MacBook Pro 16" kernel panics without panic reports. GPU issue? SAFE MODE runs worse!
I should have learned my lesson when my last MBP gave up the ghost because of a GPU issue, but I didn't. Fast forward a few years and I'm sat here shaking my head at my £2.5k investment black screening, locking me out and then requiring a restart.
I've got the A2141 16" 2019 5500m 2.3ghz i9 OSX Catalina. I've had it just over 3 years. The other day I was watching YouTube on Chrome and suddenly the entire system froze and I had to do a hard reset on the power button. Thankfully, it came back to life but the kernel_task was spiking and things didn't look good. I spent a couple of days looking through the forums, seeing the possibly fixes and trying to implement them. I reset my SMC, PRAM, ran diagnostics, even foolishly (so I'm told) downloaded CleanMyMacX to have a look around. Eventually, I saw some positive mentions regarding Monterey so I thought I'd give it a go, might clear out whatever's causing the problem (although in my heart I thought it might be the GPU again, since that's what's plagued me with MBPs).
After the initial install of Monterey everything seemed ok, temps were fairly low when using browsing and using Safari - I was hopeful, it seemed things might be ok, perhaps it was an overheating issue with the fans being dusty etc...so I looked into doing that.
Perhaps I got overconfident, but I decided to try and play a game. So I loaded into Divinity 2, an old save and watched it load up. I'm flicking between watching activity monitor and checking the game, looking to see if Kernel_Task is going to throttle me etc, while monitoring with Fanny to see the temps (I realise there are better alternatives). After two mins in game the screen goes black and the machine resets. I log back in.
No panic report, no crash report, nothing.
Figure I'll shut down and try SAFE MODE, hoping that I can see if creating a new user etc helps as some others have suggested...but no, SAFE MODE was anything but safe! As soon as I logged in the machine was sluggish, jittery and incredibly slow. I watched WindowServer in the activity monitor hog more and more CPU, going from 100% to 200%, even the mouse moved at a snails pace. Felt like the MBP was dying. So I shut down and restarted normally without Safe Mode.
I noticed one thing that might point to some sort of GPU failure. When in normal boot up and I got to About This Mac it lists the Graphics as "Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB". Assuming it defaults to the UHD instead of the AMD 5500m due to dynamic switching or only using it when needed etc. However, when I used SAFE MODE it listed in About This Mac the Graphics as "AMD Radeon Pro 5500M" and below it the "Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536". Does this mean that both were being used in Safe mode and would perhaps explain why everything was slow and sluggish, in turn pointing to an issue with the AMD 5500m?
I don't really know how to examine logs etc but can probably try a log in Console if directed as I have the time the last hard restart/panic happened.
Advice gratefully received. Thanks
MacBook Pro 16″, macOS 12.6
