by Matt, matt@smalldog.com
A customer came in early last week reporting that his 24” iMac was locking up completely while playing World of Warcraft. I ran all the diagnostics I have available to me, used the machine in real-world situations, and even “artificially” stress-tested it by running iTunes visualizer for the graphics card, copying a 100GB disk image over the network, and running several instances of my favorite terminal commands, yes > /dev/null
I could not induce any failures of any kind, so I had to play Warcraft at work. I’d never played World of Warcraft before, and the last Warcraft I played was Warcraft II back in high school on my Power Computing clone (which still works by the way…) It’s amazing how far games have come, and this game isn’t even the pinnacle of what’s out there these days. I still prefer simple games in which plumbers move left to right, break bricks with their tiny pixelated heads, and gain the ability to spew fire by eating moving fungus.
In any event, the iMac did lock up after a few minutes of playing Warcraft. I thought the problem was software-related, so I uninstalled and reinstalled Warcraft. When this didn’t help, I installed Warcraft on a known-good external hard drive and booted from that. This eliminates system software on the internal hard drive as a cause of the problem. The freezing persisted.
Looking at the logs in Console, it was apparent that the graphics card was to blame here. The 24” iMac is the first iMac to have a graphics processor that is not soldered to the logic board, so it’s not necessary to replace the whole logic board, just the graphics card. I thought the fact that the graphics card is a module would make the labor involved in the repair negligible, but not so: the graphics card is underneath the logic board, so near complete disassembly was needed.
From fully assembled to logic board removal, there are only about 15 screws involved. The 24” iMac is the most serviceable iMac yet by a wide margin, and in fact there is lots of free space in that enclosure. I wouldn’t be too hard to fit a few more full-size hard drives inside.
As I write this, Jimmy is playing Warcraft behind me, and has been doing so for about 10 minutes. We’re close to calling the repair a success.