MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

Ok well that's, that. Cougar Point has three PCIe ports, they are all x1 and each are used by airport, ethernet and firewire. So the CPU is the only place to get 4 lanes but it looks like Intel intends for Thunderbolt to use the PCH when it has more PCIe support. Which won't be an issue with desktops.

Chullo wrote:
So, In summary I recommend everyone download gfxcardstatus and keep the machine in integrated mode until a fix is found. I am now doing things that would certainly kill the machine on discrete. Hopefully that isn't too far off.

As I was saying since 10 pages back - I told you guys that integrated, when forced, stopped the issue. On my machine the gfxCardStatus should have other letters - w - for working, f - for freeze, instead of i and d, because it's basically the same thing.. a kill switch

You were also wondering if the performance isn't too good with the Intel gpu. I was testing few heavy load tests suggested here to try crash it, but also I tried playing few games, CoD or some snowboarding or whatever - with Intel gpu it just isn't the same performance. No anti aliasing is really an option and I had to lower some quality to make it playable. But still - it's far more powerful than my good old white iMac just next on the table.

Another thing is the Windows thing. Mine doesn't work good with the ATI card anymore. And the most surprising part was it all happened in the SAME moment. I had my first crash - restarted and booted into Windows.. and it all was broken there, gpu driver failed and is still not usable

anyone knows a way to force the integrated gpu on win? would be nice to test that out too

I think the hard freeze may be due to a software upgrade before the new ones came out as I have the same problem with my 2007 mbp

I had to come reply here after reading through the thread. This is software related for most people. How do I know? I crashed my mac over and over using the smalluxgpu. I went over to the windows side and burned this computer up using burnin and other program with no freezes.

UNINSTALL smcfancontrol. I ran it with smc fan control on and it freezes in an instant. Uninstall and it is fine. I will report as I find out more, but so far so good. The dynamic gpucontrol is fine for me. It is smc fancontrol.


Message was edited by: operaman1

Hey Madhat,

The issue appears to be freezing of the interface only. If you go back through the thread you'll see many folks have reported audio continuing to play as well as being able to ssh into the frozen machines. If you are having trouble reproducing the problem, reenable graphics switching and look at the following posting:

http://discussions.apple.com/message.jspa?messageID=13219904#13219904

Using the steps outlined there I was able to recreate the problem consistently and rather quickly (within at least 20 minutes).

I think Horniasty brings up a good point. Folks that are just now joining the discussion would probably benefit from reading through this thread. Many of the things people are discovering have already been found and discussed at length.

I know this can be difficult. For example somehow I missed Horniasty's post 🙂

I have read through this thread, and the likelihood of Apple releasing all of these laptops with known faults is bordering on zero. I have proven it from my end. I bought THE first batch available and had mine from America to me here in Germany with in days of release. I too could crash my system with the smallluxgpu within minutes.

Listen, I am not some Mac newbie or even PC newbie. I look to tear apart these things for the fun of it. I am an avid over clocker, and I love to push things to the limit. In the vast majority of cases this is a software issue. Mine was solved by removing both istat and smcfancontrol. I have tried to crash my machine since the first lockups. I have rebooted several times, and I will bet the house this a software-fIrmware issue at worst. I have pushed this laptop since removing smcfancontrol with insane amounts of loads and it is not crashing. This is tested both in windows and OSX. I first figured this was a software issue when I pushed the CPU and GPU to their limits last night in Windows after freaking out from getting the freeze replicating the smallluxgpu test from this thread.

I could not replicate the crash. I ran ATITool. I ran Orthus with 8 threads while running GPU burnin. While my MBP sounded like a jet it never ever crashed. For me this kills it being a bad GPU. I was also monitoring under Windows and there was no throttling to be seen. So I am feeling certain than in most cases this will be fixed with an update. I have a vested interest like everyone here in my MBP having dropped over 3k for mine.

Message was edited by: operaman1

That's very interesting....since I was able to reliably reproduce the issue on apples stock machines in the apple store. I'm now in agreement that it should bead river issue, but it varies directly with heat. Maybe an error in the driver, could be something as simple as a memory leak....running the machine @ high stress and generating just 4kb of leaks in x-cycles will bring the GPU to a halt in fair order. The GPU ram itself could be bad, could still be an overheating issue....of the GPU not the CPU (since we've been running stresses since last night on integrated w/o failure).

If you remember the 2009 SATA problem in detail, you will remember that Apple NEVER fixed the issue. They replaced my machine 4 times before finally giving me a fully upgraded 2010 model 10 months ago. No issues with SATA now, but I do have a similar sounding hard freeze issue.

Is anyone getting these probs on the 13"? I have the i7 2.7 13" and have had zero lockups.. been running it quite hard.
If it is that it's only the 15 & 17 then surely it's obviously a GPU issue of some sort with the 13" just having the basic Intel graphics...

You have a 13" which does contain only the integrated gpu, there is no AMD or no other secondary Graphics Card,

as we already stated here - the Intel HD 3000 gpu works just fine and at the moment gives some of us an only way to use the machine,
so you're safe

Well, I've got a 15" 2.2, and tried disabling the graphics switching. After doing so, i was able to run starcraft 2 (what initially caused my system to freeze) in full screen with graphics set to high. It ran! without crashing..

But, last night I wasn't playing a game, but rather encoding some video using handbrake, and the system froze (fans running high) and completely locked up. No gaming, and the graphics switching disabled.

I don't have any special monitoring utilities that others are using, the system isn't tweaked or anything.. just a few apps installed. The day I bought the system I installed SC2 and it was freezing then.

I'm not sure what to do, I doubt replacing it with another will solve my problem. Did swapping machines work for anyone else? I love my 2000$ mac, but certainly wasn't expecting issues like this. I never got my c2d 13" black macbook to crash once!

Just some additional observations about whether or not the freeze has anything to do with heat.
- for the first time I had the system freeze up with a mangled view of the login screen from standby this morning. Was using about 5 minutes earlier to browse, simple activities .. system temp very low. Closed lid .. opened up and it was frozen. May be completely unrelated to other activities.
- last night was able to play for over an hour without an issue. Cranked fans up with smc before hand. System topped out at *99 deg. C*, which honestly scares the **** out of me. I expect better, and not sure how a firmware update is going to help that.

Here are some temp charts of my system.
- http://min.us/llZL1e
- http://min.us/mvghBMv#1

Note the steep ramp up in temp as soon as I turn on my game, Dragon Age. Very concerning. Have an appointment with a "genius" this morning. I may return my MBP, not sure I'm happy if this is "expected" behavior.

Hey Everyone, I haven't read through much of the posts but I can tell you this. It is a known issue with the new chips in the macbook pros.

I got it to crash after 25 minutes with iphoto, chrome, imovie, AND running smallluxgpu at 8 core + gpu all at the same time. So. definitely something though I am not sure if I would ever stress this like this in real world conditions. The smallluxgpu is pretty intense by itself.