MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

Madhat wrote:
From our Reddit discussion someone just said:

"It appears to be a problem with software that controls the fan speed. I can confirm that removing iStat Menus will eliminate the freeze. Others were using a different program, SMCFanControl, and removing it also fixed the freeze."

http://www.reddit.com/r/apple/comments/g7fin/2011macbook_pros_confirmed_to_crash_underload/

Interesting. I don't have smcFanControl or iStat Menus installed (just the iStat Dashboard widget) and the only freeze I've run into is the one that results from the boost compilation. I've tried all of the other suggestions posted here to try to get my computer to freeze and not have succeeded.

Well, maybe I should say my computer has succeeded in NOT freezing. 🙂

I spoke to an Apple tech rep yesterday about this. He had me do a completely fresh install onto a separate partition (thank goodness I keep a habit of always putting a spare 15GB partition on my boot drive.) Photobooth plus 6 "yes > /dev/null" crashed the install within 20 seconds - no other hardware connected, no smc control, no iStat, etc. Tech then suggested I send it in for repairs -- when I protested that the machine was brand new, he marked the case as "dead on arrival" and escalated me to another group that can supposedly handle a swap with a new box. I have a non-standard CTO, so cannot just go to the apple store to swap.

I suspect that this issue is far more widespread than just a few "power users" or gamers. I had been using my mac heavily for the last week before I began to notice a pattern in the crashes, and they were mainly triggered by using the laptop connected to an external display that triggered the discrete GPU.

So far have only found one workaround: using CPUPalette to turn off cores. This is at least letting me finish my projects without constantly rebooting.

It does appear that quickly ramping up loads will very quickly trigger the problem (e.g. going from load of 0.00 to 8.00 very quickly). However, am getting crashes under load even if the CPU/GPU load is fairly constant. SMC fan control neither helps or hurts in my experience.

FWIW, my laptop sits up on a bench with two small arms that support it on the side, so its entire back side is mostly open to the air.

Not sure if this is relevant, but it sounds very similar. I'm running on a 15" Macbook Pro from 2007 and I've been encountering something that sounds like it's the same as your issue. I haven't contacted support since I don't currently have applecare and the issue only arose after upgrading to Snow Leopard. My screen goes black, everything seems to freeze and I'm left only being able to move my cursor for a few seconds before my pointer changes from the regular arrow to the X Windows pointer (shaped like a capital I). After that I need to hard power down and boot back up. My workaround for the issue has been during those moments when I still have a regular cursor to drive hard to one of my hot corners that I have set to start the screensaver. This starts the screensaver and, right when I see the screensaver come up, I can interrupt that and continue working normally. I've encountered this issue when using ffmpegX and it only happens infrequently.

I think I read on a MacFixit where they are overloading thermal paste between the Intel processors and heat sink. Could be part of the problem. This has always bitten other manufacturers in the past. To much paste doesn't let the heat transfer efficiently.

More than likely this is NOT the problem. Most of the freezes are just the screen (GPU) freezing. You can determine this yourself by having music playing and/or ssh'ing in before it hangs. The music will keep playing and SSH will keep responding. So the CPUs are not the problem in this scenario.

Jeremy, this is so weird. I'm actually posting this from my MacBook Pro while 10 instances of "yes > /dev/null" are running and Photo Booth is also open and, while my fans are going apey, I haven't had a lockup. I wonder what the common denominator is?

This thread got posted on Slashdot...

Now there are a heap of people that haven't read the whole thread saying things like... 'tl;dr it's istat pro causing the issue' or 'this is just another anti-Apple article'.

Some people...

Yeah I saw that. Sorry, but that's pretty much what slashdot is. I say that as someone who used to frequent it several times a day. But attention is attention. If that posting acts as a bridge to get other folks (Engadget, Wired, etc.) interested, then I'd say it's a win.

Again, I agree with you John,

/. is no different from any other internet forum - beware the trolls!

Regardless, exposure has got to be a good thing for this issue, as I've said before if Apple bothered to answer their phones on a Sunday I wouldn't have been so angry...

Just wanted to say that the xcode compile routine also crashed my machine and quick. Also, under Windows with a very heavy load of prime 95 on all 8 threads and running the gpu burnin really smoked the laptop though it never froze. Still the temps were insanely high. I hit the 100 C on the gpu before the fans took over, and the prime95 had the cores up to 93 for each with one core reaching up towards the limit. This took beyond 30 minutes at full stress to be clear. While it is not likely I would ever push my machine this hard ( I had 8 thread cores and the gpu under 100% load), it is worrisome that there is no response from Apple concerning this. I waited for the last gen before unibody, and this time I took the chance since it was the same body style with a theoretically smaller die cpu working under the same energy envelope as the previous gen.

I have MacBook Pro early 2011 and 15 inch with upgraded HDD to 500 Gig 7200 rpm. I have the same problem while I was using some apps that take cup a lot, like parallel, imovie , ... . It freezes and I have to turn it of buy turn on/off bottom.

My 4 day old MB Pro has had hard freeze twice while attempting to use Help function on machine. Was attempting to view Netflix but having Silverlight issues which still prevent me from viewing Netflix video in Safari, Firefox or Chrome. Have no problem viewing Netflix on my late 2007 MacBook 13".

Just done a few tests on my machine. I have installed several games including:
- The Sims 3
- Assassins Creed II
- Call of Duty 4

All these games do not run in full screen or freeze after some time or freeze when altering the graphics settings. On The Sims 3 during the first run I got a 'We do not recognise the graphics card' error/warning.

During all freezes the sound continued to play, however all other pieces of hardware failed and/or disconnected. External USB drives turned off. My bluetooth mouse and keyboard disconnected and my external monitor showed the same frozen state as on the MBP display itself.

The freeze was evident using both graphics cards. On one occasion iTunes played to the end of a song and then stopped. On all occasions the fans were screaming and a hard reboot was needed.

@John:

I just had my first crash this morning. I've skimmed through the thread a little but haven't had time to read it all. Is the consensus this is a firmware issue or something else? Should I call and get a replacement, or just wait it out?

Thanks,

JJ

I also had my new laptop freeze several times. I found it was a small program(MenuMeters) that I used for displaying network traffic. The program works great on my other systems. I then installed fan control( http://www.lobotomo.com/products/FanControl/) this seemed to removed most of the freezing. Now the fan engages quicker.
ColdMac