Screen turns black when gaming?

Hey All,
I've been following this thread for awhile and felt I might as well share my experiences thus far.

I purchased my first Macbook Pro Aluminum "15 from Best Buy in the second week of November. I noticed it had a bad line of dead pixels on the right hand side of the screen so I took it to the apple store/genius bar at the Glendale, AZ location and they promptly swapped it out for me. I was incredibly pleased.

After using it for awhile I stumbled across this thread and wondered if my new machine (swap date 12/1/08) was having the same issue. Sure enough I tested it out using Flatout 2 and World of Warcraft and BSOD within 5 - 15 minutes of switching over to the 9600.

Monday I decided to go back to the same Apple store in the hopes that maybe they'd swap it out again for a new one...no such luck. I had asked the genius dude if they had heard of the BSOD problem with this model. He had not so I happily demonstrated for him. At this point he began searching all his genius dude Apple resources and was unable to find anything. I tried to point him to the discussion board but he essentially shrugged that off.

His diagnosis was that I wasn't going to be able to swap for a new one at that location but he said that he'd be able to put in a new logic board. He told me that I should possibly wait another month to see if there is anymore word from Apple because he did not want to change the logic board if the problem was going to be the same.

So all in all after the reading the inquirer articles and other user experiences posted I'm not too sure what to do (aside from using SMCfancontrol in the meantime which didn't prevent the BSODs for me either).

Any further advice?

I'm waiting too for a solution!!
I'm going to re-install my whole system end of this month...
I think that all people that had the SMC update had this trouble!
Before I installed this update everything runs fine!
I called three times and everyone I have had said that Apple doesn't know about this problem?
Why exists this post then?

<Edited by Moderator>

Thought I'd post an update on my week 47 machine.

• Zero crashes in OS X
• Consistent crashes playing Warhammer Online in XP SP3, particularly while in GPU/CPU intensive PvP areas
• Zero crashes playing through all of Half Life 2 with all graphics settings turned up and 4x AA
• One crash playing through all of Half Life 2 Episode 1, same settings as above
• A dozen or so crashes playing through all of Half Life 2 Episode 2, again same settings

Weird thing is, I got pretty good at preventing the HL2 Ep2 crashes by letting the fans catch up with the heat. I logged the GPU temps while doing this and almost always saw the same thing. Idle at around 70c, then a big spike hitting the start screen to around 90c, then fans kick in and take it down to around 78-80c. Thing is, the fans sometimes would take forever to kick in or simply wouldn't ramp up at all. I recorded one crash with the very last temp at 96c. But I also recorded one crash where the temp was at 78c.

Pretty much stymied at the moment. I would add, Warhammer would crash anyways even with the fans blasting. Figure I'll wait until Apple actually acknowledges the problem and comes up with a real fix. I did try the nVidia system tools to no avail, and did update to nVidia's official drivers, also no change.

Count me in. Got my MBP 15" 2.8 GHz just a couple of days ago and I get the same error when playing FallOut 2 (in OSx). I just updated to 10.5.6, but I don't expect it to work better after reading this stuff here.

If you tell me how to see when it was build, I can give you the info.

**** - of course its Flat Out 2. sorry dudes, my mistake. Anyway, I just played 10 minutes yesterday after the OS Update, and it f****g crashed again. I am quite annoyed about the fact that you get something like that paying 1900 Squids...

I played yesterday COD4 under mac OSX, on best quality for two hours!! And no BSoD. And in COD5 under Bootcamp I have had only one BSoD since 2 months. Only with Flatout2 under Bootcamp I have problems. So it's a game problem and No Hardware only software maybe there's coming an update for Flatout2 and the graphiccards or something??

Well folks.... I am about 6 days into my third MBP, built wk 50. Yesterday was a pretty intense day of gaming. Probably 4-6 hours total - longest session was about 3 hours. Questing in WOW mainly - no battle grounds. Graphics set one notch down from the High Position - high performance mode.

So Far... not a single problem, no BSOD and no kernel panics..... solid as a rock..... knock on wood!

My last MBP was built week 45 and crashed like a US Airways jet flying through a flock of geese 5 minutes after I fired it up!

MtrCtyJoe - so you exchanged it twice? Is it entirely new, or did they try to fix it first and replace whatever is on the motherboard?

(Apple UK offered me to send it in to their support, but I'm curious they can find something without playing flat out 2 for more than 10min...)

Yes I have the same question.

It sounds like the newer machines are not affected maybe as much or at all. I would really like to exchange my current MacBook Pro as the logic board swap makes me a little nervous. It seems going this route can bring more problems along with it.

Is it best to call apple on this issue and demand an exchange? I just ended up in a stalemate when I decided to go the Apple store route.

I think the latest SMC update improves the responsiveness of the fans to temperature increases. Before the update, Flatout 2 would jack up the GPU temperature to 90 + degrees and the fans would never ramp up. I never played long enough to get BSOD though. I just played it again after installing the update, and the fans started winding up within the first minute of game play. The GPU only got up to around 65 degrees this time.

Its funny that the description of the update only talks about the magsafe adapter light and the battery lights. I'm guessing they really don't want to admit that there was a problem with temperature regulation.

I'm getting this problem when playing World of Warcraft on OS X, but havent had any problems with windows.

Basically I cranked up the game and within 10 minutes I was staring at a black unresponsive screen. I noticed too that when booting back into OS X, the power management is always set to the other setting to the one I was on - e.g. If it happens on High performance mode, I would reboot back in battery saving mode, and vice versa. It has happened to me using both power modes, with the 9600m GT being most frequent.

Given that the power management always resets, can somebody confirm that this is not a problem with OS X? Because this is what I initially suspected.

Well, I just got my 2nd MBP 2.8 GHz. Built Week 3 of '09, 521 production number. Still get BSoD in HL2. Haven't bothered with trying anything else. I've got the phone # of a manager at Apple... I'll be calling her this evening. And I was sooo hoping this would be the one!

I can get this to happen consistently with my Unibody MBP in Vista x64.

1. Get 3DMark06
2. Run the test
3. Observe during the second test (flying fairies)
4. System will black screen at 47 seconds, EVERYTIME (right as they enter the tree bark).

Test it for yourself, http://www.futuremark.com/download/ and click 3DMark 06 Basic Edition.

Would be good to have a consistant test that we can verify.

As far as other games, Left 4 Dead has crashed on me a few times.
OSX hasn't had any issues for me, with WoW or Flatout 2.

All of this ***** because I has no problems when my BootCamp was with XP 32bit...bah! I finished all of CoD:WaW on my MBP!

I have also done all of the updates listed here ( http://www.v2ex.com/2009/01/07/macbook-pro-unibody-screen-turns-black-when-gamin g) which definitely helped the sound and added new drivers, but it didn't help with the black screen.

nbuubu,

I also have the trackpad issue you described if I update to 2.1.2.100 through the apple update utility (or online download) in bootcamp. Reverting back to the drivers on my OS disk (2.1.2.1) fixed the problem as far as crashes, but then you don't get the two finger right click (three required).

I just want to add that this is just flat out sad that the BSOD issue hasn't been figured out and made public knowledge. Though I am happy with my 3rd replacement MBP now (still no black screens so far), I'm still worried the issue might someday surface on this machine.

I picked up my new MacBookPro on December 12 and have not had any black screen problems yet when playing WoW using the 9600M GT. My Serial number starts with "W8902", which I think means that this machine was made in the second week of January 2009.

I will report back if I have any more problems.