Overheat? The fans revved and suddenly I could use nothing but the cursor. Had to hold down the power switch to kill all and then re-power & startup. I wasn't doing anything unusual, but I had 7 apps open and was amid an auto-backup to TimeMachine.
Just a little disillusioned and concerned, wondering if anyone else there has experienced a hard freeze like this.
Something interesting, I uninstalled iStat and now my computer is running just fine, the fans do not kick up at all and I'm running some of the same programs that I was running before. I hate to say it but it seems like the problem may lie with that program of some sort and I don't know why. If you guys have iStat try uninstalling it and see what happens.....
I turned off the "fan speed" control in the sensors module of iStat for fear of this, but mine was still freezing with it turned off. I guess I could have uninstalled iStat menus too in the event that it was doing something bad even with this turned off...
But I'm still putting my money on a graphics card or driver issue. I've literally hammered on this machine all night and day now rendering in modo and with the system switched to use the integrated graphics only, and I haven't had a single freezing incident. Seeing that one of the big changes in the the upcoming 10.6.7 update deals with "graphics drivers," Apple is definitely making changes to them. Btw, I used gfxCardStatus to switch off the ATI card and use the integrated Intel graphics.
I can confirm that switching to the integrated graphics chip is the best temporary solution to this issue.
All the same issues, same solution as above poster.
*tl;dr Download gfxCardStatus and switch to Integrated Graphics ONLY and you will not get this freeze*
Figures, every single ATI powered computer I have ever owned has had issues like this. I am so FREAKING sick of their crap.
EDIT: I am a Mac Developer and will be trying out 10.6.7 to see if this is resolved. I'm not sure about the NDA so I don't think I will be able to post my results. Maybe someone better informed could tell me if such information would violate the NDA.
I had this issue at first, then I noticed that iStats Menu activated the fan control option by default.
Since I deactivated that option, the problem didn't occur yet. I played Starcraft II with graphics options set to Ultra at 1920x1200 on an external screen (so with the AMD Radeon HD 6750, as this is not possible to use external screen with the Intel HD Gfx, and it wouldn't support Starcraft II with gfx options set to Ultra anyway 😉 ) for about 3 hours, without any freeze, also Irun a bunch of GPU and CPU bench using Cinebench, and again no freeze whatsoever.
So if you are using a temperature monitoring software like the Sensors option of iStat Menu, please check that it doesn't have a fan control feature that may override the system settings for fan behaviors. iStat Menu may not be the only one having such an option, and some other temp sensor software may override fan control or worse it may not even be an option for some of them.
The best way to see if that can be caused by a third party software, is to use the MacBook Pro on a totally clean install of OS X without even installing any sensor software, just normal software to use it, and see if it freezes still.
It may also be that some of produced unit have had too much thermal paste and would require the fans to kick off faster and sooner to avoid any thermal issue. If that's the case, be sure that a software update will come to modify fan control settings to be safer to avoid overheat even on units that may have too much thermal paste.
Are you sure that your system was really frozen? Normally if the mouse moves, the system is not frozen, when I had the issue (i.e: when I had iStat Menu installed with default settings and so fan control enabled), the freezes were total freeze.
Also 92°C is not that much hot on full load.
Having a system that doesn't react to user interactions but with mouse moving generally just mean that the system is overloaded, and generally because you are overloading the RAM and so the system is swapping. Considering the settigns you put on Aftereffect, this seems logical that your system was overloading and didn't react, as even with 8GB of RAM, your settings would overload the RAM easily.
Software that is overloading the CPU and RAM can freeze the multitask (you just can't do anything until it finishes) very easily but this doesn't mean the system is frozen. Every time I had a system frozen but with mouse moving, I just had to wait for the app freezing it to finish and free resources to have the control back.
Freeze with mouse moving can be generated with overloading the RAM and so making the system swap. I easily have that on any OS, being Mac OS X, Linux or Windows, when I overload the RAM and on any PC/Mac.
I don't know how much RAM you have, but if you set 0.75GB of RAM for each core, and you have only 4GB of RAM, this is clearly overloading the RAM, considering that OS X will eat at least 1GB itself, and 0.75*8 = 6GB! Even if you have 8GB, this is a too high setting, has OS X + AfterEffect launched will heat easilly the 2GB of RAM left.
So your problem doesn't seem to be heat related and seems even to be normal considering the settings you put which are clearly too high, even if you have 8GB of RAM.
You should alway take care to have at least 1GB free of RAM at all time, this include the RAM used by all the software launched, OS X included. Harddrives is THE biggest bottleneck of totday's computer, so if you overload the RAM you'll have inevitably an unresponsive system, as it'll use the HardDrive to compensate and this will slow done the system a lot. Even SSDs, at least when not used in RAID are not fast enough to solve this bottleneck, most SSDs not used in RAID don't go faster than 200-300MB/sec, and Apple's stock SSDs are not even reaching 200MB/sec, and it's in read speed! In write speed at best an Apple's stock SSD will reach 100-120MB/sec. Clearly not fast enough to reduce swapping bottleneck significantly.
Thanx iFrodo, very interesting.
I'll try to change the default settings for After Effect.. and I'll try to find how I can set this for CInema 4D....
crossing fingers.
I don't think it is ram though.. Mine is doing the same thing when playing World of Warcraft or Dragon Age Origins, and I just checked, and I have over 1gb free ram out of 4.
I just speak of the case the mouse pointer can still be moves. For a complete freeze (nothing react, not even the mouse), then it's clearly a hardware freeze.
As I said, I was able to recreate a real hardware freeze (nothing react) when I had the fan control option of iStat Menu activated. Since I deactivated it, I had no issue, either with Cinebench or with Starcraft II (been playing for 3 hours straight without any issue).
Traded mine in, got a new one yesterday, still freezing anytime I have been playing starcraft or dragon age then try to exit the program. Fan gets loud and the whole screen freezes black.
Now on my second one with same issue- Handbrake running in background then open iMovie and render a video. First the charger light changes to green and the battery icon changes to "not charging". The fan then turns on a very high speed. If one or two more programs are opened then the entire screen freezes and a hard reset is required. This weekend I will trade in again but I am beginning to wonder whether this is a power related issue because of the strange behavior of the magsafe lights and battery charging prior to the freeze. Anyone else notice the "not charging" issue under a heavy use situation?
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.
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.
