Note regarding ATI X1900 XT with Mac Pro, Leopard

To all who are experiencing any of the frequently reported problems with the hardware/software combination listed in the subject heading:

I purchased the ATI X1900 XT as an upgrade fro my Mac Pro in January. I never experienced any issues with the card in OS X Tiger, but several months ago I began to experience overheating issues in Windows XP (Boot Camp) when playing graphics-intensive games. The overheating caused visible graphics corruption/artifacts, graphics system resets and even spontaneous system restarts. The frequency and severity of these symptoms actually increased over time, leading me to believe that the card was either defective or that the overheating was causing degenerative/cumulative damage to the graphics hardware.

I recently upgraded to OS X Leopard, and all **** broke loose. Immediately after upgrading, I began to experience frequent graphics corruption/artifacts (in the form of spurious horizontal lines), system lockups/freezes and spontaneous system restarts. None of these issues were present in Tiger. The system became completely unreliable and essentially unusable.

It was initially a popular belief that Leopard's graphics drivers were somehow buggy or incompatible with the X1900 XT. After my experiences, I don’t believe that’s the case. I think that the issues reported are symptomatic of hardware, not software problems. Leopard is merely a catalyst. Leopard's increased leverage of OpenGL stresses the graphics hardware in ways that Tiger did not, causing an overall increase in graphics hardware temperature. I believe that the glitches/artifacts/system freezes/restarts that I experienced were not due to buggy drivers, but due to the graphics card overheating as a result of the increased load placed on it by Leopard.

I brought my X1900 XT in to my local Apple store today and asked for a replacement. Fortunately, they had one in stock, and they gave me a new card on the spot. The technician was apparently well aware of the issues, and mentioned that they have had a lot of similar problems with new iMacs.

Since installing the new card, I have experienced no graphics corruption, system freezes or spontaneous system restarts, either in OS X Leopard or in Windows XP gaming.

I would urge anyone who is experiencing problems with the X1900 XT (in either Windows or OS X) to have their card replaced by Apple - assuming that their card or system is still under warranty, that is.

I suspect one of two possible scenarios is true:

Theory #1: The Rev 1 X1900 XT is inherently flawed and has problems with overheating, which is exacerbated in OS X by upgrading to Leopard. Due to Leopard's greater leveraging of OpenGL, there is increased thermal stress placed on the card relative to Tiger. The overheating is evident in Leopard as graphics corruption/artifacts, system lockups/freezes and spontaneous restarts. The Rev 2 X1900 XT has (theoretically) corrected the problems inherent in Rev 1.

Theory #2. The thermal management system of the X1900 XT (all revisions) is inherently flawed. The card will slowly cook itself over time, and the effects are degenerative and cumulative. As the age of the card increases, so will the occurrence of graphics corruption, system freezes and spontaneous system restarts, especially when playing graphics-intensive games or running OS X Leopard.

I sincerely hope that Theory #1 is the case. I’ll be watching my system closely as I continue to use the new card, and hopefully there will be no further problems with overheating.

If theory #2 turns out to be true, then Apple has a huge PR nightmare on its hands, as each X1900 XT for the Mac is essentially a ticking time bomb that will self-destruct within months of purchase.

The funny thing is, this isn’t the first time I’ve had graphics card trouble with one of Apple’s “professional” towers. I bought a G5 several years ago when they were first released. I had problems with the stock nVidia graphics card in the form of what came to be known as the dreaded “black screen of death.” This became a commonly reported issue, experienced by many owners of the G5 in its first revision. Apple replaced my card and the problem never reoccurred. I’m hoping that I’ll be as lucky this time around.

I think it’s apparent that Apple’s batting average with graphics cards isn’t exactly stellar. It’s curious, considering that Apple offers a very limited selection of graphics options for their towers. One would think that by Apple only offering 3 graphics options, they would be able to have fairly tight control over the quality of the hardware, and plenty of time and resources to devote to testing. Unfortunately, I’ve had more graphics hardware-related problems on my Macs than any PCs I’ve ever used. That’s embarrassing, and Apple needs to do much better than this.

Mac Pro, Mac OS X (10.5), ATI X1900 XT, AJA Kona LHe, 250GB system HD, 3x500GB HD (RAID 0)

Posted on Nov 12, 2007 3:06 PM

27 replies

meesto

Level 1

0 points

Dec 3, 2007 1:19 AM in response to meesto

My X1900 started to do BSOD under WindowsXP a lot. I've had it replaced under Apple Care and while the EFI Driver version has not changed (as listed under System Profiler) I have noticed that the fan on the video card goes much faster and louder when asked to do more intensive work with playing back some video games under Windows.

Dec 4, 2007 3:41 PM in response to Community User

I am interested in this thread for a couple of reasons. After upgrading to Leopard I have had multiple system hangs and crashes. I also now see horizontal lines on each of my 30 inch cinema displays. The lines tend to be in different windows or parts of the desktops, so I am pretty sure it is a display card issue or driver.
I have downloaded the firmware update and it does not seem to help. Still system hangs and lines on the screens.
Maybe I should get Apple (I also pay for Applecare) to get me a newer card?
I run Lightroom instead of Aperture. I tend to fill both 30 inch screens when doing workflow and was wondering if two X1900 cards would provide better performance or quality?
Also the same issue when working in Final Cut Studio, would two cards better than one, without putting down the big dollars for the Quadro FX4500.
I saw in another forum a gentleman running three X1900s for two monitors. Any reason to do so other than gaming?

thanks in advance for your help.

Dec 4, 2007 4:57 PM in response to Community User

Just my 0.02$ here...

I've got a older Mac Pro (4*2.66- before the Octo's came out). Stock ATI X1900 XT, 512MB RAM.

Ran Tiger for years. No problems.

Upgraded to Leopard. No problems.

No artifacts, no issues. Zip, nothing, nada. I regularly stress the heck out of the card with Quake 4, Half Life 2 (Bootcamp), Crysis and UT3. In each case (OS X or Windows), I can clearly hear the X1900 XT revving up it's fans when I'm staring out on some massive render distance on some map.

I've been playing games for over 6 months now. No issues. Everything's been 100% fine.

This IS a Revision 1 card. Not a Rev 2.

I'm guessing it's more likely that Apple had a bad batch of cards with ether thermal issues with the interface material between the heatsink and the chipset, or some other issue with the fan's speed management on *certain units* released around the time the 8 core units came out. I doubt it would be a firmware issue as that could and would have been fixed.

Either way, I'm off to hammer the card with some TF2 @ 1920x1200 (High settings). It could be that I'm one of a few lucky people who have Rev 1 cards that are behaving, or it could be that there are 200-300 (out of thousands, millions!) people who //have// had problems and those are the people who are posting about it.

Either way, I'm guessing the hype about this problem is likely overblown (as usual), and Apple is working to fix the problem, so...

-SC

Dec 4, 2007 5:04 PM in response to ScottishCaptain

Just another note here guys...

There's an LED on the X1900 XT specifically for overheating conditions. It's on the rear-upper corner of the X1900 PCB. You can see this and another LED light up momentarily as the card initializes, when booting up or waking from sleep (though they'll go out again).

If you encounter any issues with the X1900 XT's, like hanging or artifacts, then pop open your case and look for any lit-up red LED's. If there's one on your X1900, then that will confirm that you've got an overheating card. If not, then it may or may not be an overheating issue, though I'd be tempted to say it might be a hardware issue elsewhere with a certain batch of cards.

-SC

Dec 4, 2007 9:23 PM in response to jasleinstein

Have you looked at the air intake slots on your card?

I also had the horizontal lines on my 30 inch immediately after upgrading to Leopard.

I saw the tip about air intake blockage on the X1900 fan, mentioned in other X1900 threads about this problem (but not this one I don't think), and was deeply sceptical, since Leopard didn't put the dirt there.

Anyway I looked at my card and the front copper coloured air intake slots were not visible at all because of the layer of fluff and dust on them. I cleaned it all out and have never seen the lines since.

Mike

Viper358

Level 1

45 points

Dec 10, 2007 1:51 PM in response to Community User

Alan Okey wrote:
David,

I'm sorry, but I don't know how to identify a Rev 2 card vs. a Rev 1. I can't be sure that the card I was given as a replacement is a Rev 2. So far I've had no problems, so hopefully I'll remain in the clear.

There's an extensive forum thread over at Blizzard's World of Warcraft forum that has a lot of details regarding this issue. I haven't waded through all of the posts, but there may be something of use in there somewhere:

http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=94000596&sid=1

The thread on the World of Warcraft forums has alot of useful info for anyone having problems with a X1900XT in the Mac Pro.

You CAN NOT tell what card you have by checking system profiler, you have to take the card out of the machine and look for a green label on the underside. When you find the green label look for a six digit number that has five zeros in it. Now for the list of the numbers.

000004 - These cards have had the most problems, I had one of these in my Mac Pro (bought Nov. '06) that I recently got replaced with a new one via Apple Care.

000006 - These cards were going out in early-mid '07. Most of them solved the issue but some reported still having problems.

000001 - These are the newest version (released Nov. '07 I think). They should completely solve any issues you are having, do not know of any reported problems with this version.

I only had some minor issues with the 000004 card in my Mac Pro but I decided to get it replaced and got a new 000001 card from Apple. If you check the card in your Mac Pro and it has a 000004 number I strongly advise you find out about getting it replaced. From what I have read the problem with the card is that it doesn't turn up the fan speed like it should so the card slowly cooks it's memory until its useless, thus even you aren't having problems now the card could go bad in the near future.

If your still under warranty check out the info in the World of Warcraft forums and then call Apple. They will ship the new part out to you with do-it-yourself instructions. Install the new card and send the old one back to them, all at no cost to you.

Message was edited by: Viper358

Quasar

Level 1

9 points

Jan 2, 2008 9:48 AM in response to Mike Boreham

Mike is exactly right, this is most likely a blockage of airflow on the card for most of the users experiencing this problem. I was having the exact same problem, and it was solved by removing the card and taking a vacuum to the cooling fins opposite the "leaf blower" where the air enters the card.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that the leaf blower was always spinning up to ultra sonic mode whenever I was gaming, it didn't it do it that much before, but it got noticeably worse as time went on. Even upping the fan speed for the PCI cooling zone didn't help, my card eventually overheated and my screen went black, multiple times. I had to resort to running games in windowed mode to ease the stress on the card.

After cleaning the dust, it's working like brand new, full screen mode in games doesn't even trigger the leaf blower on the card to run at ludicrous speed, runs very quiet.

So I just need to make a point to clean the card every few months, or whenever I start to notice the fan working a lot harder.

If you think about it, if the problem slowly got worse and worse, it's probably because of the slow buildup of dust blocking the air flow through the card.

cSticks

Level 1

15 points

Jan 3, 2008 2:47 PM in response to Community User

I have all of the horrible problems mentioned on here and numerous other threads (the lines, shutdowns, black screen, lockups, etc.) with my X1900 and 3ghz Mac Pro. And I'm still nowhere near convinced that it is only a hardware problem. Maybe I don't know enough to tell otherwise, but until someone could help explain this more in detail to prove otherwise, I am still sticking to the fact of serious flaws in Leopard itself.

My card is also not under the 1 year warranty, as I picked up the first Mac Pro instantly upon release and waited those few extra weeks specifically so I could get the X1900 BTO'd. So if it's not fixable by a firmware update or some bug fixes in Leopard, this is extremely maddening and basically renders my Mac Pro useless for all but the most basic tasks if Leopard is to be its OS (Tiger is my main OS right now for obvious reasons):

I realize that there are certainly hardware flaws possible in the ATI cards themselves, and of course at least a few of us are suffering from that (Which is to be expected with any complex electronics). But the sheer number of duplicate reports from thousands of users all at once, that came the moment Leopard was installed, I would highly suspect proves that there is an inherent serious problem with it.

Before people reply and say that this is solely due to Leopard's greater use of OpenGL in the OS vs. Tiger, here are a few things that still don't make sense to me along those lines:

1) When going back to Tiger on this same machine which displays huge graphic artifacts and freezes under Leopard, I experience no problems - no matter what I do or how hard I push it. I can simultaneously start 5 hugely CPU/GPU intensive apps that use OpenGL and to this day, have still not experienced even minor artifacts or freezes.

2) The same issue still exists on the other 2 machines we have at work which were purchased much later than my own. They both are Mac Pro's with the X1900; one was purchased less than 6 months ago. In addition, a couple friends that have had the same issues with this configuration bought and installed the Arctic Cooling fans, cleaned the cards like there's no tomorrow, yet still suffer the same fate.

3) While I've seen bad monitor cords make some odd display artifacts, the ones we all have are very consistent and can always be screenshot-ed. Plus, many of us have the more major problems like the black-screen freezes, shutdowns, etc. that are being caused by something bigger. I only mention this because a few people have brought up bad cords and I just wanted to answer that to be sure.

4) I have at least 4-5 or so complete freezes every day when running Leopard on this machine. But, I have never been presented with a kernel panic screen (I don't even know what the Leopard one looks like, as it's never been shown). Nor is there a crash log, hanglog, or PanicReporter entry logged for most freezes. It's just a restart and that's that - no traces that I can find.

5) This kind of goes along with the others, but I am too lazy to edit above. If excessive graphics usage by Leopard's OS itself are overloading the cards (or overheating), there is definitely something wrong with the programming. I find it really hard to believe that just running say Leopard + Safari honestly uses that much juice and completely kills the system, compared to running say Tiger + Safari + Maya + Warcraft (w/high graphics settings) + Graphing Calculator (Fun, why not). Again, if Leopard's basic UI is sucking up all of that power, it needs to be cut drastically. Or, the newer CoreGraphics/GL/etc routines need to be trimmed and debugged much more.

I doubt anyone will read all of that, but if anyone does - I would really like to hear any explanations anyone can offer. In my mind, these are very valid arguments that mostly point to bugs somewhere in Leopard and (for most of us) not in the graphic cards. But again, please prove me wrong and I will be more than happy to admit it as I would honestly very much like to get to the bottom of this debacle - and even more so, have a working Mac Pro running Leopard again.

IrishPen

Level 1

10 points

Jan 3, 2008 10:18 PM in response to Community User

I haven't actually bought my Mac Pro yet, I'm waiting till after MacWorld in case a new model is released. But anyways I was wondering if the ATI X1900 cards Apple ships are some how Apple specific, or if any off the shelf X1900 card will run in a Pro. Just think that for those whose warranty has run out, if there is no difference they might save some cash getting on local off the self then through Apple.

cSticks

Level 1

15 points

Jan 4, 2008 11:33 AM in response to Community User

With Leopard and my freezing issues mentioned in this thread and elsewhere, I only get a Crash Report window opened upon restarting about 1 out of 15 times. But a few minutes ago it froze when I triggered Expose, causing me to have to hard-restart it; and it finally gave me another Crash Report to send to Apple.

In it, I noticed that the main thread/part that it said crashed listed this:

Backtrace continues...
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.ATIRadeonX1000(5.1.8)@0x8fc000->0x955fff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(1.5)@0x8ee000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.4)@0x713000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(1.5)@0x8d2000
com.apple.driver.AppleIntelCPUPowerManagement(9.25.0)@0xbea000->0xc01fff

Which, from what I can tell, definitely shows some type of failure in the ATIRadeon driver included in Leopard(?) Can anyone shed some light on this, and tell me if this points to something specific - particularly all of the problems so many of us are having with Leopard + X1900? Thanks.

Jan 6, 2008 9:24 AM in response to cSticks

I am on my 3rd X1900 on my 3 gig Mac Pro

The first two (the one it came with in early Sept 06 and the replacment in May 07) both degraded over time and the problems were seen mostly in WoW and in the high end 3D Solid Cad software And even then only in complex rendering) I run on my multi monitor system
the latest card I got in late Nov and while I was waiting the 3 days to get it I kept things going by hooking up a air line to blow cold air on the card.

While dealing with apple care the last time I had no problems getting a replacment in just 2 days( once bumped up a few levels in the system) (the senior tech said that top gues right now is that the thermal paste is degradeing between the GP and the GP heat sink.

90% of the other software That I use in work was not affected as it was not stressing the GP enough to get it hot

but if this is in deed linked to ageing of the thermal paste then Apple may be looking at a very large number of graphics card replacments over the next few years.

the rumor mill is saying that either the X1900 will be replaced as of macWorld this month or it will be bumped down to the #2 position by a new high end graphics card for the mac pro...

we shall see

Feb 25, 2008 9:57 AM in response to Mike Boreham

Here's another data point. I was getting the horizontal lines, bruises, other artifacts and frozen displays (dual 20" Cinema) on my dual dual 2.66 Pro. I could SSH in from another machine while frozen and see that everything else looked pretty normal. I saw it on Tiger, but it was getting worse over time, therefore (or otherwise) worse on Leopard. I pulled the X1900 and sure 'nuff, a thick layer of carpet fluff over the thin copper fins on the air intake. It has been perfect since slurping it off. Thanks you guys! Oh, and its quieter now.

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Note regarding ATI X1900 XT with Mac Pro, Leopard