Screen turns black when gaming?

Update:

I was playing World of Warcraft last night when after 10-15 minutes of playing I encountered the BSoD again. This time I knew it was time to call Apple. After explaining the situation to level 1 TS it was quickly determined that we needed a level 2 product support specialist. After explaining my problem to the level 2 tech he said he hadn't heard of this problem. I told him that there was a 20k view post on the discussion forums and maybe the techs should skim through them from time to time to find out what problems people will be calling in with. I emailed him this post as well as the post on here about faulty Nvidia chips that had a link to a publication that wrote about Nvidia chips being "allegedly" faulty.

He had me download and install the capture data app as well. Though there was not much more done after that besides escalating the problem to engineers, which he said would take up to 3 business days, so I should hear back from someone by next week. I made sure he knew that having a faulty 9600 on my pro is not going to fly with me and if I can't use it I want to be refunded over 1k plus for being sold a macbook in a macbook pro's body. The video card being the only reason I opted for the Pro over the standard MB.

They "claim" this is not a wide spread problem with the 9600 and has only been documented for the 8600. If your experiencing this problem call Apple so that they can get the gears moving on this problem.

Message was edited by: Chaucer498

Using the MBP 2.8 since one month, I experienced the BSOD twice yesterday while gaming on OS X, using the 9600 GT (never happened with HL2 & HL2 episode 1, but it happened on HL2 episode 2 - all these games are buggy and freeze with sound loops at every loading/saving operation ; since HL2 is not officially ported to mac I thought it was "normal"…) ; temperature is going crazy high.
Does anyone know what is considered a normal peak of temperature?
Now I use smc fan control and it has prevented the BSOD from happening again, for now.
I want to believe that this is all only software-related…

That's pretty much what I have experienced.

Without SMC fan control cranked to max I get freezes or bsod at least once per day with the 9600.

With SMC fan control cranked to max I have only experienced one freeze after 4+ hours of straight WoW gaming in the last two weeks (9600).

I rarely use the 9400 and have had no issues in that mode. Granted, I don't do any graphics related things while in 9400 mode.

The downside is I can always hear the fans.

Hopefully Apple will get to the bottom of this.

If you are to consider my case I don't think this fan/heating issue should be seen as a solution. I believe it is clear that the heating issue is only a byproduct of the underlying problem, and whatever defect is in so many of these logic boards or chips is the reason that the excess heat is being created in the first place. By forcing the ramp-up of fans, it can only be delaying the inevitable total failure of the chip or board.

Here is my evidence for this -

Original machine - 9400M - Ran all my games, most except for the newest games could run at full graphic detail and the fans came on and off but it never crashed
9600M GT - With the same games as I was playing with the 9400M, it would heat up towards 100C within one or two minutes and hit me with the BSoD. The 9600M GT was useless. Why should a much more powerful chip choke, overheat and die running graphics processes that a much lesser chip doesn't even break a sweat on?

New Machine - 9600M GT never breaks even 80C no matter what I throw it, and the FANS HARDLY EVER COME ON. In a full week of hours and hours and hours of intensive testing at max settings it has not crashed, there have ben no distortions, no tearing, no flickering. It has been absolutely rock solid.

What I think is so significant about this is not just that this machine does not crash, but that +the temperature hardly even goes up enough for the fans to even bother to come on.+

Good to hear.

Add me to the list of people with useless 9600s.. I got the BLSOD in 30 seconds playing DoD today. First time even trying out a game since I bought the machine at release.

Going to call later to further apple's awareness.

can this problem happend with the newest models? I would to buy a macbook pro now and I would to know if something was fixed in newest shipped machines.
(and another question... is the hot temperature related to game tasks or it's a costant as like in first 2006 machines?).
Thanks.

As an update.

Spoke with Apple Care on phone. Nobody knew anything about the problem but after talking with me for a while they agreed to a repair.

The tech in the apple store has heard something about the issue but believed it to be softare issue until I told him it occurs in both Windows and OS X.

They are replacing my logic board.


Here's hoping the first batch of 9600s from release day were just a horrible bad batch.. We'll see when the new logic board comes in next week.


For now back to the old trusty TiBook. At least that one has not failed me in 6 years.

Hey just wanted to put up some info on a MacBook Pro that is NOT experiencing this issue. MacBook Pro, ordered about a week and a half ago (Hardware Overview below). I did install smcFanControl due to all the horror stories this model has conjured up, however I didn't ever need to ramp up the fanspeeds. I have played WoW on the OSX side as well as Bioshock, Portal, and TF2 on the the Bootcamped XP side. All games were played with Max settings on the 9600 (looking good too by the way). I've played each game for at least an hour (WoW for over 2) and have not yet had a BlSOD. The Fans seemed to work fine at all times and the highest temp I experienced was around 84 degrees Celcius. I'm not sure if this signifies that the latest hardware has some unannounced change that addressed the problem or what. I'll be running something more stressful to see if I can BlSOD but for the time being the computer's gaming capabilities seem to be happy.

Model Name: MacBook Pro
Model Identifier: MacBookPro5,1
Processor Name: Intel Core 2 Duo
Processor Speed: 2.53 GHz
Number Of Processors: 1
Total Number Of Cores: 2
L2 Cache: 6 MB
Memory: 4 GB
Bus Speed: 1.07 GHz
Boot ROM Version: MBP51.0074.B01
SMC Version: 1.33f8
Serial Number: W8849xxx1GN
Sudden Motion Sensor:
State: Enabled

Hi all. Great to find this forum as my MBP has had the BSoD since day one (11.11.08), unfortunately Apple Australia are way behind on this issue and I've introduced it to them via this thread. My issues are playing Far Cry 2 under bootcamp (XP and Vista).

Apple did ask me to test under OSX by running the visualiser for iTunes at full screen, apparently it uses Open GL to create the image. After a few minutes visualiser froze (no black screen though) and I had to hard reset. Apple decided it was a hardware issue and suggested I take it back to the retailer for further testing.

I had the BLSOD problem since I got my MBP in early November.
My Apple Reseller advised me to do a 'Archive and Install' which had no effect at all.

But since I did the EFI and SMC firmware updates I was able to play WoW for 2,5 hours last Saturday, with normal graphical settings...and no BLSOD since!
Let's hope this problem is gone... 🙂

The only way I have found to avoid this issue to is to start up the game ( WoW for me mostly) leave it running for about 15 mins without doing anything till I hear the fans spin up and then I have no problems from then on. The black screen always happens for me near the beginning when I am playing and its clearly a temp spike which the fans arent ready to handle thats causing the issue.

Also getting this issue with the new firmware upgrade.

10.5.6 just went live. Time to test that theory.

Interestingly enough, the posts from the guy who said that the update would fix the BSOD problem is gone. Probably because of some NDA issue...

Will report back.

Update:

I just received a call from the apple tech support specialist who was assisting me and according to him engineering wants me to update to the new 10.5.6 and run a game to see if I can reproduce the issue again. If it is still occuring they want me to send another data report log to them. I was on my lunch break when he called and will not be home to test this until later tonight but that's the latest update I can give. I will be sure to report back later tonight with my findings. I really hope this works I don't want to exchange my laptop.

Typing from iPhone please excuse any typos.

10.5.6 installed here and guess what? BSOD after 3-4 minutes of world of warcraft windowed. At restart there was a crash report for apple to send, you can also fill in your comments, I'm sure you can guess what I wrote in mine. I'm very disappointed this time.

I've just installed 10.5.6, but haven't had time to test it yet.

An interesting/scary thought though - afaik it didn't do anything to my Boot Camp partition, so if it fixes the problem just in OS X - is the thing "fixed" then?

And do we then have to wait for a Boot Camp update, which could take a long time to release.