Q: display anomalies

SOLVED!!!!!!!!!

Had the issue and suspected the temperature. Mi wife has the same laptop purchased on the same store same date as mine. Her serial number differs in only one or two digits. My laptop has the abnormalities and my wife's laptop is ok. The only difference is that for unknown reasons her laptop usually works much cooler than mine.

I used SMCFan Control up to 5.5k with no success. Still believed it was temperature related so I re-applied thermal paste and puchased one of those USB powered laptop coolers. The ones that have a couple of fans blowing air to the base. The issue has dissapeared (have not applied osx patch 10.5.6 yet). I don't think the thermal paste did the trick, the cooling base was fantastic dropping the laptop temperature to 40~50 degrees C depending on the load with fans fixed in SMCFan Control at 2000 RPM.

I suggest getting one of these bases and NOT reapplying thermal paste. It is too risky. Hope it helps.

Thanks for your Suggestion,

we have already suspected Temperature but 60 °C seems to be ok and 50 °C should be cool enough to have no failures but we have them.

1. Cooling down that thing with a refrigerator is not a solution for me
2. I had the same effect, the error was gone for a while but it came back and it's going worse

Good Luck

You mean you use one of these cooling laptop trays and it was ok for a while but then it started happening again? That's a bummer!!! I thought I had reclaimed my laptop! After I bought this machine I was sure that regardless of what apple said operating so hot would have it's toll on the components. Next time I won't be such an early adopter.

Has anyone found out if apple is at least addressing this issue? They probably won't acknowledge it until there is some fix. Any news on the usefulness of the 10.5.6 patch?

My display is still glitch free since I use the cooling tray. It's not a refrigerator you just put the notebook on top of it. It is also kind of nice to work without the feeling that I am roasting my palms.

I've got the same issue (Artifacts & freeze) but it's getting worse, the MacBook Pro is freezing more and more often... I have got an appointment with a Genius on Sunday the 21st of Dec. in London (Regent Street) will post an update if there is an official answer from Apple on this. I am please to see that I am not the only one... Class Action anyone?

Same problem here.

MacBook Pro 17-inch, 2.16GHz, 2GB ram (been running tests with memtester and it seems fine), ATI Radeon X1600. My Mac has started freezing more often, without any signs in the system.log. Recently green artifacts/lines appeard over H.264 video playing in iTunes. It has happened twice now. Seems like a graphics overheating issue or something.

What did the Apple Genius say, Emmanuel?

Hi Thomas.

The genius was not aware of the issue. But he asked me to leave the computer for a dive deep investigation. Culprit seems to be the graphic card for which the mother board should be changed. I left the computer and will take it back in a week. I will post with the results when I return from holidays on the 5th of January.

Best,

Emmanuel

Thanks! Looking forward to hear the results.

Happy holidays!

Me also having the same problem ATI Radeon, 2.16 Core Duo 2GB RAM. Is getting worse the lines on the screen. Running OpenGL seems to freeze the screen now aswell.


Hope a solution comes up soon.

Got my mac back from the Apple Store. The solution is hard to hear: a logic board replacement. No comments were made, even if I have insisted to understand the issue. Seems Geniuses were unaware of the real trouble anyway, more lack of knowledge than unwillingness.

The new board has exactly the same characteristic has the previous one Intel Core Duo 1.83 Ghz. With the following versions:
Boot ROM Version: MBP11.0055.B08
SMC Version: 1.2f10

Now the bad news if you do not have the Apple Care, the board replacement costs a hefty 543 GBP (board + repair).

So indeed there is a problem with laptops having ATI Radeon X1600 has a GPU.

Thanks for the feedback!

My Mac is covered by AppleCare until May this year. Did Apple care to comment anything about the new logic board? Have they fixed some heat issues etc.?

How did you explain the problem to Apple? It is kind of hard to show the problems, as they appear pretty randomly. I have a picture I took with my DSLR when the display had a 4-5px hgih green line blinking accross my screen.

I did read on ATI's website somewhere that the Radeon has an issue with over heating when using devices that use interlacing on video. I use Equinux's TheTube which cooks my card something rotten and thats usually when i start to get the problems with display. I turned off interlacing in TheTube preferences, which did reduce the problem somewhat, but the problem reappeared eventually. I have to say i usually leave TheTube USB stick in and i find if i take it out i dont get the problem so often.

Would be very interesting to know the answers to the questions the last poster posted though.

I dont mind paying the money to have it fixed (i have no apple care as i bought a refurbished Macbookpro, so i dont think i could get applecare on it anyway) as long as its not going to happen again, otherwise whats the point in paying to get it 'fixed' when the problem may not actually be fixed?

Oh BTW my Hardware is:
Processor Name: Intel Core Duo
Processor Speed: 2.16 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP12.0061.B03
SMC Version: 1.5f10

Message was edited by: spagbol23

Message was edited by: spagbol23

Message was edited by: spagbol23

Add another data point to the mix.

I have a first generation MBP, 2.0GHz with the ATI chip. I've been experiencing the line artifacts as well as occasional "lock ups." Note that when the computer appears to freeze, it's really only the graphic subsystem. The system can still be logged in to remotely via SSH. I haven't been successful in killing processes to get things going again without a hard reset (software reboots don't work--they just hang).

I don't recall which version of 10.5 this behavior started with...I think I may reinstall and slowly update to each service pack level until the problems reappear. Sigh.

Well, here's the latest (just happened) ... never seen this one before:

http://furrybeanbag.com/images/mbp-icon.png

Honestly, that looks exactly like an opengl rendering issue when a texture isn't properly loaded. That's just speculation, and I don't know the exact internals of the rendering subsystem for OS X.

oooh nasty, i have not experienced that. i usually get a 1 pixel line going across anything , could be a youtube video say, or on TheTube, but it also sometimes appears to run across the desktop, sometimes the line is broken, sometimes it is not. I get a display freeze aswell, sometimes a complete system freeze where the display goes fully grey and audio sticks, sometimes the freeze just freezes the current screen say when i show a docked app and its midway through maximising (i decided to stop 'animate app maximize, minimize'). I also have to do a hard reboot. When i reboot i verify permissions and disk and repair.
I ran a hardware test which it passed. However when i run system profiler and look at diagnostics the hardware test says it was run in.......now get this....the year 4008........???? I actually ran it in 2008 of course, unless i went through some kind of time shift into the future which i dont remember happening.

Hi all,

I am experiencing still the behavior as reported above. Graphic memory errors and hangups as you described, ssh logins are working but killing SystemUIServer or
shutting down the system via shutdown fails.

*i have hangups now every day, GPU average temperature 50°C with cleaned fans*

As we found out earlier and some people proofed with their board here, its a defective GPU unit, only replaceable by a new board.

*I seems that there is no way out expect replacing the Logic Board, and the problem is going worse everywhere within time.*


When apple still does nothing about that we are all f**d up and we can throw this p*e of s**t out of the window sometimes.

I thought buying an apple will give me the possibility to use a computer for more than 2 years. , need a new computer now and i think it wouldn't be a mac for now.

PS: APPLE are you reading this???? Not interested in serving your customers paid a very high price for your products????

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