All of us run into trouble, even with our Macs. Today, I lead you through my latest issue, my ATi Radeon 9800 Pro Mac (128 MB version) making less than pretty pictures. I’m going to go into some detail because it’s all consuming for me right now. More after the jump.
Recently, I noticed some discoloration on my displays (I have two). They were small pink lines as seen in the picture for this post. I tried to shrug it off as restarting the computer seemed to make it go away. However, it came back, with a real vengeance. Moving windows around made things worse.
A quick post in the forums got a response. Apparently, this isn’t an isolated issue (I wouldn’t call it widespread either). There was even a posted question on MetaFilter. This issue seems to be rooted in the ATi Radeon 9800 Pro video card (I couldn’t find similar reports for other cards).
At first, I started investigating purchasing a replacement, but I was hesitant about the same model. The Radeon 9600 for Mac and PC seemed like a good replacement, but benchmarks on the web showed it to be a much inferior card (though very affordable). The thought of warranty didn’t even cross my mind.
When another poster suggested I look into it, it turns out there’s a three year warranty. Seeing as I bought the card a year ago as of a couple days ago (odd timing), I figure I’ll give it a shot and give a running account here. It’s not often one is offered the opportunity to give a public audit of a Mac product maker’s support infrastructure, but I’ll take it.
Have any of you run into this issue or have any experiences with ATi in this type of situation?
Interesting. I've got a Radeon 9800 Pro on my homebuilt PC, and it's been very well-behaved, even though I've softmodded it with hacked drivers to enable all eight pipelines (the 9800 Pro is basically a driver-crippled version of the 9800-thanks, ATI Marketing!). Granted, there are a bunch of a different OEM versions; I wonder if the version in the Mac is ATI or an OEM.
Derik, I've got a Radeon 9800 Pro SE (256 MB version) in my Power Mac G5. The card is over-clocked by about 10% and I haven't had any problems whatsoever. My only complaint about it is the noise from the fan. It's much louder compared to the nVidia crap-o-card my machine came with.
I hope your experiences are much more indicative of the quality of this card. I don't want to have to get the card repaired twice!