MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

alvinzho wrote:
Oh I was able to complete the test without it crashing after switching to full screen mode. I probably should have done that before. Strange that your video card score is so low since we have the same card. My score for that is 6.0.

I ran it in windowed mode both times and never had a crash. It's very possible that running it in windowed mode is what affected the graphics score. I'd run it again but I already uninstalled VMWare and Windows 7 -- I use Parallels on my iMac to run Windows, and at least Parallels lets you turn on the Aero effects. No idea why I couldn't do that in VMWare, but since I couldn't, I'm not at all surprised how low the graphics score was.

I reinstalled OSX & brought all my stuff back in from a firewire drive via Migration Assistant.

The box for automatic graphics switching is UN-checked in the Energy settings, so it runs on the "better" video card all the time.

Ran Folding @home for many hours Friday/Saturday overnight & during the day on Sat when I wasn't using the Mac. This completely maxes out the CPU! Every clock cycle the system wasn't using F@H was.

Uploaded/streamed a video of a demo we did at my user group last year to USTREAM (75 mins) & played a portion of it back.

The machine didn't crash, freeze, panic, or overheat. Not sure what else I'm doing differently from you guys.

The issue seems to affect machines with the AMD Radeon HD 6750M GPU (i.e. the Early 2011 MacBook Pro 17" and high-end 15" models).

The freezes occur when the AMD GPU is in use, not when the integrated Intel GPU is in use (install gfxCardStatus to see which GPU the machine currently uses, http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus).

The following steps reliably cause a freeze:

1. Wipe the disk
2. Re-install from the Install DVD that came with the machine
3. Install Xcode
4. Install MacPorts, http://www.macports.org/
5. Open Photo Booth (to cause a switch from the Intel GPU to the AMD GPU)
6. Open Terminal and run "sudo port install boost" (without the quotes)

The command in step 6 will download a bunch of source code and compile it (all serious and well known open source projects; won’t harm you or your machine). While it's still downloading, everything should be fine, no freeze.

However, once it starts compiling and generates a bit of heat, it will take only a couple of minutes until the screen freezes (note that you can still connect to and run commands on the frozen machine via SSH).

My 2011 MBP is actually a replacment for damaged 2010 MBP i got in January and never even used! It was dinted, scratched and contained beta software and hardware. Apple appologiesed sent me the new model and now this is even worse. All this new power and I cant even use the machine! I have reinstalled OS X twice and one ti e had the flashing "?" on boot up.

Opening photobooth causes a crash. Doing even the simplist makes my mac shoot to 98 cpu temp! I have win 7 on fine via Parallels and it works fine completley. I have a time machine backup so im not too worried but i want this resolved as do all you guys.

So right now on my desk I have my original damaged 2010 Mac, the new 2011 pro and an old Black mac. Guesx i will have to use black mac seen as i cant the others...

Great fun and games...

Well that worked three times for me. I finally found a use for having a camera on my phone. I made some videos of the crash and I called up the support guy I spoke with yesterday. He wasn't there so I left a message explaining that I had an example of the freeze on video (pretty poor, but it's there), and there is a way to recreate it consistently.

I'm not a port guy (I'm more familiar with fink), so is there a way to clear out the cache and make the boost compile thing restart from scratch?

I've no 17" but:

I've bought base MBP 15" (2 GHz) 2 weeks ago. Today I've had first strange thing: after MBP burned a DVD it gone in sleep and never waked up. When I've pressed space bar it appears login screen (it's normal) but in 2 parts. Keyboard not responding and arrow mouse rolling. Only way to exit it was by power button.

This is the first freeze in 2 weeks of use. After that I've used MBP for 8-9 hours without any other problem.

Message was edited by: Montegentile

@ND381:

I'll give your procedure a whirl and report back. FWIW I haven't run into any freezes yet but I suspect that this will trigger one. But even if it does, that doesn't isolate the cause. In fact, if folks who haven't yet had a freeze run your procedure and then encounter a freeze, that (to me) points to a driver/firmware issue more than a hardware one since it implies that ALL new MacBook Pros suffer from the freezing issue. It's unlikely that all of the new MBPs suffer from a hardware problem unless there's a fundamental design flaw...but even so, I suspect Apple would issue a firmware update that would effectively provide a workaround for the flaw.

I will say that it's a good thing that someone found a consistent way to repeat the freeze. This should really help the Apple engineering team isolate the issue and (hopefully) provide a fix.

I'm on a Macbook Pro 15" with the 6750M GPU and just ran the steps you outlined and it caused a freeze right where you said it would. I'm also experiencing the issues others have mentioned when exiting from a full screen game.

I was still able to connect via ssh but when I attempted to reboot it from ssh I the connection was terminated and the laptop remained frozen, I had to hard reboot it.

Another issue I have had is that the computer has hard froze with the screen artifacted with fuzzy vertical columns and all the screen display garbled. This has happened twice and one time was while playing a flash video on youtube. Has anyone else seen this problem?

So question ...

For those having the problem (myself included) .. where is your MBP when you use it? ..

My system ran cooler and without crash (granted for only 20 minutes) before I turned off the fullscreen game, when I had it run on the coffee table. CPUs were still getting hot into low 90s vs upper 90s on sofa cushion, and GPU was running about 8 degrees cooler (64 deg vs. 72) { all celsius }

So I know the specter of a cooling/heat issue have been raised .. still hard to believe that's not the case.

Anyway, so just wondering is there a common thread here with those having problems as to how you typically run your MPB...

lap/table/other?

lap/other for me.

Sure enough, my system locked up at "Building icu" when running ND381's procedure...and it locked just before my fans started to spin up. I'm not sure what exactly this means, but if it only hangs when the 6750HD is active, then I'd be willing to bet it's a graphics card driver issue. SInce this particular case is repeatable, it's probably trivial for someone with the right tools and skills to find out what exactly is tripping the system up.

Anyway, I'm not sure there's any point in exchanging your machine over this issue when it's almost a given that a replacement will have the same problem. FWIW this is first freeze I've encountered.

Message was edited by: Schwa72

I dont know if anyone already mentioned this but I was having the same problem and I just went to my power menu and switched "off" graphics switching, which means the more powerful gpu is always running and the intel gpu is switched off completely, doing this turned down the fan speed and stopped all the freezing, I feel like I shouldn't have to go and do this every-time I want to play Starcraft but its a quick fix until apple has a software update to fix the issue.

One note, when you turn off the graphics switching it does it for BOTH battery and plugged in (you can't selective it for just one profile), so if you are using your laptop without the plug make sure to turn on the graphics switching again cause the battery will take a hit.

John Harrold wrote:
... I'm not a port guy (I'm more familiar with fink), so is there a way to clear out the cache and make the boost compile thing restart from scratch?

After it freezes and you rebooted, just run "sudo port clean boost" to remove the build artifacts.

If you want to see a successful build, don't launch Photo Booth (or anything else that triggers the AMD GPU) and run "sudo port install boost" again. It should work, no freeze (that's also a good way to demonstrate how fast these new machines are; compiling Boost is not a trivial task).

After a successful build while running on the Intel GPU, you can run "sudo port uninstall boost" to remove Boost, launch Photo Booth to trigger the AMD GPU, run "sudo port install boost" again and you'll have another freeze.

alvinzho wrote:
Is it necessary to wipe the disk first and reinstall, or is it reproducible just by opening photo booth and compiling boost?

It's reproducible just by opening Photo Booth and compiling Boost. Wiping everything and installing only the OS and Xcode just creates a better test case, because you can rule out interference by third party applications.

Compiling Boost is nothing special though, I picked it at random because it’s a CPU-heavy task which reliably makes the machine work hard and produces a lot of heat. Same goes for Photo Booth: nothing special, just a random application which ships with the base install and triggers the AMD GPU, while (I assume) not really doing all that much on the GPU unless you start applying effects.

Ok my unit runs fine when editing in Aperture and playing WOW, however it has froze on me twice in a matter of minutes when tethering using my iPhone via USB. I got a message on screen telling me to hold down the power button to shut off... WTH?

Keiron

I had the EXACT same problem with my first macbook 15" 2011. I haven't had any overheating issues yet, not even with my new model but I am using windows 7 for work and OS X for watching movies/browsing.

I found on OS X when I tethered my iphone 4 it would crash the second I opened uTorrent. I don't know if it's linked to the graphics switching (apparently it utilises AMD graphics for even simple tasks) or the USB driver being incompatible with that bus.

I also found with the build of 10.6.6 which came with the new MBP that I was unable to install my dongle drivers whereas I could with a 2010 MBP which had 10.6.5 and 10.6.6.

Most peculiar... I was thinking of returning the 2.0 GhZ and getting the 2.2 one with the better GPU but now I don't know if I should bother since so many seem to be reporting problems.