[frankt1950]

I flashed my retail RADEON 7000 Mac Edition PCI card with the newest RADEON 7000 Mac ROM v208 Update. It worked OK for a few days then the monitor just went black without warning. The card still showed up in the Apple System Profiler but the screen remained black. Rebooting and resetting PRAM had no effect. Tried flashing the card back to the old firmware version (1.1.9)and on restart the screen was still black. Flashed the card one more time with the old version and the screen came back on at restart.

Now I am having a problem with the screen working after startup but going black after a short time. After a few minutes the monitor will suddenly come back to life and work fine. This cycle is repeated as long as the computer is on. I have tried three different monitors with the same results.

I bought this card to drive a second monitor in addition to my main monitor. It is less than 6 months old.

This is without a doubt a major problem for me and others. It has also been discussed in the MacFixIt Forums. Anyone else have any trouble with this update? Has anyone received an an official response and fix from ATI for this problem? My email to ATI is yet unanswered.

The monitor connected to the 7000 card is turning on and off as I write this message. The power light on the monitor remains green so it is not going into standby mode - the screen just winks out then winks back in again, over and over.

G4 933 QuickSilver 2002
NVIDIA GeForce 4 MX AGP
Hitachi CM715 19" Monitor
RADEON 7000 Mac Edition
ViewSonic PS790 19" Monitor
1.28 GB RAM
OS X 10.2.3

[goldplata]

I tried to flash it on a G3/300 and after installing it it the version of the ROM remains 1.8.1??? Have I done something wrong?? i tried to install it a few times, and also installing it on OS9.??

frankt, your problem could be this??:
http://mirror.ati.com/support/infobase/4083.html

[frankt1950]

goldplata,

Thanks for the link but as it turns out my RADEON card was permanently hosed by the ROM update and had to be replaced. It was still under warranty. The new card came with the old ROM version - I will NOT be flashing it to the 208 version until I am assured it is safe to do so.

The ROM updater download came with two installers. One for the 208 version and one to flash back to the old version. Did you use the correct one? I know this sounds simplistic but it is a mistake that could be made.

[kentuckyfried]

What's the deal with ATI anyhow?

I got lucky and didn't experience your problem, but prior to that, I had inadvertently installed the drivers from the cd-rom included with the radeon 7000 last week.

It completely screwed up my computer, there was a Kernal extension conflict with the drivers. Almost anything I did would cause the computer to restart (it'd flash up the message on the screen). The only thing I could do was startup the Terminal app and try to delete whatever I could relating to those ATI extensions....whatever happened...there were fragments still left that caused the restarts.


In the end I just had to nuke my entire hard drive (it didn't have much data on it anyhow), and reinstall OS X. This wouldn't have been so bad except that I only had a cd-rw attached to the firewire port, so I couldn't boot from cd to do the re-install and had to drag the computer over to my friend's place to do it.


If the drivers have the potential to wreak such havoc, how come ATI hasn't even bothered pulling those cd-roms or at the very least package in a warning saying "make sure you get the newest ones off the website BEFORE installation?" Admittedly it was my mistake b/c I wasn't paying attention, but what if a complete newbie had bought the card and wanted to install it? Same thing would probably occur...

[frankt1950]

kentuckyfried,

I agree - it's hard to say what's wrong with ATI. This problem has happened before in various forms - when the Apple System drivers will work better than the latest ATI drivers, or an update must be downloaded. Right now I am using the RADEON 7000 with Mac OS 10.2.3 and the ATI October 2002 ATI Retail Update. It is often confusing from their documentation as to which drivers to use with retail or OEM ATI video cards.

I guess I am lucky that my entire System install wasn't lost like yours was.

I am an experienced Mac user (since 1986) and if it confusing to me I can imagine what it must be like for novices or "Switchers". It shouldn't have to be this hard.

I was also told by ATI Tech Support that the ROM flasher should be applied in OS 9.2.2. What happens to those machines that will no longer boot into OS 9? Something needs fixing between Apple and ATI.