Broken Video Card
posted on april 13, 2004, tag: tech
Update: So they didn't ship the card until today (04/14). I will have it tomorrow.
Unfortunately, the video card in my G5 has died. It started as the 'BSOD' problem (Black screen of death in this case), where the machine wouldn't send the display a video signal after starting up cold. But yesterday, it wouldn't come on at all, even after a few hours of warming up. I remoted into the machine to find that the video card wasn't even in the system profiler. I took the card out and re-seated it, but no luck. It's definitely dead.
I called Apple and after a little convincing (they didn't want to send me hardware, they wanted me to bring my G5 in—no way), they've overnighted me a replacement card which should arrive tomorrow.
Between this and work and Easter and getting my driver's license issue fixed (which it is—yay) and working on other projects, I haven't had much time to catch up here. Expect more tomorrow.
Comments
There are 6 comments, comments are closed
Jonathan on 04/15/2004:
I can't believe your video card died already. But I'm glad that Apple is getting you a replacement asap. After some convincing of course.
Garrett on 04/15/2004:
Yeah, it sucks... but such is life for buying a brand new product in its first cycle like the G5. It's still worth it!
mathew h. on 04/15/2004:
killer dude. sorry i haven't posted aboot this. sooo happy they're sending you a new card. lucky dawg. they went and updated the emacs on me tho. :\
-m
scott allison on 04/20/2004:
that's cool that they're sending you a new card, not cool that it died.
my g5 was doing the bsod for about a month or two, i finally got fed up with it and found that replacing the video card works, so i called in, and the guy that answered was so nice, he sent one off, arriving in two days. once installed it all went away. this was about december, early january. no problems since.
Kevin on 04/21/2004:
This seems to be pretty typical.
When hardware fails it happens early in the life of the machine. It's the price you pay for being the lucky bastard with the new toys. My good old G3 500 Mhz iBook is still trucking away here and doing the job. Oh the joy of having a G5, I can only dream...
Andres on 10/06/2004:
Hello.
I have been having problems with, I think, the video card in my new G5 as well. Apple told me that there could be a disk error and I indeed found some. This past weekend, I reformatted the drive and reinstalled all apps. Nonetheless the weird problems appear to persist. I mostly notice them when working in Photoshop: horizontal and vertical, one-pixel lines appear on the image and, what's worst, they are written into the file. Ouch! Adobe illustrator also displays colors with some strange, but subtle, patterning. No BSOD yet, though. Do you have any comments? Thank you.