Screen turns black when gaming?

I've been following this thread like many of you. I'm planning on buying a new MBP sometime in the next few weeks, I am hesitant after all I've read. Part of me say's to wait until after January 9th, maybe they will have something resolved by then. I do have a question, what program are you all using to monitor tempatures?

The iStat Pro widget is a great way to monitor your system temperatures as well as other system statistics. You can download it from Apple's site.

Only a small percentage of users visit these forums, and most that do are here due to experiencing some kind of problem. Generally people whose computers work perfectly are busy using them for other things. However, for a relatively small community there certainly are a lot of folks with this issue.

My first MacBook Pro from early November had a very base case of BSoD. Apple replaced it and the new machine has a seemingly flawless GPU. Two weeks of heavy duty video work and games and not a single BSoD or crash of any kind, I've yet to see a GPU diode temperature reach 80 degrees, and the fans are rarely even audible. (the first MBP hit 90-100C within a minute or two of launching any game, even very old ones)

If you get one like this you'll absolutely love it.

Well - not one exactly like this. This one is being replaced for another problem.. And I am hoping against all hope that the third replacement does not take me back to the land of BSoD.

At this point I would advise against purchasing any late 2008 MacBook Pro.

No involved party is admitting to the problem, if a fix is in the works no one is saying anything, so there is no evidence to say that the issue will go away any time soon. And since it seems to be hardware related, the time it takes to come up with a fix is a factor.

Also, while monitoring temperature is a good way to watch for potential problems I'm not so sure that temperature alone is the root cause of this issue.

If The Inquirer is right and the underfill is bad, temperature over time could lead to the failure. But there is no tool to examine the innards of our 9600 GPU's other than ripping the laptop apart and dissecting the chipset (like The Inquirer has done).

Low or high temperatures aside, if your hardware revision of the 9600 is the same as the rest of ours, you most likely have a ticking time bomb that just hasn't gone off yet. The conditions just haven't been met to cause a failure, whatever those may be.

Message was edited by: presseject

Hi,

i could reach nearly 99 °C with the following constallation (even though my mbp does not seem to be affected with the bsod):

0. Install the newest drivers from here (no need to use laptop2go drivers since nvidia officially supplies drivers for 9600M):
http://www.nvidia.com/object/notebook_drivers.html

1. Stresstest of the GPU (CUDA part) with (since recently boinc supports cuda):
http://boinc.berkeley.edu/cuda.php

2. Stresstest of the graphical part to the same time (use keys like 'n', 'w' and others):
http://www.nzone.com/object/nzoneboxofsmokedownloads.html

And as i said run 1. & 2. to the same time and measure the temps with tools like RivaTuner ( http://www.guru3d.com/index.php?page=rivatuner)

The interessting part i have seen is that directly after you start the applications or games the temperature goes up to maximum. Then after a while it falls back to around 80 degrees and never gets this high again.
If somebody has other scenarios except games to produce the bsod then please share it.

Regards,
ToM

Tom,

My experience is the exact same as your regarding temps, etc. on my replacement MBP. Sometimes there is an initial temp spike up to 100, but it is quickly handled. I did not notice this on my previous machine. Temps would get to around 90 tops, and if it did I surely was going to have a BSOD.

******

I stated that I would post back after some gaming, and I feel comfortable saying that my replacement is running as it should. No black screens in OSX or Vista, playing games like CS, TF2, GW, along with COD4 and FO2 in OSX. ALL of these games were an issue before. I have logged roughly 10 hours or so either gaming or benching 3dmark06 so far. I just hope things stay this way, without any failure as the INQ or others are predicting.

If it helps, my new machine is a week 50 custom out of shanghai. I'll post the full details sometime soon.

So, my advice to those of you who have this issue is to return it and get a replacement.

Well you can add me to the list of affected users. Got BSOD playing FlatOut 2 after ~5 minutes of gameplay. Nothing else has seemed to trigger it yet. I'm using the iStat widget to monitor temps, but I have to find something to record with so I can see actual temps at the time of crash. It really doesn't seem to be getting that hot though...

I will be making a report to Apple support, but I think I'm going to sit tight for a while till Apple makes a statement on the issue. No sense hounding them if they don't know what's wrong yet. It sounds like the support/engineering departments are taking the problem seriously (taking in defective samples, etc.), but I don't see why so many people here expect instant results. Diagnosing a problem like this takes time - it may take two or three months starting from when they began examining problematic machines.

I'm leaning a bit more toward a software problem myself based on the crash patterns. I'm thinking a GPU command that the NVIDIA chip is not handling properly, which leads to the crash either directly or with overheating as an intermediate step. This would explain why it is ONLY games that are causing the crashes. It seems that no amount of GPU stressing outside of gameplay causes crashes.

I'm a bit skeptical about the Inquirer article(s) myself - it may or may not be a hardware problem that is causing the BSOD. There may be a deeper issue here that will shorten the lifespan of the 9600M chip, but when "bad bumps" or "bad underfill/missing layer" cause a problem, the chip should be dead, meaning no amount of restarts would cure the problem. Intermittent problems are more likely to be caused by poor BGA design (like the iBook G3 issues), plain old overheating, or software issues. I guess it's time to get that Applecare plan...

Update 5.0:

I received my replacement MacBook Pro from the Apple store on Wednesday. The Mac Genius who was assisting me was actually scared to deal with me after he read that Engineering wanted my laptop for dissection (I guess he thought I was kidding when I was talking to him and he pulled up my case). Anyway, he tells me that he hasn't seen any MB Pros coming back for this problem so I said that GREAT news that means I may get a good one from here, but that doesn't mean the problem doesn't exist.

Long story short, I took the new laptop home and installed World of Warcraft and nothing else but SMC fan control to monitor temps. Here is what I observed:

Turned on SMC fan the fans were running on default at around 2k rpm. I turn on the game and start casting spells and running around the game like a mad man to induce a BSoD. This would happen after about 5 minutes on my last pro. I watch the temps as they climb to 105C and I expecting to see a crash any second witness the fans start cranking up to adjust for the extra heat. The fans got up to 6k rpm or more between the 1 hour I played around. Temps dropped to around the high 80's keeping a constant rpm of 6200 to keep the heat down...NO BSoD as of this time. I will for sure be playing a lot more on this laptop but at least I got past 5 minutes of gameplay.

I do not know if this is an issue with select pros or if mine will eventually get the BSoD issue again but as of right now this pro shows no signs of the BSoD yet. I will keep posting my progress. As of right now all I can say is if you have a pro with BSoD go exchange it and hopefully you get one that doesn't experience the BSoD problem.
Edit:
I wanted to add that my last pro I NEVER heard the fans ramp up like the fans in this pro have been doing. I never used monitoring software on the last one like I am on this one but I never heard fans before. When the fans kicked on in this pro I definitely heard them turn on. Maybe this stopped the overheating issue my last one was getting?

Message was edited by: Chaucer498

I was going to buy a macbook pro but since there are so many people having problems with it and apple doesn’t offer a matte screen anymore I went to hp elitebook 8530w mobile workstation T9600 2.8Ghz, nv quadro fx 770m 512mb, 4GB ram, 320GB HDD 7200rpm and has a 15.4” matte 1920x1200 screen. It’s an amazing laptop for pros and I can use photoshop cs4 in 64bit mode 🙂
plus it has 3years pickup warranty out of the box, and you can extend it for half the price of applecare.

Just an update, updated SMC and EFI firmware updates and 10.5.6.

The issue is still happening. An Apple Customer Support Representative contacted me after I emailed them.

After 2 weeks, the only response is they are still waiting for the Engineering team to get back to them. Disappointing....still no one from Apple to acknowledge this issue.

The CSR will contact me on Monday again. I sincerely hope there is a resolution or they will be getting $4000 worth of my frustration.

Hi guys, I was having the same issue with the first Macbook Pro I recived in november 17th... then I called Apple and they exchanged it for a new one... with the same problem! I gave them the last oportunity and FINALLY, the third Macbook Pro I have recived is working fine, I can play any game (for example Flat Out 2, in the other two laptops I could play just for 3-4min and then BSOD appears!) for hours without any problem. Also, the fans are just working as the temperature needs to... now I'm not reaching more than 80-82 ºC! So if you are in this trouble I recommend you an immediatly exchange because we are not talking about a software issue, this is definitly a hardware problem!

an update:

1/ I can reproduce the BSOD at will, by running a game on the 9600 with the fans at default speed (2000 rpm) : CPU and GPU reach 100°C in a few seconds, fans don't accelerate and the BSOD appears.

2/ I just ran apple hardware test, it gave me the following error:
4SNS/1/40000000:TNOP-75.875

I am having the exact issue. I bought this MBP for gaming and now this... NOT HAPPY! Let's get this fixed Apple.

I have an appointment with a Genius 12/23 at 9AM.... Keep your fingers crossed....

This is the last thing I need to be dorkng with right now!

Just a week ago I posted a message that it seemed that my BLSOD was gone...and guess what: it's back.

I was just playing WoW for a few minutes when the BLSOD appeared. For the first time I got a kind of "crash report", this is how it looks:

Mon Dec 22 10:40:09 2008
panic(cpu 0 caller 0x00405DEB): "NVRM: Read Error: GPU 0, PCI 0x00000200, BAR0 0xe4000000 0x5d7b7000"@/SourceCache/xnu/xnu-1228.9.59/iokit/Kernel/IOLib.cpp:724
Backtrace (CPU 0), Frame : Return Address (4 potential args on stack)
0x56b9fc38 : 0x12b4f3 (0x45b13c 0x56b9fc6c 0x1335e4 0x0)
0x56b9fc88 : 0x405deb (0x49da40 0xe10280 0x56b9fccc 0x56b9fcbc)
0x56b9fca8 : 0xbe14f7 (0xe10280 0xe10280 0xdd4c88 0x0)
0x56b9fce8 : 0xe98d1a (0x7934804 0x7808004 0x61002c 0xc1db13)
0x56b9fd28 : 0xeac79a (0x7808004 0x61002c 0x56b9fd68 0xc1d9af)
0x56b9fd48 : 0xd13881 (0x7808004 0x7a7f004 0x18ee000 0x78a0404)
0x56b9fd68 : 0xd4605d (0x7808004 0x7a7f004 0x1 0x0)
0x56b9fec8 : 0xcc517e (0x7808004 0x0 0x56b9ff18 0x56b9ff14)
0x56b9ff38 : 0xbe20a5 (0x7934804 0x42c88004 0x0 0x0)
0x56b9ff58 : 0xbcd1f0 (0x42c88004 0x258f96a0 0x56b9ff78 0x1a336f)
0x56b9ff78 : 0x13eed2 (0x7375400 0x42c88004 0x1a336f 0x6e8ac80)
0x56b9ffc8 : 0x1a017c (0x0 0x0 0x1a30b5 0x91d8790)
Backtrace terminated-invalid frame pointer 0
Kernel loadable modules in backtrace (with dependencies):
com.apple.nvidia.nv50hal(5.3.6)@0xe25000->0x1079fff
dependency: com.apple.NVDAResman(5.3.6)@0xbc8000
com.apple.NVDAResman(5.3.6)@0xbc8000->0xe24fff
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IONDRVSupport(1.7.1)@0xbba000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOPCIFamily(2.5)@0x5f8000
dependency: com.apple.iokit.IOGraphicsFamily(1.7.1)@0x77f000

BSD process name corresponding to current thread: kernel_task

Mac OS version:
9G55

Kernel version:
Darwin Kernel Version 9.6.0: Mon Nov 24 17:37:00 PST 2008; root:xnu-1228.9.59~1/RELEASE_I386
System model name: MacBookPro5,1 (Mac-F42D86C8)



Of course I've send this report to Apple...!

Message was edited by: Scarb

Scarb wrote:
Of course I've send this report to Apple...!

Message was edited by: Scarb

I've sent myself like 10 of those reports, I hope these can help tech to come up with a fix as soon as possible.

I appear to have my problem resolved. Called Apple support and they told me to do a archive and reinstall of the OS. I was skeptical but did so. However, since that time my machine has not hung while playing WoW and the fans seem to ramp up and down as I play. The machine still runs warm, but no crashes as of 4-5 extensive gaming sessions. I have even started to dial up the video settings and no crash.