Q: MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze

I was just saying that many were implying it was with the new GPU's, not that you didn't know what was going on.

In other news, I've had no problems with my new MBP. I haven't stressed it too hard so maybe that is why, but I did try the 16 tabs in YouTube this morning and everything was fine except for CPU temp hit 160º F.

Hello,

I'm on a 2011 15 inch MacBook Pro i7 2.2Ghz, computer is less then a month old.

I can't play the Sims 3 on the lowest graphic settings WITH a cooling pad because the laptop gets dangerously hot. It has also crashed a few times when running multiple programs.

I have basically given up on playing any disc based games on it because of the over-heating/crashing problem.

I am able to make this happen with VMWare Fusion w/ Gentoo compiling any large package using more than one thread/core. The AMD GPU doesn't have to be enabled (although Chrome with 3D assist rendering probably kicks it in).

Additionally, my MBP specs are 2.3 i7 w/ 8GB Ram and 500GB 7200 rpm w/ ATI 6750M.

And the boost compile test locked up the system.

The amazing thing to me is that the cursor still moves from the touchpad so something is still alive.

I have had my MacBook Pro that I purchased last November (2010) and it has started freezing up. Mine was not hanging when I worked with it, but after it went into the screensaver and the screen blanked. I was running Electric Sheep. Once I switched over to RSS screensaver feed, that hangs quit happening.

In one instance of the 3 or so hangs I've had in the past few days, the fan was running on high. Every time I've had to hold the power button to do a hard restart.

Your machine has been recalled for this issue. On your machine it's a faulty invidia 9600 and requires a free replacement system board. It is not related to this issue. I've personally had direct experience with three machines of your exact vintage. Take it to apple and they will fix it for free.

I'm getting freezes too on my new Macbook Pro 15" with the high-end graphics card, SSD and 8GB of ram. I haven't played Starcraft II much yet, but it seems to happen almost everytime I quit the game. Screen turns black, and the fan of my Macbook starts spinning like crazy.

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/

I have it on good authority that the way the OS gets installed on the assembly line has subtle differences to the way the installer disc does its thing. I have also heard that most of Apple's internal testing is done using machines that have been wiped and then "fresh installed" using the bundled disc. Because of this, I always wipe a new Mac when I get it and do a clean install from disc. Some people may think this a silly and unnecessary step, but I have been running my 2010 i7 MBP that way since it came out, with only one or two crashes in almost a year of hard use, and they were almost certainly my fault, not the machine's. If the folks at Apple suggest a clean install, I would definitely try it, even if the above rumors no longer have any basis in reality.

Mine is a fresh install, I replaced the hard drive the day I got it.

I didn't install iStat Menu or any additional software until after the issue started appearing for me. Currently it still happens without iStat Menu (it expired) and i'm using atMonitor to monitor temperatures.

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.