MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

I spent the last 6 hours reading this thread and testing last night after I ran into the lockup while playing x-plane on my new 15" 2.3.

To me, this feels like a hardware issue and not necessarily software. Let me explain. Note that I have video switching disabled in energy prefs and using gfxcardstatus to stay on the discrete GPU.

1) I CAN reproduce this issue in x-plane WITHOUT smcfancontrol running. x-plane is hard on the GPU but easy on the CPU. With smcfancontrol running and fans spinning fast (5.5k) before I even start the game, I can play for hours, no issues.

2) Regarding smallluxgpu, I can easily lock the machine up with fans on default in smcfancontrol. With fans maxed at 6.2k, I can run CPU only tests fine. Cpu+GPU locks up even with fans maxed.

My theory is that they used too much thermal paste on both the GPU and CPU, and if you got both hot at the same time, not even smcfancontrol maxed out (and in my thoughts, new firmware changing fan thresholds) will save you. I believe this is a QC issue.

I would have bought a PC if I wanted to deal with all of this, but instead I dropped 2800 on what is probably the fastest 15" lappy on the market. But since I am within my 14 day return period, I will be leaving soon to the apple store to regretfully return it and wait this out from the sidelines. the moment it looks lear I will buy again because I love the laptop.

Until then, I have my 27" i7 imac, 2008 C2D Macbook Pro, mac mini, ipad and iphone to keep me going. It will be rough, but I'll survive.

Movie encoding doesnt generate quite enough load in my experience. Playing a 3d video game like starcraft or x-plane, or doing ray tracing, or autocad rendering will. Some folks are having issues with handbrake too. I think it is a quality control issue with the thermal paste on the GPU and CPU heatsinks, and some machines are worse than others. But these are high end, expensive machines, so we shouldn't even have to worry about this

I returned mine for a full refund before this got out of hand 20 or so odd pages ago.

Why anyone would spend this much money to become live-QA subjects for Apple is beyond me. Don't get me wrong, I love the company and the products but the answer to this one is return it as soon as you can and wait for them to figure it out BEFORE they sell it to you.

keggman12 - I'll bet if you lock your system to Integrated Only with gfxCardStatus you won't be able to get it to lock with SmallLuxGPU (settings at 1024x768, 8+CPU)...

I have 3 machines that locked on both discrete and dynamic switching - however I now have had 2 of them running SmallLuxGPU for nearly 39 hours straight with zero video freezes.

If this were a heat/CPU shutdown issue, we wouldn't be able to SSH into the box after the freeze - the entire machine would be locked hard.

See the posts from Horniasty and Chullo (from Saturday) where we were on all day tinkering figuring out what to do to get some work done.

My 2.3 system locked on Integrated Only mode has not crashed since I set it that way. I know have the fans set to default and am running 2 external monitors via USB extenders. (I cannot however use the minidisplay port while in integrated mode.)

So anyone who wants to run an external monitor, go pick up a USB DisplayLink device. BUT BE AWARE - DisplayLink says they are working on a driver for 10.6.7 which will likely be released shortly - and these devices do not work with the updated OS. As a matter of fact, their current driver for 10.6.6 is still in "beta" - so I'm not sure what the fate of these devices ultimately will be.

Take care - and see the wiki mentioned here for more info: http://mbp-freeze.wikispaces.com/

Interesting to see this thread. I have a 3 year old 15" MacBook Pro that has had the same problem for a long time, and it drives me crazy! I've got a GEForce 8600GT, 2.5 Core Duo processor. The trackpad locks up, usually the keyboard does too. Sometimes I can bring it back, otherwise must put to sleep to have a chance at getting it back, or restart (used to have to do it hard, then figured out I could plug in my remote mouse that I use for presentations via usb and it works fine. Can save stuff and restart).

I finally broke down when this new round of MacBook Pros came out. Bought my unit last week, haven't received it yet, and now I see this thread that I'm likely to experience the very thing that I'm replacing this machine for after years of ugliness. Oy!

At least Apple seems to know about it now, and I hope they release a fix for whatever it is. There was nothing for my older MacBook Pro other than one post about the cable from the trackpad that could be pushed down with a piece of tissue between it and the battery. That worked for about a year, and then it got worse again.

I suspected the power supply, because it seems to get worse when I have USB devices and such in it. I also suspected the video card, temperature management and other things, but have been unable to identify anything consistent with the behavior. It definitely gets worse when it's hot. The keyboard starts to act erratically and such.

Very frustrating. I think I'll definitely be buying Apple Protection this time around, as my last 2 MacBook Pros over 7 years have both ended up with serious problems that I regret not having the protection for and therefore put up with bad stuff until finally forced to buy a new machine. My old PowerBooks were all workhorses and never had problems like this. So it appears that Apple's manufacturing standards have definitely slipped over the years.

Ah well.

Let's pray that Apple at least figures this out and provides a solution. I thought I had waited long enough to read about problems before ordering my new machine. I guess I was a couple of days too early!

Good luck everyone!

Same problem here. 15" 2.3 GHz i7 4GB.

Games run fine, but freeze upon exit. Mouse remains functional and music continues to play. Easily reproduced.

With gfxCardStatus toggled to "Integrated" and "Automatic graphics switching" unchecked, it still crashes about 1/3 of the time.

Hello guys.
I have a macbook pro 15' i7 2.0GHz (2011) and the monitor is: 1680x1050 (anti-glare)
I read some posts of this threat and i already try to make the 1st test (open photobooth and go to terminal and write 8 times the "yes > /dev/null" and the macboook don't freeze even 1 second (it is normal?)

I opened too some programs like photobooth, ableton live with some plug-ins, I convert a movie form 720p to mp4 in handbreak, play the game: A monster Ate my homework, put in VLC player a video in 720p and redering a video to 1080p on iMovie, this all things at the sametime and no problems. Don't freeze.

@ Patranhadas -

try this: http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/webgl-aquarium/?f=webgl

in Chrome, using only Integrated graphics. Nothing else crashes my system consistently but this.

Message was edited by: Adrian J.

keggman12's post got me thinking about something else. Is the fan control linked to the CPU temp, the GPU temp or both? He's using software that is not taxing on the CPU but loads the GPU pretty well. He has lockups unless he manually speeds up the fans. If fan control is linked only to the CPU temp, then it may not ramp up fast enough to cool the GPU in this situation.

Another scenario I've thought of is this. Other have lockups when CPU temps reach 90s with the fan high or not (sometimes). The heatpipe on the cooling system transfers the heat from the CPU, past the GPU to the fan modules. Practical physics proves that the hotter the CPU is running the less the system can cool the GPU. It could be that high CPU usage is superheating the vapor in the heatpipes which in turn overheats the GPU.

Just pondering.

got these issues as well.

Freezes every time i play counterstrike source for a while (mac native).
Also when i shut down winodws 7 via bootcamp - the circle stops spinning, nothing happens at all. I think it might be related to a prior windows standby- or energy save mode. Don't know for sure though.

I hope Apple will adress this soon, and bring a solution to the table..

Yours is a KNOWN problem with the 8600. Return it to Apple and they will repair it for free regardless of apple care status. It's is a recall. You have one of the bad nvidia chips. They will replace your system board and all will be well.

thanks for your reply adrien J.
What do you mean by: only integrated graphics? how can i do this ?
I'm sorry i'm "newbiee", but i've a mac for live music performances and music producing 🙂

Kinda lost in this long conversation about temperatures: *I haven't heard a single person say that their computer locked up WHILE USING WINDOWS.*

I've heard a few people mention that sometimes Windows doesn't shut down properly. That's common and old news. But NOBODY has said that Windows has frozen on them in the middle of playing a game or using some intense program.

In fact, I've seen my CPU hit 99C in Windows several times in the course of gaming over a few hours time and it's never locked up. Not once.

Point: I think this still points to a driver/OS issue. Otherwise, we'd be seeing reports of people's machines freezing in Windows too, right? When someone reports in saying they ran X or Y stress test in Windows and experienced a freeze, then I'll agree that we have a temperature/hardware issue going on. Until then, I think that the only people that need to return their machines are those who simply can't afford to be bothered to wait for the software fix.

My tune will change if someone claims and verifies a Windows-based freeze similar to what we're experiencing in OSX. Again, the occasional Windows shutdown freeze is very common, as is the Windows start-up black screen (where it never starts loading Windows).

$0.02

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edit: Patranhadas -

download this wonderful app http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus and install. it's what we use to manually control which GPU is being used. It will put a little icon in the system bar at the top of your screen enabling you to select which GPU you want to use (or set to auto).

Set it to "Integrated Only" and run the "fish" test. See if anything strange happens.

Message was edited by: Adrian J.

@ Adrian J.

I think the chrome crash might be something altogether different. The fishes also crash my macbook pro, but I get this error in my log:

21/03/2011 17:04:04 [0x0-0x18018].com.google.Chrome[249] [11920:26635:14053511577622:ERROR:gpu watchdogthread.cc(220)] The GPU process hung. Terminating after 10000 ms.

This seems to be a known bug, and occurs BEFORE the release of this generation's macbook pros:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=68859

Anyway, whatever the cause, I am extremely unhappy with my experience of my new macbook pro so far.

you're absolutely right AJ. i just thought about this too. i never had similar problems while running windows, although i run much more sophisticated games in it. must be a OSX driver problem then, which hopefully is fixed soon..