2009 Early iMac Freezing 2.93GHz,24", ATI 4850

I still have no solution or a computer that will work without freezing. Personally I'm $2500 into my iMac. In my opinion they need to get my imac fixed fast. I don't know bout you guys but when I spend 2500 I expect to get what I payed for. It SHOCKS me to hear how many people are having problems, and how many are willing to keep it even with the problems. I mean if I buy a car, and it breaks down on the way to work, I wont keep it. I got a computer that wont compute, that doesn't work for me. 3 or more freezes a day is a lemon product for computers.
I'm still a sour apple.

There are just as many if not more people that aren't having the problem. Your $2500 isn't going anywhere but in the mac you have now or a replacement one. Hold tight is my advice.

I've tried the turning off the WiFi and using Ethernet work around. So far, it seems to be working. Played WoW at max settings for a few hours, recorded in game video and edited it in FCE. iMac has been on for over 24 hours with no crash.

So, my own empirical evidence says that the problem seems to be a driver conflict with the 4850 and the AirPort Extreme card. I'll do more testing tonight watching HD video from Hulu and NetFlix when I get home from work.

I just received my replacement iMac 2.93 w/ ATI 4850 today. So for this Canadian, that means that I placed my order on March 3rd, and am just now starting to play with a machine that may work... right now Time Machine is doing its thing to backup my system - and after that's complete, I'll start stress testing it to see if this one freezes.

What are the opinions - is it better to stress test it now to see if it freezes, or go light on the machine until Apple posts a fix? I'm not very happy about speed regulating my fancy new Mac...

Turn off Airport, connect ethernet and enjoy. Go ahead and stress it out. It's a fantastic machine and I am sure Apple will get the kinks worked out. It took a couple of days for the freezes to start but since I turned off Airport I haven't had a single freeze. There is no way they are getting this one back.

FWIW, I've been having the same problem since accepting delivery and setting my iMac up last week. First thought it was Firefox because initially it only froze while watching video online - one particularly annoying time during a webcast for Wolfram Alpha.

Finally did a search in the forums and found this thread - what a relief that was since misery truly loves company. Unfortunately my home network doesn't allow for direct ethernet hookup easily so I'll suffer through till a fix is posted.

As requested by many on this forum, I did log the issue with Apple Support here in Canada (used the callback feature and Kevin called at the precise time - nice). After checking with a Level 2, he did confirm it was a known issue that Apple is taking seriously and working on. His final request to me was to check if the clock still works when it next freezes and to post my results using my case number, which I will do.

Thanks to all of you for posting your trials, tribulations and successes on these forums.

...john...

Over 48 hours with the iMac on since turning off the AirPort and going Ethernet. Not even a hiccup suggesting it might crash. I've played games at max settings, recorded in game movies, watched HD videos, edited HD videos and more to try and work the iMac to the point where it definitely would have crashed when the AirPort was on before.

So, anyone who can hook up through Ethernet until Apple fixes the driver/firmware conflict, it seems to eliminate the crashes.

Has anyone tried the new Mac EFI Firmware Update 1.4 yet?

Ivan

Yup, done deal, firmware update is the fix. Just posted.

"This update fixes intermittent system freeze issues for iMac computers with ATI Radeon HD 4850 graphics and fixes wake-from-sleep issues in Boot Camp."

Do software update or go to http://support.apple.com/downloads/iMac_EFI_Firmware_Update_14

That really didn't take very long. Thank you Apple, good job!

I just did a good hour and a half test (Ran iTunes Visualizer Full Screen, which always worked before) on WiFi and didn't have a single freeze, hiccup, complaint at all.

Good job Apple!

Has anyone run any performance tests to determine if the core or memory clock speed was adjusted to remedy this?

http://forums.macrumors.com/showthread.php?t=695261&page=2 reply no.36 - did some xbench before and after. Doesn't look like anything's been changed.

This is great... thank goodness for these forums; I just applied the update on my 1-day old replacement iMac that I've been running with a wired Ethernet connection to avoid freezing.

The cable is now put away - back to WiFi, and hopefully no freezing!

Over at the macrumors forums, it would appear that this update has indeed fixed everyone's issues, without any degradation in benchhmark tests.

Yes!

I know that there are other more recent approaches to benchmarking performance on a Mac, but using Xbench, most scores seem identical before and after the firmware update. I took an Xbench score this morning before the firmware update, and again after the firmware update this afternoon.

Here are the results:

Name Score Detail
Results
191.09
188.18


System Info




Xbench Version


1.3
1.3
System Version


10.5.6 (9G3610)
10.5.6 (9G3610)
Physical RAM


4096 MB
4096 MB
Model


iMac9,1
iMac9,1
Drive Type


WDC WD6400AAKS-40H2B0
WDC WD6400AAKS-40H2B0
CPU Test
196.26
197.69


GCD Loop
342.24—>
343.14—>
18.04 Mops/sec
18.09 Mops/sec
Floating Point Basic
166.24
166.00
3.95 Gflop/sec
3.94 Gflop/sec
vecLib FFT
135.84
138.38
4.48 Gflop/sec
4.56 Gflop/sec
Floating Point Library
244.98
245.80
42.66 Mops/sec
42.80 Mops/sec
Thread Test
360.29—>
381.01—>


Computation
409.57—>
469.19—>
8.30 Mops/sec, 4 threads
9.50 Mops/sec, 4 threads
Lock Contention
321.59—>
320.73—>
13.84 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
13.80 Mlocks/sec, 4 threads
Memory Test
203.89
205.60


System
236.14
240.19


Allocate
334.94—>
358.10—>
1.23 Malloc/sec
1.32 Malloc/sec
Fill
193.60
194.26
9413.21 MB/sec
9445.21 MB/sec
Copy
219.62
219.79
4536.21 MB/sec
4539.63 MB/sec
Stream
179.39
179.72


Copy
169.71
170.59
3505.29 MB/sec
3523.51 MB/sec
Scale
172.98
172.21
3573.80 MB/sec
3557.89 MB/sec
Add
188.85
189.42
4022.83 MB/sec
4035.01 MB/sec
Triad
187.66
188.38
4014.41 MB/sec
4029.84 MB/sec
Quartz Graphics Test
237.98
237.53


Line
226.87
227.78
15.10 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
15.17 Klines/sec [50% alpha]
Rectangle
280.60
285.64
83.77 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
85.28 Krects/sec [50% alpha]
Circle
229.79
224.50
18.73 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
18.30 Kcircles/sec [50% alpha]
Bezier
232.56
227.89
5.87 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
5.75 Kbeziers/sec [50% alpha]
Text
227.94
231.66
14.26 Kchars/sec
14.49 Kchars/sec
OpenGL Graphics Test
231.57
227.15


Spinning Squares
231.57
227.15
293.76 frames/sec
288.15 frames/sec
User Interface Test
391.20—>
415.49—>


Elements
391.20—>
415.49—>
1.80 Krefresh/sec
1.91 Krefresh/sec
Disk Test
78.24
73.36


Sequential
146.82
126.74


Uncached Write
198.84
177.53
122.09 MB/sec [4K blocks]
109.00 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write
190.73
118.50
107.91 MB/sec [256K blocks]
67.05 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read
79.24
78.18
23.19 MB/sec [4K blocks]
22.88 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read
229.71
212.84
115.45 MB/sec [256K blocks]
106.97 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Random
53.33
51.61


Uncached Write
18.25
17.68
1.93 MB/sec [4K blocks]
1.87 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Write
217.99
220.47
69.79 MB/sec [256K blocks]
70.58 MB/sec [256K blocks]
Uncached Read
97.31
94.53
0.69 MB/sec [4K blocks]
0.67 MB/sec [4K blocks]
Uncached Read
187.56
172.16
34.80 MB/sec [256K blocks]
31.94 MB/sec [256K blocks]