MOTUnation.com

scooter wrote:It says I have a ATY,RadeonX1900, which should be a pretty decent card.r

That's the card that Apple has admitted to be faulty, I had that one and got it changed for free to a Nvidia GeForce 8800GT. Here you can read more about it:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts3420
Worth a try, might save you $2-300!

scooter wrote: My monitor has been getting little horizontal lines a few pixels thick running about half way through the screen. The longer I leave it on the worse it gets and finally my mac just freezes and I can't force quit anything but can only manually shut it down.

My card also had the horizontal lines, well known issue with those cards, get it changed. What you can do til then is open up the Mac and take the graphics card out and clear it of dust. Mine had a huge dust rat living on/in it
The exchange means you have to take the old card to the shop though. I brought mine to the service place before going to Spain for 5 days and when I got back I could pick up the new one.

That's the card that Apple has admitted to be faulty, I had that one and got it changed for free to a Nvidia GeForce 8800GT. Here you can read more about it:
http://support.apple.com/kb/ts3420" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It looks like I've scored again with Motunation.
That definitely applies to my mac.
Thanks so much for the heads up. I never in a million years would have come across that link. Now to find a mac service place that will be willing to handle this. The Apple store maybe??

scooter

smc fan control is a good one too:

http://homepage.mac.com/holtmann/eidac/ ... tware.html" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

It will show temperature and also allow some adjustments with fan speed, etc.

I had a wonky graphics card in my MacPro (Nvidia GeForce 7300GT) that caused me a lot of grief and did some research and found a link describing bulging electrolytic capacitors on that card. So rather than deal with Apple, I just replaced the caps on the board with new ones. Had to parallel pairs of caps together to get the right value and it doesn't look pretty, but it's worked great ever since. The top of the caps on mine were obviously bulging just like the photos, it wasn't subtle.

A quick update on this.
My card has the S/N that is covered by the exchange.
Apple told me that they will order the part and I need to bring in the whole computer to the Apple store, for them to install it. That's their policy.
And also I think the exchange ends the 31st of this month.

scooter

I only needed to bring the computers serial number and the old graphic card. But I'm in sweden and there's no official Apple Store's here so maybe there's different policies then.

It's a bit weird you have to bring the whole computer in, it's super easy to install the graphic card on your own...

But it's great it qualifies, I never had problems with crashes but was well worth it getting rid of those horrible horizontal lines...

Good luck!

scooter wrote:A quick update on this.
My card has the S/N that is covered by the exchange.
Apple told me that they will order the part and I need to bring in the whole computer to the Apple store, for them to install it. That's their policy.
And also I think the exchange ends the 31st of this month.

scooter

Just in Time.

Don't mis my link to Temperature Monitor (free utility dowload) in my earlier post... especially if you find dust bunnies in your Mac when you look inside!