Many people advised cleaning the fan and removing unwanted dust, this does seem to help somewhat but the problems were still happening each day. After some trawling on the web I discovered that this is a common problem with these cards. I started noticing horizontal red lines which would strangely appear on windows and would remain attached to those windows as they were moved around the desktop, along with these visual issues my mac started to crash regularly, especially on warmer days. Other than a couple of RAM upgrades and regular hard drive changes my mac has remained the same over the years I’ve owned it but recently I ran into a problem with the X1900 card. When it was purchased I opted to upgrade the standard graphics card to the more expensive ATI Radeon X1900XT which offered much better performance in 3D and video apps.
The machine is an intel Xeon based quad core 2.66Ghz. I’m a big believer in buying the best specified computer you can afford in order to make it last, and that was the case with this mac pro. Purchased nearly three years ago it’s still going strong and although I’ve been tempted to replace it a few times the performance gain by doing so just doesn’t seem worth the expense.
As far as computers go my current mac has to be one of the longest lasting machines I’ve owned.
