Screen turns black when gaming?

I have had my macbook pro for like 2 or 3 weeks now. The first thing that happends was that the game chrashed when i was starting wow. and then like after 2 days it chrashd 2 times. and then som more times.
But yesterday when playing wow as usualy it dies again, and ther i have my loving black screen 😟
and when i restarted it it happend again after like 5 minutes, it happends 3 times yesterday then i went to bed.
Today it happends again 2 times, black screen and you can her the sounds in the background, like it has al died. I am extreamly angry ath this point. Everything els works fine but i cant play on my expensive computer 😟 Its my first mac and i have only heard good things about it, and now this happens to me.

Update: Okay, it seems to be like a progression for me. For the first 5 or so times I played games... no BlSOD whatsoever. Then I finally got the first BlSOD about a week ago, and a 2nd 3 days later. Gathering from what folks have explained about the problems, it's possible that the cards are fine at first but take damage over time being at high heat, right? Has anyone else had their BlSOD problem start out tame and get worse over time?

ye its the same for me. the firtst one was my own fault i guess i put everything on hig and then i teleport my self into dalaran (wow) no good ide 🙂
Then a few days after i get the freaking black screen, and then again after some days, but now yesterday and today it is **** black screens al the time.
Playinfg for not more than five minutes and then bang black, and so it goes on

Message was edited by: isvind

Update: after the BLSOD was back (I wrote about that a few posts above) I got the BLSOD again twice. That means three BLSOD in about 30 minutes :S

@ DLevin: Every time I called Apple Support they told me to do a Archive and Install, to solve my BLSOD problem and another problem (system freeze). For me, it worked for a few days and then one problem or both problems came back.

I'm going to call Apple Support tomorrow again to see what they're gonna say now, I'm pretty disappointed with my (first) Mac 😟

I just got the BSOD in 11 minutes.... prior to that I played (WOW) for 40 minutes.... I can never get more then 40 minutes.... setting are all on High..... before the BSOD I the FANS come way up and then my frame rates drop like a ROCK and then BLAMO!

Apple store 9 AM tomorrow.... this should be interesting! I will post all the details.

Not your fault at all. We all should be able to play on high even in Dalaran without crashing, but we're stuck with defective hardware until Apple or Nvidia break their vow of silence on this (not likely).

And I really don't see how Archive and Install will ever fix the black screen of death... are they just making things up until they have a real fix?

Update #1:

Called the 1-800 number again last friday and got to a new tech specialist since my old one never called me back.

Reported that the black screen was back, pointed out the large discussion on this and even mentioned the inquirer's articles. The guy on the phone refused to comment on anything involving a hardware issue.

In the end, they are sending me another box to send my laptop back in for repairs. I pointed out that the last repair didn't fix anything and asked what would be different this time around and his response was basically "that's all we can do right now".

If I get it back with the same hardware revision of 9600 I'm sure that I'll be seeing the black screen for a third time.

Just got the BSoD yet again. I'll be making an appointment at my local "Genius" Bar for tomorrow. I expect to get another replacement, however, I'm not going to expect any improvement. I'm just going to keep exchanging and raising the issue until Apple steps up to the plate and fixes this. I love this machine, but I'm not going to settle for a faulty product, especially not a product that costs this much.

Apple and NVIDIA are just buying time with this issue ..... "archive and install", that is like telling a cancer patient to "take two aspirins and call me in the morning" on this deal... Apple and NVIDIA know they have a BIG PROBLEM... they are just trying to figure out what to do. I work for Ford Motor Company (for now anyway) and we know about problems LONG BEFORE we ever announce any sort of recall or field fix.... or Owner Notification Program.....

Tomorrow... 9 AM .... Mac Genius.. so help me if he/she tells me they "never heard of that one before"..... I will try to remain optimistic...

Hang in there everyone.....

I've been stricken with the same problem somewhat. I bought a 2.8 GHz MacBook Pro from the Apple Store online. One of the first things I loaded up was Team Fortress 2 via CodeWeavers CrossOver Games application. The 9400M worked fine, but I wanted to see what the 9600M GT could do. Every attempt, within 5 minutes, my computer would BlSOD on me and I would have to hard reboot.

I called Apple and they sent out a replacement and check my serial number online: my computer was built in December so I was hoping that if it was a hardware problem, hopefully this 2nd computer would have been built recent enough to escape it. But alas, I continued to have the same problem while playing Team Fortress 2.

Coming to the realization that this problem has not yet been fixed (even after 10.5.6 and the SMC update), I tried some other games. I downloaded the Redline demo and attempted to see if I could get that game to BlSOD the system, but it played it fine. I figured that it probably wasn't pushing the GPU hard enough.

So, I borrowed a copy of Enemy Territory: Quake Wars from a friend (the only other game I have for the Mac is World of Warcraft and I don't want to relapse into that game again). It's a fairly recent game and I figured that it may demand enough to BlSOD the 9600M GT GPU. I pushed the graphics details all the way up -- played it three times for about 15 minutes each and the 9600M GT had no problems with it.

Following the lead of others, I downloaded smcFanControl2 and set the fans to 5000 RPM and found that pushing the fans faster does mitigate the 9600M GT BlSOD issue. In fact, I haven't had a BlSOD once while I've been using smcFanControl2.

I'm not sure what the exact problem is and I'm not going to speculate based upon the Inquirer's article. It COULD be a hardware problem, but it is also very possible that it is a software problem -- my guess is the 9600M GT drivers. I know this happens in Boot Camp/Windows too, but the same software/driver issue could exist on that side as well. I know one thing, running the fans higher with smcFanControl2 mitigates, if not eliminates the issue.

Regardless, this issue is something Apple, and especially Nvidia, need to deal with quickly. Nvidia may go the way of IBM (PowerPC) and AMD if it doesn't get it's act together. Having to run smcFanControl2 just to play a game is not part of the "just works" mantra.

I've had the black screen of death even using smcFanControl2 and with the fans maxed out at 6k.

I'm still leaning heavily towards bad hardware, specifically the 9600 chip, mostly because drivers have nothing to do with the insane heat the chip is generating. When I do get the black screen I can barely touch the area above the keyboard.. it is nuclear!

Our MacBook's are the first hardware with the 9600 GPU and so far it looks like a complete failure, at least in its first revision.

I played Spore on OS X for 12 hours yesterday with the 9600gt, right from cell to space stage and had no crashes whatsoever. I'm aware that it is not a particularly demanding game but even so, 12 hours and no crashes is surely good news. I'll be getting a copy of vista soon so will post about my experiences of Supreme Commander and Rome Total War if they do/don't black screen.

This is a replacement MBP received at the end of november just for the record.

I thought archive and install was a total time waster but the fact is it has either solved my issue or mitigated it to such an extent that it appears fixed (or, of course, postponed it).

I Don't understand why, but the fact is my GPU diode runs *AT LEAST 10 - 15 DEGREES COOLER* after an archive and install, according to istat....

Message was edited by: Robert J G Gould

Message was edited by: Robert J G Gould

Well.... I went to the Apple Store this morning... and they gave me a new MacBook Pro (swapped the Hard Drives). I will let everyone know if this did the trick. I had a total of three PanicReports in the console all relating to "NVRM: Read Error: GPU 0" - they told me it looked like I had a bad GPU.

I must admit I was over the top blown away that they gave me a new machine. They never said or acknowledged there was a problem (a big problem I mean).... I pointed to this thread and they said they had not heard of it (but I did get one guy to sort of crack a smile).

Anyway, I am a happy Apple camper (lets hope this did the trick, all the WOW servers are down for maintenance - so I have not had a chance to try and break it!).

Good Luck everyone!

So I've been getting crashes only when running XP in bootcamp. Namely, they are during Fallout 3, which is a buggy game already.

I noted the 100C temps in windows, and while it got pretty high in OSX it was usually less than that.

So I downloaded the SMC fan control, and temps rarely rise above 80C now, provided I set rpms to 6k and I do the warm boot for XP.

However, I still experience crashing while playing Fallout, despite the lower temps.

It's irritating that we need to install a third party application to get a cool computer.

Maybe if someone got second degree burns by falling asleep on the keyboard, and then sued, we would see some action on apples part.