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Weird Mac Pro screen issue....help

peejack said:
Ok,

I spoke to my specialist today. The engineers want to swap my machine over again :rolleyes:.

I don't think they are aware of what the issue is yet really, but I think we can rule out the assembly country has anything to do with it as the rep said they literally just put the bits together and the BTO are done in Ireland but all have the same parts.

Anyway im waiting to hear back from him again today.

So ill be back.....hopefully :)
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Are you already on your second machine? Have you swapped once already?

Man, mine just shut off on it's own. Once last night and again about an hour ago. Just shut completely off.
I guess it's back to Apple she goes.......:mad:
 
4God said:
Are you already on your second machine? Have you swapped once already?

Man, mine just shut off on it's own. Once last night and again about an hour ago. Just shut completely off.
I guess it's back to Apple she goes.......:mad:
Click to expand...

Yep on the second well third if you count the very first one that had a fan problem.

I have been out this afternoon and the apple guy has tried to get hold of me but I missed him, he says he has some options of what to do now.

He is off tomorrow so I will get to speak to him Thursday and see what they are going to do.

Thanks
 
peejack said:
Yep on the second well third if you count the very first one that had a fan problem.

I have been out this afternoon and the apple guy has tried to get hold of me but I missed him, he says he has some options of what to do now.

He is off tomorrow so I will get to speak to him Thursday and see what they are going to do.

Thanks
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I'm back on the phone with Applecare now waiting for another specialist........
Maybe I'll wait a couple more days before I decide to send it back, I really can't be without a machine for a week.
 
4God said:
I'm back on the phone with Applecare now waiting for another specialist........
Maybe I'll wait a couple more days before I decide to send it back, I really can't be without a machine for a week.
Click to expand...

I would wait, see what they have to say first it's not as if it's unusable it just need to be sorted.
 
4God said:
I'm back on the phone with Applecare now waiting for another specialist........
Maybe I'll wait a couple more days before I decide to send it back, I really can't be without a machine for a week.
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I am not a fan of Apple Care on the phone, in fact, if there is any other problem again, I will not call them, lol. Are you near any Apple Stores? I find the Genius Bar to be superior. Usually you can tell them you tried everything and they will just give you a new computer. I too can't be without a computer for a week. Those days were so painful when the MacPro wasn't working right.
 
darthraige said:
I am not a fan of Apple Care on the phone, in fact, if there is any other problem again, I will not call them, lol. Are you near any Apple Stores? I find the Genius Bar to be superior. Usually you can tell them you tried everything and they will just give you a new computer. I too can't be without a computer for a week. Those days were so painful when the MacPro wasn't working right.
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The closest store is about 25-30 minutes away. The only problem is that I have a CTO machine (single cpu) and would have to wait for a new one anyway. The good news is that they just emailed me the FedEx shipping tags and they will release a new one to me when the tags are scanned from FedEx. So I shouldn't have to wait more than 2-3 days.

EDIT: Maybe sooner, I just asked if I could pay the difference to upgrade to the base config of 8 cores and they said yes and that I would get a 24-48 hour turn around. :D
 
4God said:
The closest store is about 25-30 minutes away. The only problem is that I have a CTO machine (single cpu) and would have to wait for a new one anyway. The good news is that they just emailed me the FedEx shipping tags and they will release a new one to me when the tags are scanned from FedEx. So I shouldn't have to wait more than 2-3 days.

EDIT: Maybe sooner, I just asked if I could pay the difference to upgrade to the base config of 8 cores and they said yes and that I would get a 24-48 hour turn around. :D
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Awesome! Welcome to the Tower of 8-core power. lol You'll like it better than the 4-core.
 
4God said:
The closest store is about 25-30 minutes away. The only problem is that I have a CTO machine (single cpu) and would have to wait for a new one anyway. The good news is that they just emailed me the FedEx shipping tags and they will release a new one to me when the tags are scanned from FedEx. So I shouldn't have to wait more than 2-3 days.

EDIT: Maybe sooner, I just asked if I could pay the difference to upgrade to the base config of 8 cores and they said yes and that I would get a 24-48 hour turn around. :D
Click to expand...

Good to hear? Who did you have to talk to, to get it fixed?
 
Mr.PS said:
Good to hear? Who did you have to talk to, to get it fixed?
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I had to go through some hoops and about a total of 2 and a half hours on the phone. I probably dealt with 4 different specialists. The last one was really helpful and shared the engineering notes with me. They seem to think it has something to do with the memory or the memory risers, namely the top one. He shared with me that they were thinking that it had something to do with the upper one even though the design change helps it to run cooler. Of course it could be just speculation, but even after I mentioned what my thoughts were they still think it's Apple's RAM or the risers.
 
4God said:
I had to go through some hoops and about a total of 2 and a half hours on the phone. I probably dealt with 4 different specialists. The last one was really helpful and shared the engineering notes with me. They seem to think it has something to do with the memory or the memory risers, namely the top one. He shared with me that they were thinking that it had something to do with the upper one even though the design change helps it to run cooler. Of course it could be just speculation, but even after I mentioned what my thoughts were they still think it's Apple's RAM or the risers.
Click to expand...

Oh really??? They don't think it's the Video cards then?
 
Now my pm froze in the start... with strange graphic error over the screen.. Guess i have to rethink and perhaps sending away my comp after all. :(
 
4God said:
Nope, not the video cards - so they say.
Click to expand...

It would have to be pretty hard to be the RAM riser board - there aren't that many things on that little board anyway, so either 1) Whoever design the riser board needs to get fired for messing up a small edit on an existing design to support 800 FSB ram or 2) they are "in love" with AMD/ATI so they don't want to "ruin" their reputation or 3) they screw up the firmware/driver, but don't want to admit it's their fault...

Only reason I am saying this is that RAM is usually one of the easiest area to test - just run it overnight and if it doesn't crash for like 2 days, you are good to go...
 
noi375 said:
It would have to be pretty hard to be the RAM riser board - there aren't that many things on that little board anyway, so either 1) Whoever design the riser board needs to get fired for messing up a small edit on an existing design to support 800 FSB ram or 2) they are "in love" with AMD/ATI so they don't want to "ruin" their reputation or 3) they screw up the firmware/driver, but don't want to admit it's their fault...

Only reason I am saying this is that RAM is usually one of the easiest area to test - just run it overnight and if it doesn't crash for like 2 days, you are good to go...
Click to expand...

I know, it is kinda off base. I'm thinking they just didn't want to admit some silly mistake or they didn't want to give me real inside info.
Before I finish packing it up for return I should pop the video card out and see if I can take some pics or something and maybe when
the new one arrives see if there's any difference (part numbers and such).
 
4God said:
I know, it is kinda off base. I'm thinking they just didn't want to admit some silly mistake or they didn't want to give me real inside info.
Before I finish packing it up for return I should pop the video card out and see if I can take some pics or something and maybe when
the new one arrives see if there's any difference (part numbers and such).
Click to expand...

Please do - should be some sort of model and revision number information on the card itself, so just keep that in mind when you get the new one. Too bad I don't know how you can track the EFI version information from the video card itself, as that might be the problem too...
 
I have had this problem happen at least 10 times within 2 weeks. I am going to call Apple Care also in the morning.
 
Phooey. Add one more to the list. I recieve my Mac Pro "standard" config on Sunday and the screen goofiness happened last night. I'd like to believe this is going to be a one time glitch, but my fear is that it will not be. My last Apple desktop was a dual processor G5 when Tiger was released. This was an ATI card as well and I occasionally had some screen goofiness that was resolved with a driver update.

I hope the resolution to our woes is as easy when it's all said and done.
 
I have had this happen 3 times in the 12 days I've had the machine. Once it happened when nothing was running, while the dock was in the process of sliding off the screen.

Mine seems a lot less bad than some, so I'm going to leave it until the problem is resolved. I can work with this level of instability (it's no worse than MacOS 9!). The last thing I want is to have my machine replaced with a worse one.

Barney.
 
barneyntd said:
I have had this happen 3 times in the 12 days I've had the machine. Once it happened when nothing was running, while the dock was in the process of sliding off the screen.

Mine seems a lot less bad than some, so I'm going to leave it until the problem is resolved. I can work with this level of instability (it's no worse than MacOS 9!). The last thing I want is to have my machine replaced with a worse one.

Barney.
Click to expand...
Yes, it sounds like the replacements aren't necessarily better. I think I'm going to hold onto mine for a bit, since this is not too troublesome, yet.

Occasionally, I have also noticed, for the lack of a better word, "tracers" in the dock when icons grow and and shrink when I move the cursor over them. I don't know if there's any relation here, but it may be worth noting.

I'd had an issue like this in Windows-land years ago and it was indeed an issue with the video card. I my case, I think it was simply a bad card since the exact replacement worked just fine.
 
blackgmc said:
I have had this problem happen at least 10 times within 2 weeks. I am going to call Apple Care also in the morning.
Click to expand...

Good move. It seems that the longer I waited, the worse it got.

Carl Spackler said:
Phooey. Add one more to the list. I recieve my Mac Pro "standard" config on Sunday and the screen goofiness happened last night. I'd like to believe this is going to be a one time glitch, but my fear is that it will not be. My last Apple desktop was a dual processor G5 when Tiger was released. This was an ATI card as well and I occasionally had some screen goofiness that was resolved with a driver update.

I hope the resolution to our woes is as easy when it's all said and done.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was hoping for a firmware update or driver update with 10.5.2 but so far nothing. When I spoke with Apple though, they seem to think it's the ram or one of the risers. I hope yours is a one time glitch.

barneyntd said:
I have had this happen 3 times in the 12 days I've had the machine. Once it happened when nothing was running, while the dock was in the process of sliding off the screen.

Mine seems a lot less bad than some, so I'm going to leave it until the problem is resolved. I can work with this level of instability (it's no worse than MacOS 9!). The last thing I want is to have my machine replaced with a worse one.

Barney.
Click to expand...

At least yours is bearable for now. I just hope for all of us that Apple released some sort of fix soon.


EDIT: I wonder if anyone with these issues has tried using Bootcamp and if it did the same thing in Windows? Hmmm.......
 
I just got off the phone with one of my friends at Work. They just bought a New Mac Pro 3 days ago from a Apple Store he has the same problem it happen twice to him . I think you guy's are right about getting a replacement. I am just gonna wait it out. I got a NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GT on order so I will just wait. I still think its a graphic card or software problem.

Thanks
 
Carl Spackler said:
As the issues occur randomly, or so it seems, this may not mean too much, but one user at the Apple Disccussion thread noted no problems in bootcamp.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I just saw that too. I was gonna try it myself but got fed up with the constant freezes and shut downs to bother with it.

BTW, I'm user "Dave at the River" on the Apple support forums and I've posted in that thread.
 
4God said:
Yeah, I just saw that too. I was gonna try it myself but got fed up with the constant freezes and shut downs to bother with it.

BTW, I'm user "Dave at the River" on the Apple support forums and I've posted in that thread.
Click to expand...


Your MP was shutting down by it self ?
 
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