MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

I have not encountered any freezing with my new 15" iMac (2.3GHz i7 quad) but I have noticed the weird "Not Charging" behavior when under very heavy load (Handbrake rendering). I figured it was a precaution the system takes to prevent charging the battery when temperatures are very high, but that's just a guess.

I'll try to do another Handbrake encode this evening with an iMovie render in at the same time to see if I can induce a freeze. We'll see!!

Nothing really exciting to report, other than that I have tried some heavy After Effects renders with and without the Graphics card switching turned on and off, and from what I am experiencing, there seems to be no difference, strangely after trying this the macbook wont freeze anymore, whatever I throw at it I cant replicate the freeze issue which I easily been able to the last days.. but dont drawany conclusions based on this, Im sure the freeze will come back.

I saw someone mentioned that this "freeze" state is just something that happens, and that we should wait it out, tried that, waited for 15 minutes, only the mouse was responding, hard reboot.

I just installed Xcode, will try to disable the built in "Hyper-Threading" on mac os x and see if it makes any difference especially rendering in After Effects as this software uses Multi-core and pushes it to its limits, the only hard part now (ironically) is to come up with a freeze again, my old tricks (1280x720 HD Trapcode particular, hi res textures polygons, RAM Preview) just doesnt seem produce a hard freeze anymore...

Oh, and I did some tests with the multi-core settings in After Effect, trying to find the CPU/RAM sweet spot, and for me using 3 cores with 1.5 gb RAM/Core was it. I tried 7 cores with 0.75 GB/Core and the rendering took the double amount of time.

/d

Just chiming in. I have the 15-inch 2011 MacBook Pro 2.3 Ghz. Mine freezes anytime I am doing anything graphics intensive. Same symptoms as many of you are reporting. Fans spin up loudly, computer freezes. I do think this is heat related. I installed TemperatureMonitor and it seems to happen consistently once the GPU gets up around 70 C.

If I don't try to play games and don't do anything else to stress the GPU, all is fine. Beautiful machine, quiet, fast, etc, except when I try to play games and then the fans go into high-gear and the computer freezes. As much as I love it, I'm taking it back and will wait until Apple fixes this.

No matter how much or little physical RAM you have, in a modern (read 1995 or later) OS knows how to manage it, swap unused physical pages to a file, virtual memory (64 bit hardware can address amazing amount of RAM and no machine in existence has enough physical RAM to exhaust the width of 64 bit registers), so this is always done in every OS.

Now, paging can take some time, and it may slow down everything while the kernel writes pages from RAM to disk, but you will hear hard drive churning to write them, and you will also clearly see in your activity monitor that available physical RAM is really low (usually bytes left).

I don't think anyone ever mentioned here they were left without physical RAM, when their system "froze". So, I don't believe this theory.

@Mario: I might be going out on a limb here, but you probably read "MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze Pages" which has nothing to do with the thread itself as "Pages" only refers to the number of pages OF this thread and not the "Pages" as they occur in memory 😉

As for the actual problem: I'm expecting the MBP 15" to arrive these days and I'm almost certain it'll have the same issues, which probably (and hopefully!) get fixed by a firmware upgrade sometime soon.

I don't know, but I spent a few (4) hours in Win 7 playing Fallout New Vegas and not a single crash. There were times where the fan seemed non-existent and times when the fan revved up real quick to full blast. Maybe this is a driver/firmware issue in OSX?

I agree. This does not seem to be an overheating problem. The only time I get this problem is when running a game for a while, then either quitting properly or cmd-tabing out of the game. This typically only occurs after playing for a while.

I've tested with both 'automated graphics switching' off and on, and it happens with both settings.

What this seems like is some sort of firmware bug that is triggered by extended use of the fans and a switch in graphics resolution. I haven't reported it with apple yet, but I hope they are looking to fix it, because I agree with the consensus here that this is completely unacceptable and should have been caught in testing.

Having the same issue here.

I'm not certain that is any one specific thing. However:

- I am suspicious of automatic graphics switching. It changed some video game settings mid-play and hard-froze the machine one time.

- I am suspicious of the whatever ATI hardware process happens when an application goes from full screen to Finder, either windowed or quitting the application. In almost every case I froze, it was switching from Full-screen to window, or quitting a full screen app.

- I don't know if this is a heat issue, however the fact that there is no kernel panic can't rule it out.

- I doubt it is RAM. Apple has a notorious history of screwing up graphics in their laptops, not screwing up installing RAM. Also, when there are RAM failures, doesn't the mouse stop moving too?

- Unless I force the machine to boot into 32-bit mode, it defaults to 64-bit mode. Last night after both disabling automatic video switching and forcing it into 32-bit mode, I played an entire evening of games with no problem. Today I had to restart the machine for a software install, unaware it had defaulted back to 64-bit. When I got home and started playing, I got crashes. Investigating realized no matter what I told the machine, unless I held "32" down during boot, it defaults to 64-bit.

I hope this information is useful but I will be calling AppleCare tomorrow.

blake let us know how you geton..

I dont really play any games on any of my previous macbooks and I am awaiting for the latest macbook pro at present. But can some of you who have and have Not had problems please confirm some of this info.
Are hard freezes or unoperative problems with your macs (only able to move mouse) related to just games ?
Is anyone having problems with CS4/5 LR4 etc on there mac ?

Has anyone done a reinstall of OS 10.6.6 and then just used the machine for a full day and not had any problems ?
has anyone not got any fan software such as istat/ smc etc installed and still getting issues ?
Auto switching from a game to the finder can revert back to using the std graphics card and this could be the cause as well as 3rd party fan control software. However I feel that the OS 10.6.6 in conjunction with slow fan speed accelaration with lower or not to warm room temperatures slows down the cooling of the CPU/GPU and causes the hard freeze especially if there are 3rd party drivers for fan control installed - Please lets here some feedback on this.
As a final point when charging your macbook pro at the same time this may also be a problem, so has anyone had this problem during charging or not ?
You can test this by booting up into AHT by holding the D key down (make sure you have less than 70% charge and more than 20% charge on your battery, and the power connector is in). Then do the std test and repeat a couple more times without restarting - Do you get a tmp' error ?

I think the more we all try different settngs we may narror this down to either a Hardware/ software fault.

Thanks.

Try the following and Further info….
Please note Apple Hardware test may not report an error if not charging laptop at time of testing or if macbook is almost or fully charged (plugged in or not). Only try this test if your charging macbook that is not almost fully charged.
graphics switching auto - turn this to off (do you get the problem)
Also try running in 32 bit mode (how to do this I don't know at present waiting on macbook pro any day now)
disabling the S.M.A.R.T update interval on Istat pro (if installed)
Remove 3rd party fan control software (not just switch off)

This problem occurs for me daily on my new 15" MBP 2.2, and it is beyond frustrating.

I've had sleep/wake issues with this machine since I got it. I'll open it up and nothing will respond - no mouse, no keyboard. I'll close it again, count to 30, open it up, and then it goes.

Last night I set some files copying. Nothing intensive, nothing that should have strained the graphics. I run gfxCardStatus and it was on "Internal" the entire time... and I was left with a spinning beachball. Even terminal stopped responding after a while. Had to do a hard power cycle.

The logs report:

(com.apple.ReportCrash) Falling back to default Mach exception handler. Could not find: com.apple.ReportCrash.Self

And that's all - nothing for a couple hours and then that!

It has also locked when attempting to change resolutions in Starcraft II (but not while actually PLAYING Starcraft II).

Reading this thread, I don't think there's much commonality. I'll run the hardware diagnostics from the application disc, and call Apple... but I'm not holding out much hope that this is something they will resolve. It sounds like a firmware issue to me, but could also be a bad batch of logic boards.

Had Apple call me, things we did:

Disk Utility Verify - Pass.
Permission Repair - No problems.
Hardware Diagnostic - Pass.
SMC reset + PRAM reset...

And it is booting, sleeping, waking, and performing faster/better... so we will see. They are leaving the case open for now.

@matthewadams: No I was actually replying to iFrodo, whose theory was that the freezing and slowdown is due to "swapping" (also known as paging), where the kernel writes unused pages from RAM to disk.

This condition is easy to recognize and you will plainly see that you ran out of memory.

Having the same issue on the 15'', I don't notice the fan speeding up necessarily, but the machine does become completely unresponsive and takes a power cycle to resolve.

It's happening about once every day or two for me.... Very annoying.

I just got off the phone with Apple MacBook Pro Support:

- Tried blaming the application CHECK
- Tried suggesting turning off automatic graphics switching CHECK
- Tried blaming the application again CHECK

- Finally admitted Apple Engineering is aware of the problem, it is NOT my application, CHECK.


"We can't give you any information, Engineering is working on it. Watch for a software update."