MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

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.

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.

David Pazdan wrote:
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.

David, do you want to elaborate?

operaman1 wrote:
Well reproduced it again. What I do not understand is why it works in windows just fine...

If it's a driver issue or an OS level issue with switching, then it would make perfect sense that it would work on Windows and not on OS X

Hi,

I have a 2011 MBP 15" 2.3Ghz (high res) with the Radeon 6750M. The machine has hung three times this week. In one hang I was editing code in IntelliJ, in another I was compiling and the fans were spinning hard. Not sure about the third hang, think I was compiling code again.

In the last two crashes I was able to logon via ssh. The UI was frozen and unresponsive. In one crash WindowServer had pegged a core, in the other crash, Terminal and VMWare had each pegged a core.

In all cases I was in discrete mode because I had a external monitor attached.

I've also seen a number of video flickers (a brief blackout of the video image) across the lower 1/3 of *two different external monitors*, with different cables and different DisplayPort adapters.

I've already had some file corruption due to powering down my machine while in use to recover from the hangs.

Video driver bugs and/or unstable hardware don't surprise me, though they severely disappoint. What's odd is that my machine was actually stable for two weeks after I bought it. Just enough to get out of the 14 day return period.

I was able to compile boost (once) and lots of other MacPorts though. I've compiled the Android source with no problems (took hours). So the problem is intermittent, but definitely present.

Yay, another MBP that is unstable.

Apple -- this is sad. Please test your hardware and drivers instead of making us do it.

Mines going back. More freezes in the last couple of weeks with this MacBook Pro than ten years with various iBooks/MacBooks/iMacs.

Out of interest, bought it off the Apple Store. Shipped the 1st March, was received by me 8th March. Just went to raise the return on my order, it says it's not eligible, outside the return period.

Does the Apple Store start counting the 14 days from the ship date rather than when it was delivered? I assume if I ring tomorrow, they'll be no issues, as I'm within my 14 days from when I received it.

John Harrold wrote:

operaman1 wrote:
Well reproduced it again. What I do not understand is why it works in windows just fine...

If it's a driver issue or an OS level issue with switching, then it would make perfect sense that it would work on Windows and not on OS X

mine started making "faces" at me in windows at the exact same moment of the first crash in MacOS and since then I can't work on windows cause it's all stripes and different weird other artifacts, and the driver crashing all the time

so it's somehow related..

Just wanted to say that I have a 2010 MacBook Pro Unibody and this has happened to me a few times. I thought it was just a random error but it fits with what you are all saying that the UI freezes but things work in the background. I'm going to call apple but I don't really have the time to reinstall OS X...

just a quick update:

no freezes over the last 24 hours. I still get this odd delay when moving the mouse via the trackpad where if I don't move it for about 10 seconds, it has a delay in response to my touch movements for about a second. irritating...probably because it comes and goes. other than that, it's been stable.

I bought my Macbook Pro 15" on June 2007. I am having the same problem only recently, say last 2-3 months, and increasingly more. It hangs, and I can only move the cursor, can play with the screen brightness as well and that's it. I need to hold the power button to turn it. I think this is something to do with the OS X and not specific to any hardware.

My 17'' MacBook Pro (2.3Ghz/ 8GB ram / 750 @5400) is on the way to me now - I'll try to leave a post here to indicate whether or not I've seen the same problem, but judging from the speed at which this thread is growing and the amount of people posting, it seems almost imminent...

Anyway, I also sent a tip to Engadget with a link to this page attached so let's see what happens next; if Engadget posts the issue there's a good chance Apple won't be able to ignore it anymore =)

I think it may not be related to a specific hardware release. I've been having similar problems with my MBP5,3 (circa 2009). This MBP has the two nvidia geforce 9400M and 9600M GT graphics cards (I usually run it on the more battery-friendly card). I've been reporting system freezes related to VMware Fusion for about a year now, with no resolution to both Apple and VMware. I do not believe my system has any hardware related problems.

I can usually freeze the system by putting it under load in the VMware Linux guest. It's worse if I create a dual-processor guest, or run more than one VM at a time, although I've frozen it by doing a big compile under a single processor Linux VM. VMware claims that it's an Apple problem when the system gets resource starved. Maybe, but such freezes are pretty catastrophic (data loss has occurred after hard reboot).

My problem may be different than the one being described here. When my system freezes I cannot ssh into it, so I actually can't tell if anything is still running in the background. But everything else about this problem sounds eerily familiar.