I was working on a long post earlier tonight about subversion and document management, when my computer locked up for the 6th time this week. Usually OSX is so stable that I measure my uptime in weeks if not months. I’ve been known to delay doing system updates because it would wreck my uptime. The sad thing is that I’ve known what my problem was, and how to fix it, and only now got around to doing something about it.

First, a little history. The video card that shipped with the original Mac Pro systems in the Fall of 2006 was an nVidia GeForce 7300 GT with 256MB of video RAM. When I purchased the system, I decided that I’d go ahead and blow some extra cash on the ATi Radeon X1900XT – with more video RAM, and decidedly better performance. I got the system, and it blew the doors off my vintage Dual 2.0 Ghz PowerMac G5. I don’t run many games on the card, but I do use Photoshop and Aperture, and they are taxing on the Core Image subsystems of OSX. Aperture, in particular, was a horrible performer on my G5 – even though it had a supported graphics card. It was only a 128 MB ATI 9800 Pro, and just couldn’t keep up. The new Mac Pro was amazing, and fast for the photo work that I do.

Last spring, I started having some problems with the system. Strange horizontal multicolored lines started appearing when I was working in Photoshop, and they would go away if I resized the window they appeared in. As the summer wore on the lines would appear anywhere – even in Finder windows and on the menu bar clock. I realized that in 10.5, everything in the window manager runs through the graphics card for final composting and rendering to screen. Somewhere in that pipeline, there was a problem. Additionally, the computer was getting louder and louder. When I’d first set everything up, the Shuttle I was using as a test Solaris box was the loudest thing in the apartment. By the end of last summer, it was the Mac Pro, by a healthy margin. Following some advice online, I took the video card out, and run some compressed air through the heatsink. It seemed to help – the fan was a lot quieter then – but I still occasionally had the video problems. Determined to get a glitch free system, I downloaded smcFanControl, and set all my system fans a few hundred RPM higher. This fixed the display problems for awhile, while getting me used to the noise of running the fans cranked up all the time.

By the time this spring rolled around the PCIe fans were set to 1500 rpm at all times. In late April, they got turned up to 2000 rpm. Now, even with it constantly set to 2000 rpm, I still had the occasional line across the screen, and if I didn’t watch it, the whole box will lock up. I think it has something to do with the summer months, and the fact that we don’t run the A/C here 24/7/365 like we did in the last apartment.

So, doing some digging online over the last few weeks, I found that a LOT of other people had problems with the X1900XT. And that Apple has replaced many of the cards. So, today, I finally called Apple up and gave them all my specs. Turns out, yes, I do qualify for a replacement card – even though the box is out of warranty. Which is nice, because the cheapest card I can find for the MacPro that is still in production and has 2 DVI ports is over $200 on sale. They are shipping me a new card this week, and once I have it, I’ll swap them out and send the bad one back to Apple.