Apple Imac 27″ display flickering – Temp FIX!

If you haven’t heard, the new Imac 27″ (released October 09) , has a model wide problem with the display flickering. Some have the issue worse than others, and the ones who say they don’t have it, well they may not realize it, because it is the ATI graphics card that is causing the corruption.  Any avid overclocker easily can recognize the nanosecond flashes or pixelated corruption that flash a vertical bar across the screen, and would know that its caused by one of three possible reasons:

1.The gpu fan is not spinning fast enough, causing the card to heat up after activity.

2.There is a firmware or driver problem (unlikely though since ATI releases solid drivers)

3.The gpu memory is deteriorating (this was a known issue in 2009 with certain memory manufacturers)

Any way you look at it, it’s posted all over the Mac support forums, and to date, Apple has no resolution for the problem. They released a firmware update that even I tried, and I still have a flickering display. Contacting Apple support, there is no replacement policy due to the fact, that you would just be receiving a unit with the same GPU, hence the same problem still exists. Some imac 27″ owners were actually able to have their Imacs swapped for new ones, but as i just got off the phone with Apple support, there is in fact no more replacements being dished out.

For the time being, they let me know that in 3 weeks there should be a final fix and update..cross your fingers on that one.

EDIT: Found a good temporary fix , go here: http://www.macupdate.com/info.php/id/23049 and download the SMC fan control, and turn up your CPU, HDD, and ODD fans by about 25%, and give it about 10 minutes and voila, no more flickering, it is a heat issue with the GPU after all…

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1. Reviewer

   27″ Apple iMac – flickering fix? « Alan Kent’s Blog says

   January 29, 2010, 2:17 am

   [...] appear to fix the problem for everyone. There is now talk of another fix coming. My best hope was this article where someone said running the fans faster fixed the problem for them. Basically seemed like a heat [...]

   Reply