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

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?

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 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.

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…

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.