I have an iMac DV SE with bum vram. Is it possible to replace the vram, or is it soldered to the board?
Any suggestions are appreciated. TIA.
mfun
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Slot loaders use slodered down VRAM. It's the trayloaders that have VRAM slots to add VRAM. Depending on how comfortable you are with surface mount soldering it is possible to replace the chips, buty finding replacements might not be worth while. Putting in a new mobo is probably the most cost effective way to fix it.
How did you determine that the VRAm is bad? You aren't confusing the well known OS X install causing video problems as being caused by the VRAM are you?
Actually, the screen was wanky, with lines and blips and such, and it was one of those rare occasions where I was able to use the hardware diagnosis disk to check the computer (so often, it's just a "dead" computer).
It identified (visible through the haze) a vram issue.
I have some machines lying around that are expendable (other parts don't work), and I was just hopeful that I could remove vram and replace it on the DV SE.
Sounds like I'm outta luck, though.
Thanks for the info. I'm not an experienced soldering guy, so I don't know that I could jump into that.
Cheers,
mfun
Have you tried a firmware update? If it's more than just wonky colors on the screen it might not be it, but I have no idea how the screen-gone-bad-because-of-OS-X-Install shows up under a hardware diagnostic.
Thanks for the reply, and interest. I'll go back and double-check the firmware update, but the machine was configured to run OSX Panther, and had been running it for a bit. It's a middle school computer that was placed in a lab situation. I pulled it back to the dead soldier area, but it has only been recently that I have had time to look at it.
I'll give 'er a look.
Cheers,
mfun
The OS X problem can manifest in various ways. One common way is to have wonky video right at the first reboot. Other times it can creep into a worse and worse state from seemingly being fine. Other times it might be fine for a while until the video electronics get strained enought that they give out. The FW update seems to fix many video problems that aren't actual hardware faults.