iMac with ATI 4850 FIX IS OUT!

Run software update and grab the "iMac EFI Firmware Update 1.4". It fixes the freezes on the new 2009 iMacs with the ATI 4850!

Update 1:

Just a quick note. I have played Fallout 3 under bootcamp, World of Warcraft under OSX with no  crashes. Also it seems to run cooler all of the time without any extra noise.

Update 2:

Well, I just put in another 4 hours of Fallout 3 with no problems. The iMac stay quiet under all playing conditions it seems, which is really nice. So, I guess it wasn't a straight heat issue. I also got in another hour with Wow with the graphics setting cranked up to 'ultra'. Not that Wow really pushes anything.

Update 3: 

At 24 hours now and I would normally have had about 3 freezes or more. But I have not had one so far. I really think they got a good fix here. I am very happy with it and am glad I did not take my box in to get it fixed or replaced.

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2009 iMac, ATI 4850 freezing. Is it wireless, not completely.

So, I have been playing with my iMac, trying to figure out why it keeps freezing up on me under OSX and crashing under boot camp. Like many other owners of the new 2009 iMacs with the ATI 4850 graphics card I have been suffering from numerous freezes and crashes. I thought it was heat related since I never hear my fans speed up as things get hot. So, I downloaded a fan control program and cranked it up. However, while trying to do a Jungle Disk back up to Amazon s3, it hung again, twice. So, freezes and no backups. Great. This is with wireless on. So, I book into boot camp and turn off the wireless adaptor, since I don't need it to play games. I still get crashes. I will have to say though, that the crashes don't happen as often. I was able to play for a few hours at a time, before I turned off the wireless adaptor, it was 30 minutes at most.
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iMac ATI 4850 Crashes and Graphics Problems (glitches)

So, I am not starting to see problems with, what I think, is the ATI drivers for the ATI 4850 in the new iMacs. Look at the picture upper left in this post here and look at the upper right corner. See that greenish line, it isn't part of the image. That picture is part of a screen shot taken from within Aperture 2. I have seen that with other images, If I exit and come back into Aperture it is gone. The line moves around too and grows and shrinks in size for different pictures. I am also seeing crashes and freezes....

I am also seeing crashes and freezes in OSX now. I was using Aperture and had moved to a new picture when the whole system just froze. No response from anything. I had to power off the iMac and power back on to recover. I, again, am seeing more crashes in boot camp, this time in Fallout 3, had to reboot.

OSX 10.5.7 is due at "any time now(TM)". Lets hope they roll out new ATI drivers for both OSX and boot camp.  Here is a picture of the full aperture session.

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Do I secretly have OSX 10.5.7?

So, I ordered a new 2009 iMac, 3GHz, with the new ATI 4850. Now, I, along with everyone else who ordered one, had to wait 6-8 weeks for it to get shipped. While Apple never said anything officially, I wrote, in previous posts, that I suspected the wait was for them to get new ATI drivers in the kernel of OSX to support that new card. So, we had to wait for the public release of OSX 10.5.7. So, last Friday when I got an email from Apple saying that had shipped my new iMac, I just assumed that OSX 10.5.7 was out the door. But, when I received my new iMac that was the first thing I checked and it still says 10.5.6. However....

However, I have been noticing some differences between my new iMac and my old one sitting right next to it. For example, the preference pane is different between the two. On my new iMac the power pane is all in one instead of two separate tabs like it is on my old one. Plus, the obvious, that my new ATI card is running fine (and really really FAST). I guess the only way to tell for sure is to wait for 10.5.7 to come out and see if I get hit with the expected 400+MB download (10.5.6->10.5.7 upgrade) or if it comes across as something very small, like a simple string change.

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Gaming with the iMac, ATI 4850 and BootCamp

So, I got my new 24" iMac all setup, backed up and patched. The very next thing I did was get BootCamp installed. For those that don't know, that is how you run Windows (XP or Vista) on an iMac natively, in its own partition and at full speed. Basically, games. I installed Supreme Commander, Microsoft Flight Simulator, Fallout 3, BioShock, World of Goo and Portal so far. On the OSX side, I installed World of Warcraft and Eve Online. Read more to find out my initial impressions of game playing on these iMacs with the very nice ATI 4850.

I have had only (only?) one lock up so far. It was under BootCamp (Windows XP SP2) running BioShock. However, before it locked up it was SO beautiful. I am running it at full resolution, 1900x1200 wide sreen, with every single bell and whistle turned on and getting very very good frame rates. Looks so nice compared to my old iMac. My only gripe with it is with the mouse sensitivity. I am not sure why, but if you up the sensitivity of the mouse, the movement of the graphics, as you pan around, gets a bit 'jagged'. Setting the mouse sensitivity to 1, no boost, makes it go away. Not too big of a deal for me, but I generally like to crank it up. I don't remember seeing this when I played it on my old iMac, but I had to have a lot of the graphics options turned down there.

Next up was Microsoft's Flight Simulator X, with Service Pack 2. This is another game I ran extensively on my last iMac. On that old machine I had to turn down most of the graphics to get decent frame rate. Not a problem since I used it mostly for IFR training, so all you saw was grey clouds. On the new iMac with the ATI 4850, I have turned up the graphics to Ultra High settings and drive it at 1900x1200 with no problems at all. I guess all that rain and clouds will look really good now. :)

I also ran Fallout 3, which looked very nice and had no problems at all. Again, every graphics option is set at the highest and it runs smooth as silk. Very nice.

I am going to hook up my 32" HDTV to the new iMac as a second monitor and use it in Supreme Commander. I will post another separate article on that since I will be also using the 2nd monitor for Aperture 2 and other OSX based apps, not just games.

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iMacs with the ATI 4850 are shipping!!!

I just got an email that says my new iMac with the ATI 4850 has shipped! So, they are on their way folks.

that must also mean that OSX 10.5.7 must be available now or in a day or two. So, keep checking your software update to get all the yummy updates.

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New iMac with the ATI 4850 Graphics Card

So, the day Apple announced the new iMacs I ordered one. I customized it a bit, off of their web site by upgrading it to a 3 Ghz Core 2 duo and upgrading the graphics card to something I can use for gaming and Aperture. The problem is, as soon as I did that the ship date went from 24 hours to 4-6 weeks! Man, I hate waiting. Anyway, as best as I can figure out, the problem lies in the fact that they do not have drivers for the ATI 4850 in the kernel yet, so we have to wait for the next version of OSX to get released. That version will be 10.5.7. I have seen steady releases of 10.5.7 to developers, almost every week. So, no doubt it will be ready soon. My order status still shows April 14th, 2009 as the ship date; happy tax day it will be!
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