New Radeon 5870 graphic card putting graphics all over the screen

recheck the 2 x 6-pin aux power cables

reseat the card

zap pram

do a safe boot

No, you shouldn't need to do a safe boot. It was just a diagnostic test and to clear a few caches.

Create another account and boot normally into it. Is the problem still there. If no, there there's someting wrong with your main account (login item? launchagent?). If yes, then back to square one.

Post the files in the following folders:

/Library/LaunchAgents

/Library/LaunchDaemons

/Library/StartupItems

Also open Terminal (in Utilities) and copy/paste the following line, hit return, and post its output:

kextstat -kl | awk ' !/apple/ { print $6 $7 } '

These are all system wide places for third-party add-ons that you may have installed. Booting in safe mode suppresses all this stuff. So these become suspects.

Is that a brand new graphics card? Return it if it is.

While the card could be defective, the fact it works in safe mode is why I asked for the above info (where's the kextstat by the way?). There's a ton of possible suspects here. Where t begin?

Here's my suggested list of things to try to remove in order.

1. Well first get rid of the PACE stuff. That always a csuse for problems.

2. Symantec AV stuff (another troublemaker).

3. The sophos stuff (why two AV's, i.e., this and Symantec?)

4. ProTec stuff (yet another AV?)

5. com.xrite.device.xrdd.plist (don't know what that is)

6. Adobe stuff (SwitchBoard).

7. The wacom stuff.

8. Whatever else I missed.

Basically it's a process of elimination to see if any of these add-ons are causing the problem. Safe boot had suppressed them and since you say you have no problems with safe boot one or more of these are what to investigate.

the fact it works in safe mode

While your investigation method is valid, and there are a couple unsavory softwares/software components in use, the fact that it (video) works in safe mode only tells us that it provides basic, unaccelerated, unenhanced video.

I can't see the involved softwares causing the graphics anomalies as described.

Safe mode unloads all graphics drivers, only drawing on the most basic graphics production abilities of a card.

Once the drivers are loaded and the card is required to produce accelerated graphics, perform Open GL, OpenCL and Core Image functions (all demanding of the GPU and card architecture) then graphics anomalies are produced.

This tells me that the card is most likely defective and should be replaced.

Everything a Virus-checker does looks like a Virus.

If you have more than one Virus-checker installed, they are all trying to stop each other from... doing perfectly innocent stuff looking for other virus stuff.

The bottom line is, you can have at most ONE Virus checker program installed. Any more risk bringing your Mac to its knees.

Well done. Glad the machine is back to normal.

Nice to hear about good service, too.