MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

Well, I have been running some tests here tonight and everything seemed fine,
maxed out 8 cores at 1 hour, no problems, handbrake encoding, noisy fan but really quick.

But just when it all started to feel great, i changed the After Effects Multi core setting to use all 8 cores with 0.75gb allocated ram for each core, and the CPU raised to 92 Celcius, wich I was expecting... but the fans rpm were too slow to catch up on the sudden increase... so another system freeze, only mouse cursor moving... hard reboot.

So, there u have it, all is well with the new macbook pro´s 2011, its just this glitch with the fans not able to react quick enough when the CPU cranks up from 50 to 92 celcius in a matter of 5-10 seconds...

I believe this is the case with all new macbook pros, its just that most of us dont push ALL cores to the max really quickly, therefore some of us will never notice this problem...

I did change the After Effects CPU to use only 6 cores with 1 GB allocated ram each, that worked really well, fans stayed at 5000 rpm and temp ever rose above 85 celcius.

Summary: Reinstalling the snow leopard OS as suggested by Apple Support did nothing.

/Daniel

Not being a techno, can you shut off some of the cores globally? It's rather annoying to spend all this money on all these cores and not be able to use them. In your opinion; is this something that can be fixed with a firmware update?

Interesting that you mention this, I almost want to say that it has something to do with manufacturing on some of the units, I say this because the black panel where the Macbook Pro wording is connecting the screen to the bottom was lose and I had to press it in to snap it back together. I was having the fan issue but I have not had that happen for a while now and I noticed it with small tasks and when I have multiple programs open. I don't know what happened but it is working just fine now, as if the system recreates itself based on uses. I've had to reset the computer one time now but ever since that has happened I do not get the freezing anymore. I sold my 27 inch i7 2.8 for this and I do not regret it one bit Absolutely love my MBP....I know ppl are not suppose to love a thing but man it's hard not to.

I'm placing my bets on a video card or driver problem. I've been rendering in modo and have had a half-dozen freezes in the past two days on my brand-new 2.3 GHz machine. Today, I looked up the menu extra "gfxCardStatus" so that I could disable graphics switching and just run on the integrated graphics for a test, and this afternoon I've been able to run numerous rendering tests without the machine crashing. I've had iStat Menus 3 installed to watch the temps and have seen 90+ C temps, but the fans are running and the machine is working fine.

Hopefully, someone else can install gfxCardStatus and run on the integrated graphics to see if your machine behavior changes when the automatic switching is overridden and one or the other graphics subsystem is used.

Brock

Will Apple eventually release a firmware update or something that will correct this issue?

For me this has only happened while playing X-Plane 9. That game is very hard on the GPU/CPU. My GPU temps often shoot to 190 degrees.

dnakad wrote:
I did change the After Effects CPU to use only 6 cores with 1 GB allocated ram each, that worked really well, fans stayed at 5000 rpm and temp ever rose above 85 celcius.

Might this be related to Hyper Threading, then?

That might be the case, I will disable the hyper threading tonight/tomorrow and run similar tests.

On a side note:
I once read that disabling the hyper threading actually improves after effects renders, i tried it
on my Mac Pro 2010 at work without any differences in speed though..

/d

I have the same problem with my 15" quad-core i7 machine. When rendering video using Screenflow, the fans quickly begin to ramp up in speed and then the machine seems to freeze. In most cases, the cursor can be moved around the screen but you cannot click anything or type on the keyboard.

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.

Message was edited by: Tristan Pemble

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.

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).

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?