Q: display anomalies
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Mar 11, 2011 6:47 PMby hexdiy,OK, here's to you all:
there is definitely a *hardware problem* with the ATI X 1600! As a fervent Mac repair hobbyist I have purposefully acquired a defective MacBook Pro Core Duo 15" 2GHz to see what all the rant in this thread (and others) were about. Believe you me, I am not a troll!
I have given up trying to read the whole thread ( the same and more of the same), and am amazed by Apple apparently ignoring the extent of this defect.
Indeed, my new baby does not even start up except in Safe mode (under a 10.5.0 fresh install, running from an external Firewire 400 LaCie enclosure), presenting diagonal and regular artefacts from the startup screen onwards. Only the blue screen in between/ during startup seems absolutely clean. Artefacts are stable after startup, but differ in place from the startup screen. Verbose tells me (barely readable because of the artefacts) the original display has not been found or something of the like. *System Profiler* tells me the screen is supposed to carry 32 bits of colour, whereas the original spec is only 18 bits (instead of the expected 24 bits), which makes me wonder... May this be the cause of all our problems?
Instead of all that, all seems fully functional. Artefacts not withspoken.
I have read a lot about keeping the temperature down by means of iStat Pro (boosting fan RPM) and/or even cleaning off old and brittle/unevenly applied thermal paste to be replaced by thinly and evenly applied good thermal paste, to keep temperatures in check. To little avail it seems here!
To all DIYers in this thread, my question/ theory:
would it be possible that thermal paste unevenly applied in the factory has eventually caused a fatal and permanent thermal breakdown of the GPU? In which case it is fried beyond repair.
Or would reflowing the GPU be helpful, intense heat seemingly only having affected 1 or 2 address lines/ connections to the GPU?
BTW, (de)soldering issues will probably surface more and more since ROhS compliant technology! Lead soldering would probably last you a lifetime, but do not expect much more than 5 years from ROhs, especially with components running as hot as they are today. That and bad thermal design, obviously! -
Mar 26, 2011 1:18 PMby m271082,Hello again! Anyone else tried to install another OS than MacOSX? My MBP 2.2 currently runs with Ubuntu 10.10, with no issues at all. I got 3 small scripts to increase the fanspeed (like SMCFancontrol) and thats it. So far tested normal DVD playback (with moderate temp increase) and World of Warcraft (emulated via Wine, D3D and OpenGL) - no glitches, lines oder lock-ups so far.
Feedback on issues with other operating systems would be nice. -
Apr 9, 2011 11:39 AMby hexdiy,The question as far as I am concerned, is, m271082: did your MBP show any of the described bloxy/ grid pattern video issues before you installed Ubuntu? Meaning the use of Ubuntu has actually MADE THE VIDEO PROBLEM GO AWAY?
If yes, this may be a firmware issue (and hopefully so, though I do not believe that to be the case).
If no, your MBPs GPU may not (yet) have been affected, meaning most of ours in this thread actually SHOWING the video issue are fried- OR suffer from faulty soldering due to overheating on a regular basis.
Please get back to us on this! -
Apr 10, 2011 9:01 PMby btmarsala,Hey Ian-
Thanks for doing all the research on this issue. I followed your instructions and have been line free for 2 weeks. Now, a new issue has cropped up as a result. I can't view most flash-based pages. They either freeze up or completely crash. This includes sites like youtube and espn.com. Any ideas on what I may have done to screw this up? Any solutions? Thanks-
B -
Apr 23, 2011 12:15 PMby m271082,Sorry for my late response here hexdiy,
I've had exactly the same problems other's already talked about. Distorted lines, weird textures within opengl games up to complete lock-ups. I tried every single OS (MacOSX Tiger to SL), Windows XP, Windows 7 and the last few weeks different Linux "distros".
The issues were worst within the Apple OS'es for me, followed by the Windows' ones. As for the Debian-based Ubuntu 10.10 (Maverick) and Linux Mint: were running like a charm, even under higher load (running games within VirtualBox'ed Windows 7) or World of Warcraft via WINE (winehq.org). Actually i am running on LMDE and still haven't had any problems at all.
Maybe a little off-topic, but still worth mentioning: I installed Tiger, then rEFIt as boot manager to boot from external discs/usb sticks. When booting into MacOSX i got a colored line parallel to the mac-menu on the top, sometimes the system locks-up when using safari and clicking around. Hardreset > rebooting into LMDE: no issues.
All tested Linux OS (64bit) were using the same kernel version 2.6.32-5-amd64.
If you need further information, i'll do my best. As far as i can tell for now: Linux works much better for me, it makes my MBP a stable computer again.
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Apr 23, 2011 2:39 PMby Ian Cheong,Thanks. Could you please verify if your Linux install includes a driver for ATIRadeonX1600 and that you can test it with an application that requires 3d rendering. (Google Sketchup and a complex model would do) If you can run Linux and ATIRadeonX1600, then we have proof there is no hardware problem. (I'd still like apple to enable firmware to be reloaded so we can test it.)
To banish the colored horizontal line, one needs to at least zap pram and reset SMC.
My MBP is still quite stable for months without ATIRadeonX1000.kext, excepting the latest Safari crashes reliably reading this forum and a few applications that don't like not having 3d acceleration. Who knows why viewing/scrolling a forum page would require hardware 3d rendering? At least Firefox works with no problems.
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Apr 24, 2011 6:21 AMby m271082,I did some more testing with Linux. For all tested distros: my ATI x1600 is supported. The hardware accelerated window manager "Compiz" is using OpenGL for drawing windows and some other shiny effects - without issues. So, compared to MacOSX without the kextfiles and missing 3d acceleration, this - for me - is working flawlessly.
Putting lspci -nn | grep VGA into terminal:
01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: ATI Technologies Inc M56P [Radeon Mobility X1600] [1002:71c5]
$glxgears output:
GL_RENDERER = Mesa DRI R300 (RV530 71C5) 20090101 TCL DRI2
GL_VERSION = 1.5 Mesa 7.9-devel
GL_VENDOR = DRI R300 Project
$glxinfo turned out that direct rendering is also supported additionally to all supported GL extensions (+ versions).
Summary:
Now all i can do is using my MBP and keep my eyes open. After reinstalling MacOSX Tiger earlier today the setup hung up at enabling iSight for taking a photo for local user account details. The Linux systems do all make use of the same driver base and i observed no issues at all so far by doing the same things with my MBP as i did on MacOSX. (Office, Browsing/Email, Flashgames, OpenGL Games).
Further information on supported graphic hardware (not only for Ubuntu).
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Apr 29, 2011 4:41 AMby m271082,Hello small3687,
this is not a fix, i've installed LMDE (amd64) and haven't had any display anomalies yet.
If you want to try out Linux, just download the .iso Image of the distribution of your choice and burn it as a bootable CD. Then go to http://refit.sourceforge.net/, download rEFIt and install it.
rEFIt installs itself as a bootmanager.
Right after the Apple-Beep you got a tiny menu where you can select what system to boot.
If you're not familiar using tools like disc-utility and if you do not know what a partition or filesystem is: please DO NOT touch anything. Please have a look at guides or information about partitioning and using multiple operating systems on a mac. I strongly recommend to backup your entire system (TimeMachine etc). Additionally go to the support forums from your linux of choice and try to find compatibilty information. If youre familiar with the terminal and disc-utilities you can go with Debian and derivates (such as LMDE), otherwise sticking with Ubuntu or Linux Mint (shares its core with Ubuntu) is always a good choice. As a sidenote: i prefer LMDE (based on debian) over LinuxMint (based on Ubuntu) and then Ubuntu. Reason: LinuxMint, for me, is much more userfriendly and the most things work out of the box (like flash, divx, mp3 and movieplayback, etc).
After you've installed reEFIt insert the CD/DVD and reboot your mac. Within the rEFIt menu select "Boot Linux from CD" and follow the onscreen-instructions CAREFULLY. Especially the partitioning-part. Mistakes could mean the loss of all your data. Make sure you do NOT delete the EFI and the HFS+ partitions, otherwise your MacOSX will fail to load and all your files are lost. You can free up some space using the macosx disc-ulitiy by resizing your HFS partition or you can do so by using the partitioning-tool coming with the Linux installer.
The setup will ask where to install the bootloader (grub), MAKE SURE you install it in the device you installed Linux to.
My partition table looks like:
/dev/sda1 EFI
/dev/sda2/ HFS+ MacOSX
/dev/sda3/ ext4 /
/dev/sda4/ swap Linux swap (1024mb)
While sda1 + sda2 where created by the MacOSX installation, i created sda3 +sda4 manually by installing Linux to /dev/sda3 with filesystem ext4 and mount-point "/", the bootloader should be installed to /dev/sda3.
When the installation is finished and the system reboots select "partition manager" within the rEFIt menu, it checks the harddisk for changes and will safe them.
Now you can select on startup between MacOSX or your Linux of choice and test your system with Linux.
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May 2, 2011 4:00 PMby SergeGardien,Yesterday this issue appeared for the first time on my Macbook Pro (late 2006) and the Apple assistance center told me that I have to replace the logic board for 740 euro.
http://img819.imageshack.us/img819/1556/photo3bg.jpg
http://img43.imageshack.us/img43/361/photo5co.jpg
http://img232.imageshack.us/img232/3117/photo2tak.jpg
Speaking with the technician, I've understood that this is a common issue on this Macbook with this ATI X1600, and it is usually caused by heat.
What do you think about a class action? Maybe against ATI?
I've looked over the web and I've found the "Hagens Berman LLP".
This is their website and it is possible to tell them about our claim (there is a button on the left): http://www.hbsslaw.com/home/
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May 8, 2011 8:39 PMby small3687,Hey M27! thank you so much for all informative write up. I consider myself an above average user. I've take my mbp apart replaced the thermal paste, installed a 500 gb hard drive. I have a portion of my hard drive already partitioned but its a windows 98 partition haha. I never use it and I have been meaning to get rid of it. I think testing it out with a linux or ubuntu partition would be great. So I am a little confused about some of the things you touched on there.
First of all I think I completely misunderstood you. When you wrote about LMDE (amd64) I thought that that was sort of like one of the kext files everyone was talking about deleting to gain functionality through the processor but losing 3d acceleration. I was hoping there would be a way to replace the kext files in mac with whatever is operating the 3d acceleration for the distro you are running. The distro is the correct term?
Truthfully i'm not sure what a partition tree is. My computer is at a functionally manageable level. What I mean by that is I can use it reliably for web surfing, music, and movies. Only doing those three things I need a hard reset maybe 2-4 times a month. If I use it for anything else, video editing in final cut, starcraft II is unplayable, sometimes it will freeze just on the menus, If a game gets even moderately interesting or lasts past 5 minutes I can count on a hard reset and sometimes it will wreck the B-tree catalog and I have to use the macbook I bought my parents and diskwarrior to rebuild my drive. I would love to be able to play starcraft II. It strikes me as odd though that should this be a physical heat related problem dealing with the GPU, which is what I have always assumed and it seems everyone else has determined it to be as well.
I am going to start looking into what exactly this whole linux ubuntu distro stuff is. I appreciate the time you took out of your day to write such a helpful response. Thanks!
-Zach-
