problems with amd gpu on early 2011 macbook pro

I'm disassembling mine now to ship its logic board to China, there a service bill 179$ for reballing and new GPU plus shipback thru DHL, I'll give a try have good reviews, I hope at least last enough until new rMBP with Broadwell CPU/GPU are available, I don't want to buy a new one just now the new model is about to arrive.

This is going to the 4th time I go back to Apple to have this problem fixed. I don't know what to say......

weiswang wrote:

This is going to the 4th time I go back to Apple to have this problem fixed. I don't know what to say......

Nore do they! 😮

Same here - 15inch MPB, Early 2011.

But hey - it still works in target disk mode👿

i have some problem with my late 2011 model of macbook pro 15, with gpu radeon 6750.

after that glitches my computer dosn't start normal

i cant restore cmd+r = blue screen with vertical lines

cmd+alt+r = internet restore = gray screen after download somethink from internet.

normal boot = gray screen and full speed fans

alt+d = internet hardware test = ok!

its biggest apple fail! no more AMD!!!!

i most time use my macbook with external display, but always open!

now, after some manioulations in sinlge user mode, it start only without ATI extensions(drivers) with software render =(. and work almost "normaly" only for buckup my data.

after all i bought new macbook =(((.... with nvidia

I do not know why but my Macbook Pro's have always worked better and lasted longer when using clamshell mode (lid down).

This particular issue does not show up as a failure on any hardware tests that is one way Apple is getting away with denying there is an issue.

After all it took some women dying from an electrical shock in Europe before they just now began a recall / replacement of the 3g iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S’s made between 2009 - 2012. Wonder what it will take to get them to recall these bad POS machines that are factory defective?

I had a iMac that was getting too hot, so hot I burned myself. I took it to the Apple Store “Genius” Bar "I use the word Genius very lightly"... they ran the hardware test which I ran at home and it passed but no I had to drive an hour and a half to the store so they could see it. The "Genius" said looked fine to him, passed the hardware test nothing he could do. He said you have Apple Care if it gets worse bring it back. I said this is a business machine in a music studio and I'm afraid of it starting a fire (I NEVER TURN OFF ANY OF MY COMPUTERS IT IS BAD FOR THE COMPUTER), a reboot every few days is good for Windows can go much longer on Unix/Linux/Mac (which is based on a *NIX OS), turning off and on is bad. Anyway I sleep in my studio a lot not to mention the enormous amount of money worth of equipment in the studio. The "Genius" said well like I said you have Apple Care they will have to replace the machine if it catches on fire. I said what about the rest of the studio including my own life. He shrugged and said it passed the test there is nothing I can do.

That iMac did eventually catch on fire and its a good thing I was sitting right there to pull the power plug from the outlet and the back of the machine and contain the damage to the machine and the stand it was on. They did replace the machine with the iMac I am using right now which is the exact same configuration as the Macbook Pro’s in question and until my Macbook Pro died this machine sat unplugged and unused for over 2 years. Now that I have to use it, it is doing the same thing the Macbook Pro’s are doing. So all the machine’s built during that time, with that configuration, AMD Radeon HD 6750M is vulnerable to the defect.

Apple's stock is in the red daily. They are being sued by so many people for multiple reasons of different devices. Apple "DOES NOT" Care and that is the final word unless someone dies THEN just MAYBE if it gets enough press they may do something as if they just realized there was an issue. BAH! They know there are all these issues when they go on the line and have a separate fund for those that sue for damage. But Apple is not the only company that does things like that, Apple just seems to be doing it far more often with just about every product they produce so they stay in the limelight more than other companies doing the same thing.

Go a head Apple delete this post we all know you will. 'SOK we have copies. Apple is no longer the Mac Daddy of anything.

Add me to this ever growing list.

So disappointed with the lack of response.

Hi.

The problem with the graphics unit is that the soldered pins loose connection to the mainboard.

I had the same problem with my MBP early 2011 and got it fixed here:

http://www.reworkit.de/.

It took 150€ to have the graphics chip soldered again to the mainboard. I know it's costly, but not as much as a mainboard replacement.

Maybe there's a similar service near you.

i hope this helps.

I have the same issue, Macbook Pro 15" Early 2011.

Been using it closed with an external monitor, but now it bombs out with a corrupt green lines.

If I reboot without an external monitor I hear it boot but no screen at all.

My Apple Care has just run out.

Not pleased

Thought I'd share my find after countless forums and message boards with the same problem only to have apple genius tell all the same thing - that it's a logic board issue and that the graphics chip or processor is possibly damaged.

Well I found through other such cases that the logic board doesn't necessarily have to be replaced as the apple geniuses would have us all believing. Apparently pc users get the same problem too, and according to techs that fix pc's all the time, this screen problem and inability to boot is an easy and fast fix, it's generally related to a graphics chip problem where the soder that binds the chip to the logic board has softened due to overheating. If you take your mbp to a pc tech who also deals in fixing Macs, he will be able to do what's called a reflow, which is a process of rebinding or resodering any loose pins back to the logic board. According to them this is a simple fix. Only takes two hours max to complete! Do as I did, find yourselves a Computer tech in your neighborhood using yelp, mine quoted me only $80, and only need to pay if he's able to fix it and if thats the only issue! Of course, for some people, your chip may be cracked or fried, therefore only a new board would be advised, but please try this first before letting apple genius convince you to turn yours in for some rediculous fees and dollar amounts of up to $1200 in some cases I've read.

The logic board is repairable folks if it's only loose soder...just as long as there's nothing else wrong with the graphics chip and nothing else is cracked or damaged like the board itself, connectors, the drive, etc...there may be hope yet! So find yourself a pc tech who knows about doing a reflow...this may solve your problem!

The issue with the GPU becoming faulty / disconnected / unseated due to heat usually happens over time. Most super geeks are a bit more passive, we may cuss a bit but think well a reboot might fix it after an uptime of 10 days (No need to reboot machines or worse yet shut them off daily/nightly that is old school mentality and more harmful to the computer).

The reboot temporarily fixes the issue and in the beginning IF we were aware of this issue we wouldn't have been passive and would have done something right away, I did but alas it fell on deaf ears at Apple.

The point being is the longer the machine is used and each time it does heat up to the point where it is unusable it does damage to other parts inside the machine. When they opened mine all the wiring and cables inside the machine was melted. They replaced all the wires and cables twice. They also replaced the logic board 3 times, the optical drive 4 times if I include what they did on the DOA machine rather than taking it back and giving me a another machine. A side note when I got a hold of Tim Cooks assistant she said she would not replace my machine which was DOA because it was a replacement for an identical machine that was DOA purchased two weeks prior with the same issues. Well this only shows that I received 2 bad machines in a row and it cost me some major players in the music industry because I couldn't work. My photography company suffered too I couldn't do any post production. To me that excuse / reason was completely asinine and let me say I was under Apple Care and they refused to do ANYTHING. On to the other issues this long term heating issue caused that seemed harmless at first, it took out my airport which was replaced 3 times, the firewire port did not work, the mini display port would drop out constantly causing me to stop whatever I was doing and pull the mini display adapter to the big screen monitor and plug it back in to get my screen back. I will say having the machine connected to an external monitor does for whatever reason stretch out the problem, maybe because I used it in clam shell mode from day one therefore no dust no nothing ever was inside. I never used the keyboard or screen exception to set it up when I first received it. The rest of the list of failures was a few times when they replaced the logic board and returned it to me the USB ports did not work, there was NO power. I sent it back in and after a week of "testing" I received a phone call from the depot telling me they could not reproduce the issues so I asked if they plugged anything into the USB port and he said no all we do is run hardware test to stress the machines, well this issue does not I repeat DOES NOT show up on a hardware test. After talking for about an hour I received my Macbook Pro the next day, I live very close to the depot by way of Fed-Ex, the paper inside stated logic board replaced due to no power to USB port. They also replaced the wiring again as it was visibly worn and it was just replaced a couple of months prior for melted wiring. Of course the machine never worked correctly from the day I received it. I have 8G of RAM in it but it only shows up 4G on boot up and drops to 1G within 5 minutes with nothing running in the background, on start up or any other method of running an app, daemon, etc. This cat and mouse game went on for the entire 3 years I owned the machine. The OS was reinstalled so many times I lost count. Of course the standard resetting the PRAM and all the other resets were done every time I called in. The audio jack did not work which was an issue given the machine was mainly used in my music studio so I had to purchase M-Audio 4 Track to bypass the audio in the Macbook Pro. It cost me a fortune to use the machine given I had to purchase other devices to work around the devices that did not work on the Macbook Pro and this was out of the box the day I received it under Apple Care. The list of issues went on and on and on and the frustration led to a stroke which was costly, mentally, physically, as well as my reputation given my livelihood was taken away because I was in critical condition without the main workstation.

Someone posted they were going to sell their Macbook Pro before it goes completely. He/she had just had the logic board replaced so it was working and he/she was going to sell it. Now at the time I thought there is noway I could do that but after months of thinking about it and being without the ability to use the Macbook Pro I thought well if a major company like Apple does it all day every day then why not? Its obviously a buyer beware when it comes to Apple these days, the machine boots and I have the paperwork from the Apple depot stating the machine is back in good hands, mine and now passes all test. Well of course the 4 previous times I received the same piece of paper and for months it went back and forth to the depot even though it passed all the test, however once opened they were able to visibly see the issues, I mean its kind of difficult to not notice melted wires and cables. The last time it went in they did nothing and I received a phone call from the "White Glove" manager asking if I understood whey nothing was done. I said yes, because Apple DOES NOT Care, it passed all the hardware tests and you all now know this issue will pass the test and it would cost a fortune to replace all the Macbook Pro's out there that is defective. Replacing defective parts with more defective parts will return the same results, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over expecting different results. He said "My Condolences" and hung up. So as much as I really think its wrong I have to do something so I will use Apple's reasoning and method of sales, which is buyer beware, and I am wiping it clean, doing a complete reinstall and selling it. I will show Apple's paper showing it has a clean bill of health, of course it looks brand new because I did use it in clamshell mode so there isn't a scratch on it anywhere inside or outside with the exception of one small nick that happened at the depot but one would have to be very OCD to see it.

I hate that it has come to this and turned me into a person I don't even like by knowingly selling something that I know is going to fail but Apple does not feel bad for doing it, as a matter of fact they refuse to even recognize it, and they try to blame the user. So why should I behave any differently? I have Apple's stamp of approval the machine is in top notch shape what more do I need besides a temporary break from my conscientious?

Well, I went and got mine re-soldered today. The repair guy said initially after he did the repair, it looked very promising. The GPU was functioning and everything else was going okay. But after a bit more testing of a more intense GPU nature, the computer crashed and the audio alarm for hardware fault apparently occurred.

So it may not be that simple unfortunately (or my guy was incompetent). I'm going to have to go get the logic board replaced now but I don't quite know that I want to put $1200 into patching up a piece of aging hardware.

Quite frankly it stinks, Apple.

Unfortunately that is what happens to these machines, as I stated the definition of insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly expecting a different result. I'm not sure if Apple is insane or they thing we are but either way I am not about to put out one penny on that machine.

I HATE Windows but I bought a Lenovo W540 which runs circles around the early 2011 Macbook Pro and with the warranty it only cost $1300 and it has a bunch of extra's. It is used by Engineers mainly so I knew it would perfect for heavy computation type of work, CPU and GPU intensive and it is! And if you get one now you can get the new yoga tablet for $199 can't beat that! You will see a lot of complaints about that Lenovo W540 but it is the Engineers, who like myself are OCD, do not like the fact they added a number pad and took away some features on the trackpad. Personally that was one thing I hated about the Macbook Pro's no number pad which is why I always used an external keyboard. Once the engineers complain about the new keyboard layout they do say it is a solid piece of machinery that is a workhorse and I can verify it. It will also run any CAD software like its nothing. I multi task bigtime having music apps running and Lightroom 5 as well as many other things running and the machine never gets hot. Its an alternative if you want to go that way but I did contact every person possible to try to rectify the situation at Apple before I started dumping all Apple products including my iPhone.

I won't lie I prefer Apple but not if they won't or can't stand behind their own products and warranty services. I can not afford to run my companies using equipment from companies that are inferior to what they claim. I relied on Apple for years, as I do Unix and Linux (Slackware) however for Apple I never trusted any company for any product without getting the warranty and when they didn't honor the warranty that was the end of the rope for me with Apple. The one small that keeps me going is when I check the stock and see Apple in the red I keep telling myself they will get theirs.

Years ago Steve Jobs left Apple and it was run into the ground and they begged him to come back and when he did he built an empire but Steve can't come back this time. Let's face it visionaries like Steve Jobs do not come around that often and given the company has gone downhill since he got ill then of course his passing, may he rest in piece and not see what is happening to his empire, there is nobody on the side lines capable of walking in his shoes.

Same Issue!!

15inch MBP (Early 2011) with AMD Radeon HD 6750M...

It crashes frequently now.😠

I have had more issues with my 2011 i7 MBP than any other computer I've owned. The well documented fact that many of there machines had sloppily applied thermal paste on the heat sinks is, I believe, the source of many issues. I remember seeing temperatures well in excess of 90 degrees celsius. I had the machine for less than a year when I had to replace the display (among other less significant issues). I don't have Applecare btw. Now this is latest issue to give me trouble.

These machines need to be recalled Apple. Simple as that.