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CoffeeMonkey

macrumors regular
Original poster
Feb 23, 2003
108
0
Last month, I purchased the Radeon x800 Mac Edition, and while it looks beautiful most of the time, I've found that when my computer is running more than 5 hours, I start getting green speckles in odd patterns all over the display. (They are gone upon reboot). This happened right around the time that 10.3.8 came out, so I wrote it off as a driver issue that would eventually get fixed.

I finally got on the phone with ATI support (a toll call, btw). They've never heard of the problem, but they think it is a problem with the card, and said I could send it to them for repairs. But they didn't know how long it would take, and they didn't have any useful suggestions as to what I would do for a video card in the meantime. (I no longer have the original video card).

Fortunately, CDW has a great return policy and is sending me an RMA to return the card for refund to them within 10 days.

So what do I do?

Should I borrow a Radeon 9600 from a friend and wait until the x800 becomes available again (its on backorder until late March)? Should I replace the x800 with the nVidia card (tempting since I am none too happy with ATI)? Should I trade down to the 9800?

To be honest, the only thing I really use the x800 for is WoW, and while the graphics boost is nice, I'm not having any more fun playing the game than I did with the 9600 (which is still a ton o' fun).

Any thoughts would be greatly appreciated!
 
Overheating video card?

Big problem on the earlier ATI cards in the G5 -- so they heard quite a bit about it from Apple -- but not really any consumers.

If your frame rates went up, there is a chance that 10.3.8 made more use of the card than previous version, allowing it to overheat.

---

We'll probably see more of these post around the beginning of summer...
 
Sounds like you would be perfectly happy with a 9800 and save some bucks, too. I'd go for the refund.
 
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