have you tried the card with a different monitor or unplugging all your peripherals that are plugged into your monitor? i tried it on a mac pro 3.0 with a x1900 at a store and had no problems with the screenshot. it only had 2 GB of RAM, though.

Hey, Kenny. There are no peripherals attached to the monitor because I can’t sleep the Mac when I plug it into the USB hub built into the monitor (30″ Dell).

Haven’t tried a diff monitor, but tried a different card with same monitor. No artifacts. The monitor and cable both work.

Sooooo….

when will we hear the announcement you going back to PC…. :D

Do you notice that there are some fade images on the right part of the thumbnail? I can read “Saturation, Brightness, Contrast” at the top right hand corner. That seems to be the image that has been got refreshed. I actually have this problem with a 23″ ACD and eventually returned it. Do you notice that?

Eddie – the HUD in aperture is translucent. What you’re seeing is stuff behind the hud display. (The screenshot is fine)

Douglas tells me that a temporary solution seems to be to hit “Detect Displays” in the Displays System Preference. Sparklies go away. But when they come back, you have to do it again. I tried it, and it seems to work!

OK, just a few comments here:

1) Saying you are a high maintenance computer user dramatically understates the issue. It’s like saying Paris Hilton would be a high maintenance girlfriend. It doesn’t quite capture it.

2) This is not a high maintenance issue – this is a bug, pure in simple, most likely in the driver for the card. That’s why you don’t see it with the other video card.

3) If you are really tired of your Mac Pro, I’ll exchange it for you for a dual 2.5Ghz G5. No charge. :)

• Adam

does the dell use a duallink DVI cable? have you tried the cable in the other port on the 1900? i think they’re both dual-link.

i agree with adam nash, though; if both 1900s show the same problem, it sounds like a driver issue. have you checked macintouch.com?

Kenny – the 30″ requires dual-link for full resolution. haven’t tried the other port, but I will.

The alterna-fuel RV photo in this article also gives me artifacts.

Hmmm. I will check this tomorrow. I have the exact same machine and exact same video card. I have a 24″ Dell LCD, however.

Nope. No sparkles on my Mac Pro with X1900 video card.

hello,

in first, scuze for my english, i’m french.

check your screen frequence, it’s probably to up. I’ve had the same problem, and i’ve had put the frequence at 60Hz instead of 75Hz. And the artefact as gone.

Allan

Unfortunately, the refresh rate option is disabled in the Displays prefs pane.

I experienced the same using some long DVI-cables for my two 23s. Perhaps the signals from the ATI card are too weak for the Cinema display. A Sony LCD was just fine on the same cables…

Just got my new comp in the last 2 weeks. Having the exact same problem. I’m mostly noticing it while importing my collection of CDs in iTunes. In the Cover Flow view, when the album cover is missing, I see the artifacts like crazy. I’ve even tried the Detect Displays and that didn’t work. Only thing that has worked so far was to completely change the resolution and then back to the original 1680×1050. I’m on a Viewsonic 22″, so I really doubt it has anything to do with the monitor itself. I’m also forced to keep it at 60MHz. I’m going to have to assume that it just needs a new driver to work with any type of alpha maps. As it seems that its when transparency is involved that it then screws up.

“Hey, Kenny. There are no peripherals attached to the monitor because I can’t sleep the Mac when I plug it into the USB hub built into the monitor (30″ Dell).”

I had this same issue, then I plugged the Dell USB cable into a hub that is then connected to your computer…. this allowed me to sleep the monitor and use the Dell USB ports as intended.

I’m having a similar problem, but it is only in full screen mode in PS CS2 and 3 and with no palettes open as well. It ends up distorting the image in strange blocks if moved with the hand tool. If I have a tools palette or any other on top of the image, the problem doesn’t occur. I’ve spoken with Adobe, Apple, and now ATI, as I have a similar system to that that’s mentioned. ATI had me send them a system breakdown report and they are going to try and replicate the problem with upper level engineers and if it can be replicated, an updated driver will be sent off to Apple.

Dan

My brand new mac pro does this as well. Only on strange combinations of greys though. this image is particularly bad: http://arjay.typepad.com/photo....._worth.jpg I am not at the point of talking to apple about it, as I feel any replacement card would likely have the same problem. And thankfully most of the apps I use on a daily basis, Illustrator and Photoshop (and a few games), do not exhibit the shimmer/sparkle effect that is so distracting and annoying. I have a Viewsonic 22″ which displayed no problems (except for a stuck pixel) on my previous Powermac G4 so Its definitely not the monitor. I just tried the Detect Displays trick and it had no effect. Also, though I can’t check right now, I think it also exhibits this in Vista Which I dual boot with Bootcamp. I have installed the latest Catalyst drivers so next time I boot Vista I will try some tests and post back.

Hi Eric,

I had the same problem twice. That is, with 2 different Mac Pro 8-Core + ATI x1900.

I experienced the sparkings you mention while using a Samsung 30-inch dual-dvi display on port #1. When I plug it in to port #2 it works fine. Also, with a dual display configuration using a Samsung 24-inch on port #1 and the Samsung 30-inch on #2, they both work fine.

I talked to Apple and they sent me a replacement computer, as they didn’t have the card in stock (I guess due to a too high demand for them?).

I have just received the new Mac Pro. Guess what, I plugged it in with the same configuration and… there are the dancing pixels on grey!!!

So, I guess there is an issue with the Ati card.

Forgot to mention. When the card heats up (after an hour of usage or so). The problem gets even worse.

By the way, have you solved the issue?

Regards,

-Pablo.

I too have this experince with my Mac Pro and X1900. I have dual Dell 20″ LCDs and have this single green pixel that shows up in random spots on BOTH monitors. The green dot only shows up on dark colors. You can hide it with the cursor or dragging a Window over the top of it. While researching this issues, I stumbled accross this page. I downloaded the thumbnail as well as the image in the last post. Both of them give me the little red pixel. It appears that the red pixel is in a fixed location…. but leaves a trail when draggin these images around. Hitting “detect displays” doesn’t get rid of it. However if I change my resolution from 1600×1050 to 1600×1000 it gets rid of it. Going back to 1600×1050 brings the problem back. This is obviously a driver issue. Any word on updated drivers from Apple or ATI???

An updated firmware was released today. Seems to have fixed the problem for me. UPDATE: I WAS WRONG. I’m still seeing sparkles in Aperture, but only when I am paging through images in the Viewer. The “dancing” sparkles in gray areas are gone.

I have a Mac Pro 3GHz with the X1900 XT and ACD30 + LG 24″ displays. I get a dancing pixel or two on the LG regularly. When I run Aperture, I get rows of dancing pixels that run for several inches across both displays. I’ve had the computer for at least nine months, and the problem only crept up a month or two ago. It’s getting worse.

Eric, I don’t think this is an issue with the card (I changed mine and problem remained). I found that pressing the metal bevels of the monitor together, or distorting them slightly by putting opposite pressure on the right/left sides (on top or bottom of the screen) changes the pattern/quantity of pixels dancing. It is clearly an issue of a bad electrical contact in my case. I have had this type of problem with a 30″ Apple display for several months now, and still have to send it in for Apple Care repair (I’ve been too busy). The distortion can be so bad that I sometimes lose all connection and get a blank green/purple screen with moving areas and lines. I suspect you may find the same issue. Most people are probably too scared to put pressure on the enclosure, but it works and brings the screen back to normal (for up to a few days or couple of weeks sometimes, until the heat expansion/contraction cycles from turing the monitor on and off bring back the problem). I suspect the electrical contacts between the LCD itself and the enclosure are held by pressure, and this may be a weak link in the design. Someone else may be able to comment better on this.

Yves: 1) I have a Dell, not an Apple. 2) When I switch to the NVidia card (the cheaper one that came with the machine), the sparkles go away.

This suggests that it’s not a contact issue in the monitor, in my case…

I have the same exact problem. I have a Mac Pro with 3 Dell monitors. I have 1 30″ monitor in the center with 2 24″ monitors sitting vertically on each side. The 24″ monitors are connected via analog ports and only the 30″ experiences flickering and dancing and sparkling artifacts. 1 24″ monitor is connected to the ATI card as is the 30″ monitor. The 2nd 24″ monitor is connected the Nvidia 7300 card that came with the Mac Pro. I noticed this right after I got the card and exchanged it with Apple for another one. It made absolutely no difference. Its unfortunate that the only decent card that is somewhat recently priced is flawed and that ATI nor Apple is doing anything to rectify, or even acknowledge this. I recently updated the firmware on the ATI x1900xt and it made absolutely no difference.

was googleling LCD sparkles and found your blog… have the same problem but i’m a PC user…. however I too have an ATI card.I have a 19″ wide screen monitor. The sparkles will appear in a random place in an image, however if i move the image around, it moves with the image. for me, however, if i lower my resolution to 1280×1084 or lower, the sparkles seems to go away. Grant it I have not tested this over any period of time. Just sharing my frustration I guess. I have an ATI X1300 pro but am gettign an HD2900xt in this week. I have always been a proud ATI owner, hope it gets fixed. Anyway, if i have anylucj with the HD2900 i’ll drop another note for what it’s worth. (Also my sparkles almost always appear in the darker parts of the screen.)

I have started to experience this same problem – after installing Leopard and upgrading the RadeonX1900 firmware from last week. I have 2 30″ cinema displays both set at millions of colors and the highest resolution. Clearly something in Leopard (in my opinion) has pushed the graphics processing needed to display the windows over the edge. I can generally get the screen back to normal (by dragging the window to the other screen and back) but it is becoming quite annoying…

Im havening the same issue. Its related to colors for sure. Seems to be intermittent. Come up after I play WOW.

Running on a MacPro with the x1900 and a Dell 3007wfp

I’m getting strange coloured sparkling artifiacts too, but I’m on a G5 Powermac with an AGP ATI 9600XT video card. A reboot seemed to fix the problem for a short while, but then it progressively comes back. I wonder if it’s the GPU overheating? Perhaps Leopard is working the GPU harder than Tiger did?

I see these with a Radeon X1600GT on my PC. First I thought I had stuck pixels and blamed my monitor, but I just upgraded the PC to a Nvidia 8600 and now the monitor is fine. Meanwhile I moved the ATI card to my Vista media center and now I have dancing pixels on my LCD TV.

So I definitely think it’s an ATI card issue.

was googleling LCD sparkles and found your blog… I have had the same issue since I installed Leopard a few months back. I get these randon linear artifacts appearing in Photoshop… Quark… Firefox… I hide and show and it disappears and reappears again… I have a 30″ ACD and have reported this to Apple using my Apple Care Warranty and with no satisfaction over the phone… I also brought it to a local Apple Care acredited repair shop with no solution from them either. They just said I’m covered for three years so if it gets any worse Apple will sort you out…. but I’m not sooo sure after reading this thread… so many people with the same problem but no solutions. I even thought the recent Graphics Udpdate 1.0 given with 10.5.2 would sort the problem… but after some small investigation I found that the X1900 drivers weren’t even included in the update. The ATI website only supports driver updates for G5 and 10.4… anyone know if a 10.5 update is due…?? Or if anyone has had any luck with ATI even acknowledging the issue… I love my Mac… love my 30″ ACD… and it’s such a pity that we all have to work on with this issue after paying so much money and being so loyal as always to the Apple Brand.

Yours sincerely Anthony

Irish MacUser and MacAddict

I had the exact same problem with my new Mac pro 2008 model with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT video card. In my case, the problem displayed itself on the main monitor, then the video adapter was connected to port 2 (to rule out grounding effects theories, the problem remained even if no equipment was connected to the video card).

Well, after a bunch of calls to Apple support, they finally sent me a replacement card and the problem went away.

I have the Early 2008 2.8GHz Quad Core and the X1900XT Mac Radeon Upgrade kit off ebay and it produces the same thing, the guy I bought it from said it came out of a Tiger System and no problems, so it definately is a bug that either Apple or ATI need to address, also is this card the X1900XT better than the HD 2600? which would game better, the one with the most ram wins or not necessarily…?

Thanks, Lane pls email any suggestions comments to lanejasper69@msn.com

hi, I would just like to say I have a pc with an ati X1650 installed. And guess what, I too have a graphics issue with sparklies, however, when the pc boots up (XP pro) the sparklies are dancing at 120 beats per minute! And after boot up I get artifacts like static dots presented on the screen (on the desktop and in programs like Internet Explorer). These dots don’t dance about tho, they only do that at boot up! I have looked around but found not a single fix for this issue. It definitely is either a bug with ati drivers or in my case a problem with Direct X 9 although it is unclear. I tested the Dx9 drivers and there didn’t seem to be a problem. like many of the people here, I updated drivers but still no luck. It is difficult to know which vendor is responsible for this, however, as you are using a Mac and me a Pc it seems unlikely to be the fault of Operating systems and definitely a DRIVER issue.

Have you obtained a fix for this yet? and how?

I’ve got it, too. Mac Book Pro with an Apple Cinema Display. I get it in the black areas of certain web pages! Close the web page, it’s gone! BTW – This page does not. But XMRadio.com does. Really Odd.

Has anyone found a solution to this problem? I just noticed this twinkling pixels issues while looking at a RAW image in Photoshop CS 3.3. I’m running Leopard 10.5.5 on an iMac,2 GHZ Power PC G5, 2 GB DDR SDRAM with ATI Radeon 9600 for graphics. I noticed this sparkling/twinkling of pixels in a dark area of my image (side of a cast iron skillet.) Never noticed anything like this until today.

I have the Intel Mac Pro with similar problem with the 1900 using a Mac 23″ Mac monitor. The problem is with movies and Eye TV – After about 1 hour with either Eye TV or movies on a DVD, I get strobes running across the screen. It starts out as one strobe and eventually several show up. If I let it cool over night. it usually is ok. When I take the card out and run the vacuum on the exhaust end of the card, it usually is good for about an hour. It is definitely a heat problem as far as I can tell – has anybody else experienced this and if so, was a fix short of new card?

I have got something similar to running a Mac Pro 3.0 with 1900XT graphics card… Running through a 22″ Cinema display and 15″ Dell monitor… the dell monitor is fine – the cinema display goes all wierd with artifacts when the system runs hot… The card easily collects dust. Originally thought it was something to do with running Parrallels as it only happened when running Parrallels on my system… The came to re-install XP64 and Vista 64 on my system and got some weird problems where the display just gave up after installing the ATI Drivers for x64… think this might be something to do with the problem…? Would the driver architecture be vastly different running from a x64bit machine???

Hi! Same problem here… I have a First generation MacPro, ad a 30″ Apple Cinema Display. I started having the artifacts (in my case green straight dotted lines across the monitor) after about 1.5 years of use. The card was an Ati 1900XT. Reading about the problem elsewere, i tried changing the stock cooler, for a new accelero X2. This helped a bit, for about 15 days… Then everything started again! In my case the Mac would even hang if I started a game… Overheating seems to be the problem, or at least the majority of people seems to say that’s the one. So I decided to change video card. I bought a new nvidia 8800gt.. Tried out a few games with no problem, used photoshop, lightroom, finalcut with no problems, but after a few days…. Even worse artifacts: flickering little green pixels. Now I read other posts and people say they have the same issue with the 8800 too….. This time I’m going to send it back before it’s too late… but I’m not positive about the outcome. We’ll see…

Good luck,

Matteo

PS: Class action anyone? :)

Yo brothers, I have the same problem. Have a first generation MacPro and I upgraded the regular card with the ATI X1900 XT right away. For about 1.5 years all’s been well but lines and flying dots, apart from the occasional enlargement of a single word on the screen started bugging me.

Opened it up, double checked the ram, zapped the PRam, cleaned the interior of the machine and the video card. Nothing. Called Apple up before it was too late and they are sending me a replacement right away. I don’t know whether that’s going to work but I am trying. We’ll see what happens. Keep me posted about your developments about this friggin’ problem

I just got an ATI 4850 1gb and the temps are in great shape. When I go on websites like blackle or others with dark grey areas i get small, green, pixel, sparklie, artifacts. I have a 22in lcd on Windows XP. Like someone commented before, I think it has something to do with Catalyst control, or maybe a game trying to force a refresh rate the monitor can’t handle. My monitor says it will support 60hz at 1680 X 1050, but when I go into games it allows me to turn it up to 75hz. When I restarted my monitor the artifacts went away.

1-make sure you stop ati tray tools if you have that,

2-stop Catalyst Control Center(c.c.c.),

3-restart C.C.C., then force the refresh rate no higher than your monitor’s max. Note: there are 2 places to force refresh rate: display properties, and display options, I set both of them to the same.

I also set avivo video presets to application controlled.

When you have finished this turn your monitor off then on.

This is just the things I did, I don’t know if it will work for you or for Mac, I don’t even know if you have C.C.C.

Just did this also, will report back if the sparklies return.

Many of you said you have dual monitors, that might be causing some conflict or it could just be ATI’s poor drivers.

Hope this helps, Reed.

http://www.howtofixcomputers.c.....66983.html

might help

no sparklies have returned!!!!!!!!!!!

Hi Eric

I havce the same problem with my Mac pro and 30″apple display and it is definately the Card ATI radeon x1900. The problem is that the mac pro overheats the card and that is why it seems to be alright at first. When you first turn your mac on It’s not as hot as it will get after a few hours and thats when the card starts failing. Really Apple should have never promoted this card as it clearly is not completely compatible.

However there is a fix (which has lasted me about a year now) and that is smcFanControl – its freeware and it speeds up your Mac pros fans sufficiently enough to cool the badly designed Radeon down.

This fix is temporary though cos each year I’m having to up the fan speed more.

Next year I’ll be on Maximum and if it happens again It’s time for a new card – but it definately will not be a Radeon

PS Apples update (2007) didn’t explain what it was supposed to do probably cos it did nothing exept work as a placebo – it got me off their backs for a while and now its not in warranty.

This is a computer manufacturing flaw, not an ATI flaw. It happens on PCs and MACs, starting from the X1400 GPU and above.

The flaw is a miscommunication/representation from ATI to manufacturers (Gateway, Dell, Apple, etc.) of the cooling requirements of the GPU.

What you are experiencing with the dancing pixels is an result of the GPU memory over heating. Just like with processors, too much heat will first cause strange behavior followed by failure.

For those who experience dancing pixels with ATI GPUs when they KNOW their PC is cool (been off for a few days, you turn it on, there’s the dancing pixels) then you have PERMANENTLY DAMAGED GPU MEMORY. NO CURE EXIST. PERIOD. If you experience dancing pixels after a certain amount of time after boot up, you can still SAVE your system by installing extra cooling capacity.

This is a KNOWN flaw that has been discussed between ATI and manufactures for … hold onto your hat … YEARS. While each is blaming the other, you and I are suffering.

Only REAL solution is not to buy any product with ATI GPUs.

Good luck.

Bryan Gateway PC owner with lots of dancing pixels and no more warranty

Yup, same issue. Artifacts on screen. MacPro Quad Core 2.66 GHz Intel Xeon, 1st generation, OSX 10.5.6, DVI cable to Dell 2007WFP LCD. It doesn’t matter what you do, it’s in finder windows, quicktime video, FCP interfaces, AE7 interfaces, Firefox windows, website pages with lots of scrolling. Same issues as: can’t change refresh rate, no driver available for after PowerPC G5 or Mac Pro 10.5. The link posted above may not work for all because here in the edit room we have a Mac Pro Dual Core 2.66 GHz, running Tiger 10.4.11, with two 24″ Apple cinema displays, and this exact card, with really long cabling, and there has not been any issues. What I’ve noticed: After I installed the ATI RAdeon X1900 XT, and saw that I was having artifact issues, I was doing tests with various pro apps, interfaces, windows, graphics, I had alot of windows open, but that is normal when working, still getting the artifacts all over, my computer suddenly froze. no response whatsoever. I had to manually shut down. That sucked. I got worried and immediately removed the card from the machine. Right underneath where PCIE slot 1 goes, on top of the RAM compartment are some rubber pads, meant to be soft supports for graphics cards no doubt. I noticed burn marks on the rubber pads! like where the black nodes on the bottom of the card were! Unbelievable! Maybe they were there all along? I doubt it very much. This makes me think: The card is indeed overheating and could be due to the card malfunctioning, or incompatibility with Leopard’s OS not having the coding to regulate the temp of this card, or the unavailability of a driver to help newer Mac systems to regulate the temp of this card, or all of the above. This is both Apple’s AND ATI’s fault, for not providing the much needed support of an updated driver or OSX firmware update to handle this card that is still being sold on Apple’s website. FAscists! I’m going to write Apple. But I have a feeling it will go unheeded. If anyone has any updates to their issues, please repost and help us all! Thanks

Matteo – it’s not a bad idea. or at least if enough people bombard apple with this issue, maybe they’ll spend some money and do something about it. I mean they are selling a third party component that isn’t jiving with the new OSX/MACPROs/whatever.

I also have an first release MacPro which I ordered with the ATI 1900XT card as a build-to-order. I am on my third video card from Apple and they are no closer to resolving this than when we started. Fortunately, the MacPro is still under AppleCare. The most recent “repair” involved performing a clean install of Leopard. The Apple Store had the MacPro for a week and I picked it up yesterday afternoon with them telling me the issue had been resolved. Within four hours of hooking it back up at home, the issue has returned!

How many times do I need to go around with Apple to just get them to give me a completely different (yet equivalent) graphics card?

Some images…

The speckles — http://homepage.mac.com/bedelm....._72dpi.jpg Screen grab (clean) — http://homepage.mac.com/bedelman/screen_grab.png Temps & Fans — http://homepage.mac.com/bedelman/istat_72dpi.jpg

The screen grab doesn’t show the speckles which would be the case if it was an issue with vRAM. The speckles seem to be taking place on the rendering and output.

ATI x1650 with an nec lcd2470wnx, pc.

Same dancing pixels, only on certain darker, graduated sections of, mostly, web pages, Firefox and IE. No sign of them when viewing Naviset’s test screens.

My card is an AGP version, with its own fan, which I believe creates more heat than the PCI version. Are others here using PCI or AGP ?

Bryan Gateway’s comment above sounds plausible, but I’m wondering if the memory is being damaged, why it only seems to appear in certain specific situations.

How many times do I need to go around with Apple to just get them to give me a completely different (yet equivalent) graphics card?

Looks like the answer is…

3 1900XT video cards 2 Visits to the Apple store (leaving the MacPro for up to a week each time) Several phone calls

We finally got the nVidia 8800 sent to us as a replacement, installed it, and the problem is no more

• Bob

ATI Radeon HD 4780 with Apple Cinema HD 30″

Machine built by Apple a little over a week ago. I observed the same problem (“sparkles” or dancing pixels) with the first boot. Same display connected to the 3 year old Mac G5 the new system is replacing does not exhibit the problem. Using a mini-DP to dual-DVI adapter in the new system does not exhibit the problem. Using the DVI connector on the replacement graphics card does not exhibit the problem. So it would appear that ATI has a systemic design problem with their high end cards or inadequate manufacturing quality control.

Same issue here….. (Mac Pro 1st gen, ATI Radeon X1900XT, BenQ FP241vw 24″ Monitor)

I have lines of green pixels that recently stard showing up across my screen in random areas (mostly in darker areas) dragging a white window over them makes them dissappear…

FIX: Well its not a real fix, but I changed the color profile from NTSC to my monitors default profile and the pixels dissappeared… For how long(?) I don’t know…

Here’s another update for Gateway owners with ATI based laptops AND the dancing pixel issue:

I talked to a company called PELL TECHNOLOGY (www.pelltechnology.com). This company actually repairs computers (a rarity these days), and sells replacement boards like mothersboard, etc., for nearly every laptop made.

They told me that the ATI “dancing pixel” issue was “common” and they see it in X1400 and above on all machines using these GPUs.

I was ticked off to find out this is such a well known problem, and ATI is doing nothing about … and the manufacturers of our computers are doing nothing about it … that perhaps we, as buyers, should avoid any computers with ATI processors. TELL YOUR FRIENDS, TOO.

The kind tech that I talked to at Pell told me he heard it had something to do with “Hypermemory Technology”. Some new frizzle techy hardware abstraction that allows the GPU to dynamically increase or shrink it’s memory using system memory. He also stated that he understood the problem NOT to be the memory going “bad” but the bus for which this memory is shared.

In any case, the folks who see this all the time say it is a permanent problem once it begins– you’ll need to replace your component.

A letter sent to chris.hook@amd.com concerning the dancing pixel issue. I’ll let everyone know what their response [if any] is…

Mr. Chris Hook:

My name is Bryan Wilcutt, I own a Gateway M285-E laptop which uses the ATI X1400 graphics processor.

The reason why I am writing to you is to determine if AMD is aware of in-field failures with the ATI X series GPUs. Specifically, problems such as “dancing pixels” becoming a permanent apparatus on the display, over heating issues, and PCI bridge memory transfer issues.

As a member of several blogs, organizations and university research groups, I’ve discovered numerous computer users being inconvenienced by the time and cost of replacing motherboards and video cards with ATI product. My own computer will be receiving a motherboard replacement because of the “dancing pixel” issue.

What has AMD done to remedy this well known issue? Is there any remedy that out-of-warranty owners can find to resolve this issue with AMD?

Thank you for your time,

Dr. Bryan Wilcutt, PMP

I also have an first release MacPro which I ordered with the ATI X1900 card as a build-to-order. Have seen pixels dancing mainly when running Windows, but now, also in Safari.

change color-profile and dancing pixels are gone! but they reappear if same color combination appears with these new settings.

This should be enough for hardware techs to enable them to tell what’s happening and what’s probably the solution, if any…

btw, if you have the X1900 like me, please open up your mac and vacuum clean the videocard regularly: the inlet gets stuffed with dust, especially when you smoke like me! I probably didn’t clean it soon enough and the sparkling is a result of that?

I have 30″ apple cinema display with dancing/sparking particles. I am also using a benQ 24″ as a secondary.

what is weird is that it only happened on port 1 of the card. I would see the sparkles with certain colors, dark gray as the desktop background was the worst. dancers also only show up at the highest rez

I put the 30″ into port 2 of the ati card and drug the title bad in display preferences to the 30″ (essentially swapping the ports) everything is fine now

I have the same problem with a Mac Pro on a HP LP2465. Tried different monitors and had the same problem. Took the Mac Pro to the Apple store and was told “Couldn't create the problem, and tests didn't detect any problems”. I work a lot in Photoshop and whenever there are grays, the red dancing ants appear. Jobs needs to fix QC.

[...] I had the exact same problem with my new Mac pro 2008 model with the ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT video card. In my case, the problem displayed itself on the main monitor, then the video adapter was connected to port 2 (to rule out grounding effects theories, …. I havce the same problem with my Mac pro and 30?apple display and it is definately the Card ATI radeon x1900. The problem is that the mac pro overheats the card and that is why it seems to be alright at first. …Read more… [...]

I had the same issue right after Leopard came out in Fall 2007. I called Apple at the time and they didn't have any X1900 XT's in stock (they said the wait would be 30+ days). Since I did not want the Nvidia GEForce card at the time (a downgrade), I convinced the tech on the line to send me the Nvidia Quadro FX card that was compatible with my quad-core Mac Pro (although the retail price of that card was $1500+). They sent it to me, and I haven't had a problem since. I posted a lot about this on the Apple Discussion board, and just found my old X1900 XT in the closet and looked to see if anything new had been reported about the issue.