although a bit less artefacts in single user mode.

What are the odds for this?
Do I have an issue with the AGP port?
Others with the same issue?
I’m handy with the iron if it is needed.

 

[davisdelo]

I have a DC 2.0 2003 G5 with 8gb ram and ATI 9600 pro running 10.5.8 from ssd.

Last year I bought a 6800 DDL Ultra that had seen alot of use, and it showed wavy vertical lines and caused a grinding halt before login in osx.
Single user boot gave me a desktop but stil a bit different wavy artefacting.
ASD 2.5.8 returned vram issues.
I gave up and returned to the 9600 pro.

Now, I bought a cheap 6800 DDL GT that was still in the box and in mint condition for cheap, and it too showed exactly the same symtoms, although a bit less artefacts in single user mode.

What are the odds for this?
Do I have an issue with the AGP port?
Others with the same issue?
I’m handy with the iron if it is needed.

Sounds like you have a Dual Processor (DP) not a Dual Core (DC) G5. It's fairly easy to troubleshoot video cards in the DC G5 since you can simply swap the card into another PCIe slot, or even install multiple cards. If your on a DP G5 then you have an AGP card, which unfortunately I can't help you with.

 

[Project Alice]

I have a DC 2.0 2003 G5 with 8gb ram and ATI 9600 pro running 10.5.8 from ssd.

Last year I bought a 6800 DDL Ultra that had seen alot of use, and it showed wavy vertical lines and caused a grinding halt before login in osx.
Single user boot gave me a desktop but stil a bit different wavy artefacting.
ASD 2.5.8 returned vram issues.
I gave up and returned to the 9600 pro.

Now, I bought a cheap 6800 DDL GT that was still in the box and in mint condition for cheap, and it too showed exactly the same symtoms, although a bit less artefacts in single user mode.

What are the odds for this?
Do I have an issue with the AGP port?
Others with the same issue?
I’m handy with the iron if it is needed.

I had a similar problem that I decided was my AGP port going bad.
I have a DP 2.0Ghz that had a Radeon 9800 Pro in it that one day started artifacting really bad and didn’t display any of the colors correctly.
I actually have 3 G5’s, so I pulled out a video card from one of the other ones. They all had GeForce 5200s installed. Well, the 2ghz DP would never boot to the desktop with the GeForce installed. The furthest it would get in Tiger or Leopard is a blue screen after the grey startup screen. I think I actually have a unresolved thread on here somewhere about this.
I even boot the G5 off of multiple different OS X installations and could never get past the blue screen. The only thing that did was a Tiger install DVD but once installed it wouldn’t work.

Anyways, I ordered a 6800 Ultra DDL because I wanted a replacement for the 9800 Pro and a 5200 wasn’t going to cut it. The 6800 arrived, I installed it and it did the same thing as the 5200s.

I proceeded to pull everything out of that 2Ghz DP G5 and stuck it into a DP 1.8Ghz. Including the 6800. Low and behold it booted up just fine. I still haven’t tested my Radeon in another machine but I may get around to it for curiosity. Something tells me it will probably work, as the G5 being unable to boot with a GeForce and has many display problems with a Radeon probably has something wrong with the Logicboard or AGP slot.

This all occurred after I had spent a week trying to figure out why UT 2004 wouldn’t launch (a game that I can even play on my G4 upgraded B&W), I then tried to play a game that would actually tax a G5, “prey”. That is when the artifacts arrived in the first place and when the G5 exhibited these symptoms.
With the dual 1.8 I changed to it has had zero problems playing any games.

 

[trondl]

Thanks for the input!
Yes it’s a DP, not a DC as I incorrectly stated.
My problem is that the ati 9600 card works flawlessly, even with the completely dried up thermal glue/pad I found while doing a full teardown of the G5, including psu dust cleanup and new paste on the cpu’s and gpu (scary moment when powering on after such complicated surgery).
I haven’t tried the 6800 after the teardown but I will give some contact cleaning on the agp port a chance.

 

[trondl]

The weirdest thing just happened!
I installed the 6800 GT card and booted into single user mode.
It showed artefacts during boot, but suddenly after I got a desktop, the artefacts disapeared.
I rebooted to normal boot and everythink was fine.
ASD gave an error on one of the vram tests but succeded in 4 of them.
I removed the card to apply new thermal paste to the gpu.
I then tried a youtube video and the glitches came back after a little while.
The AGP port is suspect no1 at the moment. Will give it a round of iso tomorrow.