diagnostic software for radeon pro 555 macbook pro

Is anyone aware of diagnostic software for radeon pro 555 macbook pro? The Radeon card are notoriously unstable, so if you have irregular screen issues it is likely this card or the "gateway" to the logic board. Why apple decided to put these "gaming" cards in a mac just to have a "nice picture" is baffling to me.


In my case, if I leave graphics switching on, from time to time the driver fails and I get colored static. Or upon opening the mac, red screen. It is fixed by restarting the machine. Apple snr engr suggested turning off, or disabling the switching, but that only works for some applications. In this case, you notice the failure by strange performance in eg Word, unable to select words, or blank pages, or in VLC, a flickering screen, or in Netflix, an error when u try to play a video.


I spend hours on the phone with 3 engrs, and explained in detail something was wrong with the cards, but they ignored me. They replaced the screen and a fan -- how stupid is this. Screen works fine.


And I also conclude they know this is a problem. Hence directing me to turn off the automatic switching -- which wipes out your battery life.


There are only two work arounds. Get apple to replace the entire logic board and Radeon card -- which obviously they are reluctant to do. Or to get into command line interface commands to disable the Radeon, which also requires a hardware fix of a jumper to un-power the Radeon.


I have been a Mac user since 1985 - 35 years!!!!! I decided to splurge and lay down the $3500+, and I get a lemon instead. So applecare engineers basically replaced the screen and a fan and then sent me back a broken computer. It is impossible to test for, you simple have to replace logic board based on the history of the machine....... I suppose Apple has done the math and decided to to replace these double graphics card machines knowing quite well there are a certain number of failures.


So my question and a comment:

1) Is anyone aware of diagnostic software for radeon pro 555 macbook pro that would actually find the problem? Apple, can you actually find this problem, given the failure is random - my only observation is it seems that failure occurs more when the machine is in heavy use. Imagine trying to get a grant proposal in to meet a deadline, and the machine is failing every 15 min -- other times it will go a couple of days.


2) RETURN your mac immediately in the 1st 15 days if you notice any funky graphics behavior or poor fan performance. Better yet, don't but a macbook pro until they stop using the Radeon cards. In my 35 yrs of using countless macs, the 2017 MacBook has hands down been the worst.


I will send back to apple again, but they are very hard to deal with these days, certainly nothing like the service I used to see 20 years ago.


MacBook Pro 15", macOS 10.12

Posted on Dec 25, 2019 9:41 PM

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diagnostic software for radeon pro 555 macbook pro

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