display anomalies

I have never seen a problem in my machine safebooted, nor has Apple Hardware Test reported a hardware issue running for overnight in loop mode. Those facts suggest a software problem. I have submitted a bug report to Apple, who seem to acknowledge a bug and have linked my bug report to an existing bug. No resolution has been reported.

My machine has been running happily on Leopard 10.5.8 with no ATIRadeonX1000.kext, after cleaning out software corruption using the previously published recipes. Machine has been quite stable for nearly 12 months and still runs screen grab, VLC, Quicktime player and nearly every thing else I use daily. Only trouble I have is Google Sketchup having trouble with 3d rendering and Safari crashing on various apple pages (appleTV scrolling and these discussions pages). Apple DVD player will not run.

10.6.x is definitely different and wants to talk to the ATI chip for more.

Well on my machine I can probably rule out software as being the issue. After the machine sat for three hours without the PRAM hooked up and an SMC reset, I installed the MacBook's drive. Upon first boot, like before, the grey screen even before the apple logo had display issues across it. Several reboots, PRAM resets, SMC rests, etc. Nothing, same thing. The machine seemed fairly stable though. Just not usable.

So in my case, it have to reverse my belief that its soley software that is the issue. I think it can still be a combo of both.... but...

I decided to remove the board. Last time I did this was a month ago when I got it working. I then took a hair-dryer and super-heated the motherboard. I know a heat gun is recommended, but I thought this would be worth a shot before I get a real heat gun. I doubted it could melt the solder. And if it did, I would have surface mount resistors flying all over! It did not, and after applying lots of heat and letting the board cool, I reinstalled.

Then I immedialy swapped back the original MacBook Pro's drive. And presto, the machine is once again stable and running like nothing happened. Spore runs fine, fans are running minimal, etc.

I dont know what to make of it, my machine could be the exception and not the norm. But it changes my perspective a bit.

marco...POLLO! wrote:

Then I immedialy swapped back the original MacBook Pro's drive. And presto, the machine is once again stable and running like nothing happened. Spore runs fine, fans are running minimal, etc.

Hope you'll forgive me if I don't remember or go back and reread the 70 pages in this thread . . . plenty of others have posted in these forums about issues with aftermarket drives. Some have surmised that Apple uses their own firmware, so even though you might get the exact same manufacturer/model, it behaves differently. I do not know the accuracy of that, but just thought I'd mention it. Also, check for firmware updates from the HD's manufacturer, as that has also been an issue in the past.

Not sure what you are saying. Although I understand it, I think you took my bit out of centext. But to summerize, there has been some belief that there may be both hardware and software issues here. After I had the issues, I put in a vergin drive and still hade the issues. Then after heating up the board, I put in the same drive were the issues started and did not delete/clean anything - yet the display problems were gone (and still are as of now). I was just mentioning that since it, at least in this case, ruled out software corruption.

Just to add, I have a MBP 3,1 that under Leopard and Snow Leopard was excellent until I installed OS X Lion, which then I've had artifacts on the screen while booting and a ocassional just goes black death syndrome.

I've reinstalled thrice, from seperate means, same issues.

Went back to Snow Leopard and rebooted twice, once EFI was flushed it ran like normal.

Hope this helps the enginneer who has fix these issues, god bless your soul you got work. 🙂

Throw my name on the pile as well (iMac4,1 20", 2G, 10.6.8). Pretty much all of the hangs I experienced were while a video was playing, typically Netflix streaming. And I am just now playing with removing ATIRadeonX1000.kext. In doing so, I have made an interesting observation.

I also have smcFanControl installed. Normally, when I would play a video, the temperature of the GPU would climb, but the fan would not speed up. I never understood that. With that .kext removed, the fan does speed up when playing a video. Normally, the fan is at 800 RPM. While playing a YouTube video, the speed climbed to 956 RPM. This didn't happen with the .kext installed.

Anyone else concur with this?

As it stands, I am just avoiding playing videos on my iMac; kinda *****.

marco...POLLO! wrote:

Not sure what you are saying. Although I understand it, I think you took my bit out of centext. But to summerize, there has been some belief that there may be both hardware and software issues here. After I had the issues, I put in a vergin drive and still hade the issues. Then after heating up the board, I put in the same drive were the issues started and did not delete/clean anything - yet the display problems were gone (and still are as of now). I was just mentioning that since it, at least in this case, ruled out software corruption.

Thought you were implying it might have something to do with the HD. Understand what you mean now. 😉

hi guys. great news for my mac.

my model is macbook pro 2,2 so 2.33ghz, 120gb, ati radeon x1600 256mb.

i'm runnning without any kind of issue lion 10.7.1. what i've done is:

thermal paste changing

hard cleaning of mptherboard, fans etc

hard disk changing to a 7200 rpm 500 gb

pram battery discottected for 30 minutes

smc reset

clean lion install booting from lion 10.7.1 dvd made by myself

that's it!

this morning i had to crash, without graphic artifacts. gpu temperature was high, near 60 °.

then i installed fan control 1.2, and i put the 2 fans to the highest rpm. now temperature is near 47-50°, i'm watching a film, using ken shiro flash application and running a youtube video.

the problem is both hardware and software. we have to find out a way to keep gpu temperature near 45 °. any idea?

I have thrown in the towell with mine. But for those of you still trying to work through whatever issues, I just wanted to report that I installed Linux on mine and the display artifacts are even worse under Linux.

Another update. After heating up the mobo with a simple hair dryer, things have been well. Until last night. I decided to install Myth III. The case got a lot hotter than usual. After playing I decided to watch some TV shows in VLC. On the third 40 minute episode artifacts and a hard crash. I forgot I had set the boot up drive into Windows. Upon booting into windows there were a ton of artifacts. It did not make it to the desktop. After a black screen for about 15 seconds I got a blue screen of death. It did a physical memory dump. The issue, it says, was with an ATI driver. Which makes sense. But at the blue screen, no artifacts.

Then after re-booting into 10.6, all is will again for now. Normally once I get artifacts, they are there for good. Booting into Windows seems to have purged them for now. Since I had artifacts in the Windows booting, I can say that in my case its hardware that is at fault.

marco...POLLO! wrote:

Since I had artifacts in the Windows booting, I can say that in my case its hardware that is at fault.

Seems so, but very strange.

Are you thinking the Windows memory dump did basically the same thing that you had done earlier in this thread, clearing the PRAM totally (beyond the normal PRAM reset)?

This thread has gotten so long I don't even remember what I've posted, but this behavior reminds me of some cases (outside of this thread) where L2 or L3 cache had gone bad, leading me to wonder if it might be cache or VRAM in some of the cases in this thread.

17 hours to game time. 😉

Watched the Brewers while eating at River's Bend last night; even though it ended well, I hope not to see quite as much drama with GB tomorrow.

Well originally I suspected PRAM, since hard clearing did something. Then it came back and I had a virigin OS X install on a drive I swapped in. Issue was there. And now when booting into Windows, it was there. After blue death, cleaned up for just a little while. I think that will catch ya up! lol But basically what I am getting at is that between the clean OS X and Windows, its likely not software. That maybe does not rule out some weird PRAM issue or something of the sort. But in my case, I dont think it can be software as many have suspected. So in a nutshell, I am back in the group that think its a hardware issue. I am going to put a heat source on the chipset again and I bet it clears up - until I push the hardware too hard again.

I've been to River's Bend once. I have a friend whos mom works there. Was packed pretty good for a Packer game.

Hi macro...

I was wondering if you had any tools to dump the PRAM contents, could put a rest to if it gets corrupted, with bad settings.

My System MBP1,1 RadeonX1600,VRAM (Total): 256 MB,EFI Driver Version: 01.00.068

I am getting the zigzag, whole screen effect patern when the fault occurs, it looks to me like the thing that scans the video memory and produces a picture from it, is misreading every so often, I'd say a bit or two on the address bus are wrong, or the settings used to explain the structure of video memory to the hardware that scans

it are wrong.

Others with the issue have posted example below.

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=690920

I'm wondering if this is the same issue as the line of corruption accross the screen, but a different bit getting corrupt . I'm on Latest Snow Lep 1440 x 900

When this problem happens, I lose access to GUI applications can update the gui, mouse still moves and ssh access still works, trying to kill window manager via ssh and restart it fails with the application hanging. Basically the video chip isn't happy at this point.

Without ATIRadeonX1000.kext

The screen corruption still happens less often, but everything still works, and it can unhappen, the zigzag grid, can change pattern, and get worse/less or go compeltely.. This tells me the vram has good data in it, no redrawing is needed.

Without ATIFramebuffer.kext

Seems to work fine, however Flash things like youtube in the browser are compeltely transparent, and allow you to click on items under the web browser, rather strange...

I'm guessing without ATIFramebuffer the way data is held and used from vram is different.

I'm trying to find a Flash version with no GPU Acceleration to get around this.???

When i reboot after its gone wrong, the pattern remains right from the start almost always, unless i let mac cool down and then theres a good change of a clean boot.

When the boot process gets to change the screen from grey, to pure blue it always fixed the issue, for a while at least. I believe at this point the ATI is reset, and programmed with display settings. This always fixes it so a physically solder failure due to heat, can be ruled out by this.

If I could redo this ATI reset by a command line util, I could problerly run the mac fine, and have a autofixing task to reset the display if it stops working.????

On linux you can switch from Xwindows to a console and back, it dumps video settingts and restores them, a similar thing for mac would help.

The problem started after a period of running the mac hot, and the problem occurs at random with increased chance based on heat.

My thoery is there are bits of data held in the ATI that hold values to do with scanning video memory, 1 of these is subseptiable to a few bits going corrupt, these registers are not cleared by a normal power off or PRAM reset.

But can be cleared by software reinitializing the ATI something that I guess installing linux would do every start of X windows.

Be nice to have a util to dump out all the ATI internal settings, then I can compare working, and crashed display values.

iMac2006 ATY1600... same fking problem. Can't play any game...