Black Screen

The other day my iMac went out along with everything in my room due to a power outage. It was running Parallels 7 and League of Legends so to say the video card was pretty busy at the time. After the outage when I went to turn the screen back on I was greeted by the usual sound of fans and chime, but the screen remained black. I reset the SMS and PRAM all to no avail. After being reminded by phone support that I am out of warranty and many google searches later I'm still only pretty sure that the Video Card is fried. If that is the case I've found replacements for around $600. Do you think there could be any other solution to this? and how much would Apple charge for repairs?

Specs:
27" iMac mid 2011
3.4 ghz i7 quadcore
AMD Radeon 6970m 2gb GPU

ps. I'm definitely gonna buy a better power strip.

Nice computer! I have the same one

It could actually be a number of things....

My only suggestion is to make an appointment at the nearest genius bar. They will plug your computer into their machine and run a hardware diagnostic on it for free so they can at least tell you what's wrong and what needs to be replaced free of charge.

The apple store will do the repairs for you in house; they usually do desktop repairs in the back room of the store - laptop repairs usually get shipped to back to Apple for service. As far as I know, they charge you only for the replaced part + tax. They don't charge labor. It might take a few days though if the part needs to be ordered.


Don't fret about the warranty being expired. They might not have even covered it anyway b/c it was caused by lightning. I had the same thing happen years ago to my old Dell laptop (I needed a new motherboard after it got fried during a thunderstorm) and they wouldn't cover it because the warranty didn't cover "acts of god" as they called it. Usually things like that are covered under homeowners or renters insurance instead.

ps. I'm definitely gonna buy a better power strip.

Click to expand...

Power strips are pretty much worthless when it comes to surges from a lightning hit. What you can do though, is buy an UPS for your iMac. A good UPS has built in surge protection along with some line leveling. However, nothing is going to protect your electronics if lightning strikes or strikes near by.

In order to do your own diagnostics - do this: Attach an external monitor or TV to your iMac. If the external monitor or TV works, the video circuitry is OK.

Thank you both for the quick replies. I checked the external monitors and still nothing. I'll be making an appointment with the genius bar as soon as I can scrounge up some money!

Take it on in as soon as you can. Even though it's out of warranty, sometimes Apple will get generous and do the work anyway. Also, the GPU is integrated on to the logic board which means the entire logic board would need to be replaced. That's likely to be an expensive repair. Good luck with it and let us know how it turns out.