Screen Flicker with External Monitor

Jeff -- When I get home this evening I'll give this a try and will let you know if it works for me, too. THANK YOU for posting this! I'm afraid you and I are using displays that are no longer supported by Apple.

I left my Mac Pro on for a day. When I came home there was no more flickering. So the problem seems to have resolved itself.

Weird.

Looks like the flickering has returned for me. After several weeks of having no problems, the flickering has returned. It's still not quite as bad as it used to be, and some days it only ever flickers a handful of times over the course of a couple of hours, but it has definitely increased again.

I've heard people having graphics issues with 10.7.2. Perhaps that's the problem. I also have a problem with graphics glitches after the computer wakes from sleep with my external monitor, in this case a Samsung TV.

After I enter my password on the lock screen, the desktop becomes a gray colour and the menu bar is messed up. Parts of it show, and parts of it are black. Mission Control looks very weird as well. The only way to fix this is to log out and back in.

In order to avoid it I've woken the computer before turning the TV on. This seems to prevent this problem.

Anyway, perhaps a simple reboot will fix this flickering. But even when it was "fixed" before 10.7.2, it still flickered once every couple of hours. So the problem has never completely vanished.

Rebooting didn't fix it at all.

Well, I'm still having problems with the flickering. Sometimes it goes away after I log into the log in screen. This was never a problem before the 10.7.2 update.

It's got to be the driver that's not working properly.

There is a good side to this... I've been looking for an excuse to get a 27-inch Apple display!

I also have the same problem. 2011 21.5" iMac hooked up to a 19" samsung monitor via DVI and het a display flicker that varies on frequency from a few seconds to sometimes a minute or so. I think it is a problem with the ATI graphics driver and what is called overdrive.

Hopefully aple will have a fix for this soon. no amount of rebooting etc makes any difference.

Hello all,

the two updates (EFI firmware for MacBook Air 2011) and Thunderbolt software update appear to have solved my flicker issue on my Apple Cinema Display (the mini DisplayPort from 2010).

About time.

S.

The MBP EFI update seems to have greatly improved the flickering problem for me once again. However I still get the ocassional single flicker, but it's very infrequent. I would say it happens once an hour at most.

So it seems it's been an up and down ride with these updates.

OS X Lion 10.7.0 = Flickering a lot

OS X Lion 10.7.1 = No change

OS X Lion 10.7.1 with Thunderbolt Update = greatly improved, once an hour flicker at most

OS X Lion 10.7.2 = back to flickering a lot

OS X Lion 10.7.2 with EFI Update = once again greatly improved but still flickers once every now and then.

Will this problem ever be 100% fixed? I hope so. But at least now my TV is usable as a monitor once again.

I have a new MacBook Pro with Thunderbolt and a 23" HD Cinema Display. I was going crazy because the 23" would flicker, as in trying to wake up from off/sleep. Eventually it would come on and when it did, all was good, but I was ready to throw the whole lot out the window.

Just got off the phone with AppleCare who directed me to downloading a Thunderbolt Firmware Update that specifically addresses this issue. Time will tell (I just got off the phone with them), but so far so good.

Update to my previous thread. I still have the problem, even after the most recent Thunderbolt Firmware Update, but it doesn't take as long for the monitor to come to life and once it does, it's good until everything goes back to sleep and needs to be woken up again.

I really hope they can fix this through firmware, otherwise they better recall these machines and make things right.

Hello,

I have a macbook pro 15" 2011 edition. I get the same problem with a HP w2258hc external monitor. I installed windows in my second hard drive to play games and I use my external monitor and I do not have any flickering issues. My resolution is 1680 x 1050. I will try this resolution in Lion maybe that is the issue. I was using 1080p or 1920 x 1080. Hope it works. Also, the computer connects directly to the Graphic Card and not the Internal graphics.

Took everything to the Genius Bar. Computer checks out 100%. Monitor checks out 100%. The suspicious culprit is now the MDP-DVI adpater. I'm no engineer, but I suspect the adapter is not robust enough to pass the proper amount of data or power or both to run the monitor. I've gone back to using my 17" Studio Display which has no problems whatsoever (less data and power consumption?).

Seems to me Apple needs to engineer a new adapter. You listening Apple?

Ok so I am not alone with this.

Strange thing is that with my 2011 Macbook air and the same adaptater and screen, I have no problem.

I insist on the fact that the problem appears after an amount of time on my MBP 17 2011. It can be 10 minutes or 40. But I need to do something that is "graphic-card related". For example use Aperture to zoom on a photo (this makes the bug appear a lot), play a game or change pages in Reeder.

It also appears in Windows under a game so maybe is it the adaptater and the graphic card ? I don't know 😟

I have the same flickering problem with my MBP 15" 2.3GHZ 2011.

I'm using a 24" HP LP2475W monitor, and the flicker gets really bad when I connect my RAID 0 G-Drive over firewire, and when data is being transfered. I think the Data causes some sort of interference with the minidisplay/thunderbolt connection?

Any solution in sight apple?

Solution is here : http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4045?viewlocale=en_US