Dual Heads on ATI 8500 Crashing Jaguar

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ericmurphy

Registered
I have a G4/500 AGP with 1280 Meg of RAM and an 80 Gig ATA HD. Not long before I purchased 10.2, I bought an ATI 8500 so I could take advantage of Quartz Extreme. Since I had an extra monitor anyway, I decided to run the system with two displays. The problem is, I got random crashes and kernel panics, most often when the displays woke up (the system never sleeps because it serves web pages). Disconnecting the second monitor makes the crashes and kernel panics go away.

Has anyone else had similar experiences, and is there a fix or workaround? I'm not running the Oct. driver update because a) it doesn't say it fixes my problem, and b) you need to run Classic in order to install the update, and Classic isn't installed on the machine.
 
I have a raddy 8500 and when I hooked my monitor up to the DVI connection all I got was a messed up screen to where you can not make out anything. You do not have to install the drivers off of ati site. I heard just intall 10.2.3 and you will be fine. Have you tried hooking up a different monitor to it? On the screen of the monitors what are you running at the time?
 
I'm just running the drivers that installed with Jaguar. The crashes and kernel panics continued with 10.2.3, and have occurred with two entirely different secondary monitors running at different resolutions. It doesn't seem to matter what's showing on the secondary monitor, and it doesn't seem to matter which application is in focus.

The crashes seem pretty random (although most of them have been kernel panics), but they seem to occur most often when the screens are waking up, and usually are spaced three or more days apart. I'm guessing it has something to do with power management on the Radeon, but that's as far as I've gotten with the trouble-shooting.

Have you tried using a VGA adaptor on the DVI output? That's how I'm using it.
 
I had a problem on my early G3, it was due to a problem on the CPU. So I would suggest your Radeon card CPU may be out.
 
I have the 8500 running two Apple 17" Studio Displays and never had a kernel panic because of the two monitors.
 
Have you tried using a VGA adaptor on the DVI output? That's how I'm using it.
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Yeah I have tried that and that is where I run into problems. The screen gets all messed up to where I cannot make anything out. And ever since that happen the problem will occur once in awhile with the VGA now.
 
Hi Eric, I don't want to be one of those, "Gee mine works fine posts" that ends up making you more frustrated than before, but maybe my positive experience can help you in your trouble shooting. I have a 8500 running two displays and I have used the same card in two machines with the same dual displayes (both VGA) with zero problems - my old G4 450 AGP and now in my DP 1 GHz.

Do you think there is any chance you have a bad card? Maybe this is an extreme long shot, but maybe a bad video cable on that second monitor? I mean, it just seems such an odd problem you are having. Have you switched the cables or displays between the two ports? These may be dumb ideas, but I'm trying to think of ways to help isloate whatever it is that is going on with your machines - sounds very frustrating.

If only we were neighbors, we could swap our cards and/or monitors to see what happens! :)
 
Actually, those are all good ideas. It has occurred to me that the card may be bad. I can definitely rule out the second display as a problem, since two different displays, by different manufacturers, running at different resolutions, have had the same problem. I've considered doing more extensive trouble-shooting (switching the main and secondary displays, etc.), but right now I'm just enjoying some reasonable uptime. Maybe in a couple of weeks. :)
 
Really sounds like a hardware problem on your card... CPU, or a memory chip, or a bad contact... or bad cooling...
 
but right now I'm just enjoying some reasonable uptime. Maybe in a couple of weeks. :)
Click to expand...

Sure, why not! :)

Seriously, if you have a bad card (which really sounds like the best bet here), time will be your enemy. Of course you will face the type of tech support "resolution" that only IT can offer - ATI will balme Apple, Apple will blame ATI... all before they admit there is a possibility of the problem being theirs. Though some may disagree, I feel you have no choice and in this case I would simply lie - tell them you have a friend with a 8500 and when you switched cards the problem dissapeared on your machine and appeared on your friends machine. With a new card you can be pretty sure you can now rule out the card if the same problem reappears.
 
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