Unobody 17" Macbook Pro 9600M broken gfx card?

Cinebench OpenGL Standard:
Before Update: 5067
After Update: 5408

I'm assuming the higher number is better?

Did you test your notebook with cinebench more more than once?

would like to see the second results,

thanks!

Well that seems like good news! Thanks!

Well because of the dramatical dropping of "new post frequency" I presume the bigger part of the problems are solved by the recently released firware update.
I check this thread several times a day and there are no new posts the last days with any problems mentioned.

I still wait to buy a UMBP17 till the first wave of deliveries is complete and the M9600GT trouble isn't part of that deliveries anymore. Hopefully nVidia is now shipping only good GPU's to the MBP factories.

The Firmware update seems to have fixed my problems for sure.
I am done testing / benchmarking.

Collected my MBP17 on Saturday (28th March NZ Time). Once set up I immediately went to get the Firmware and discovered that my machine had actually shipped with new firmware so update wasn't required. Display is rock solid on both chips. No problems at all (to date at least). Will give it some more graphics intensive tasks over the next week or two, but at the moment....sweet.

I also got my 17" MBP with the new firmware, last week. No issues at all. Even played Warcraft for 4 hours straight.

Now I can enjoy this machine. 🙂

Yep, I too can confirm that my brand new unibody 17" MBP also came with the new firmware already there out-of-the-box.

First, My W8912xxxx serial number (purchased 4 days ago at a local Apple store) also already had the Firmware update, and thankfully exhibits none of the problems in this thread.

Q: In System Profiler, was the ROM version updated in the NVIDIA section?

Second, in regards to screen clarity and brightness...
My new MBP shipped with a 9C98 screen rev. I can confirm what others have been saying in this and other threads: the 15" MBP screen is slightly brighter and crisper than the 17" screen. Some of this may be due simply to native pixel size (bigger black pixels), and my age <grin>, but I'm able to discern a difference. I have not seen a 9C99 screen, but I may consider switching to a 15".

It's not far fetched that Apple received a batch of defective components from a supplier, and more than one laptop is affected.

Would you you buy a car if you knew after 3 days the wheels would fall off if you >drove above 30 miles an hour?

Would you avoid every brand of car that's ever had a problem on a new product, especially when that problem only seems to affect a few of a particular model?

Personally I've had Dell, HP, Compaq, and Sony machines fail within a few days of receiving them too. I've even had Cisco gear arrive with problems. And you know what? I still use products made by most of those manufacturers.

I cant believe that SO many people have the same issues

I haven't actually seen a statistic on this. How many people have had the same issue? What percentage of the new laptops are affected?

If 100% of the people are seeing this issue, then it might prompt a recall of the computers. It might allow us to return our computers at a later date when they solve the problem

If 100% of the people were seeing this issue the laptops would never have been shipped. I'm sure the percentage is lower.

Since you didn't even try, I wonder how you know that Apple doesn't support you after a year? There are plenty of accounts of people getting G5's repaired or replaced recently, and they're a lot older than your MacBook.

Guess what? Dell doesn't offer free support out of warranty either. I don't know of any company that does under normal circumstances. Apple repaired an iBook for me well out of warranty when it developed a known common problem -- and it was outside the extended repair time for that problem. There was no charge and they even coveed shipping both ways.

attached the 17" unibody to an external display and received no artifacts on their external display, which supports the notion that it is definitely a hardware issue

Can you explain how you came to that conclusion? Was the video chip programmed with the exact same parameters as the external monitor? If not, why couldn't it be a software issue? The video board is programmed differently for different outputs.