2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

Here are some more pictures (different from my previous) - basically there are many different display symptoms and characteristic anomalys experienced as a result of the same fault. They usually end with an eventual freeze/crash and occasionally don't. When the system crashes it may take a few attempts, several attempts or even a couple of days to eventually get a successful Power-up (as did with me only recently).

Normally when the fault occurs on 'power-up', it's usually a blank Grey screen that never ever reaches the desktop and sometimes a Blue screen with faint thin strips that also never makes it to desktop leaving no option to hold the Power Button down to forcefully power-off the MacBook Pro. (I've posted the blue and grey screen pictures previously on Page 390).

However below shows the fault/defect occurring while I was in the Desktop (which I hadn't posted yet). It's important that all affected owners where possible post their pictures of the fault occurring.

ABOVE: The fault occurs and loses graphical display integrity and system responsiveness from the user

ABOVE: A black bar appears where it shouldn't and the Desktop has been 'split' towards the right hand side where it can be seen that the Dock, the Menu Bar and Desktop work area are clearly split where the whole display has been shifted to one side by apprx 25% with the cut-off edge wrapping around to the other side

ABOVE: This image is similar to the one before it but without the black horizontal bar.

These are just more examples to the many others and being graphical related it therefore similarly varies .

Hello.

just joining the flow of failed GPU's in 2011 macbook pros here.

for anyone it interests -

i have a Late 2011, 15" MacBook Pro, base model. (6750m dGPU) and 2.2 Ghz Core i5 Processor.

i'm based in the uk, London.

i purchased my MacBook Pro on Marh 12th 2012.

it just died last sunday, but i do believe i was experiencing early warning signs of its incoming failure (sudden system freezes/crashes. including to black screen. force restarts)

but sunday it simply went to a blue screen with vertical dark lines. since then i managed to boot up once more, and i wrote it off as just another crash.. and stupidly i decided to continue working as i always did - Intensive CPU work - like video editing /encoding.

and then konk, it died. and has not been able to boot up since, it stays at the white/grey screen with the apple logo gone. sometimes it will eventually turn blue with dark vertical lines.

it also gets very hot and the fans kick in very loudly as if i was doing CPU intensive work..

i'm going to call apple care very soon, but before i do, i must return the original 500gb HDD to the laptop - which i happened to be using as an external drive - so it has data on it i must extract first. as soon as i've done that i will be taking this to the apple store / calling apple care.

updates to come soon.

Hey there guys,

prety sad that my first post has to be related to this but oh well. Same exact problems as everyone else. Early 2011 MBP, 15 inch, Radeon 6490M, purchased in Spain.

<Edited by Host>

Just adding my burden to this thread. Was not aware of this issue until I myself experienced this with my early 2011 MBP 17".

First the screen started to get distorted, garbled, showing left side of screen on the right side vica verca, and then finally the blue screen appeared, together with the fan maxing out on the RPM's. Unresponsive and sounding like a jetengine, I finally turned the machine off, let it cool down, and I'm still able to start it up and use it for Excel, simple webpages and stuff. But immediately when trying to use graphic heavy programs, it agains bites the dust, and leaves me in a very dark blue place....

It saddens me that such a fine and extremely expensive piece of hardware suddenly stops working after 3 years of loyal service, maybe this fault is the ultimate Kill-Switch and part of the "expiration of products to force us into new purchases" philosophy so many are talking about these days :-)

Adding photo as suggested previously... Not really hoping for any help though...

Another early-2011 17" MBP owner here. I'm getting vertical stripes on boot, and then it locks up and heats up to the point where it's too hot to touch, and the fans are spinning at maximum speed. At that point all I can do is power it down.

Starting it up again will often result in a normal, successful boot into OS X, but sometimes I'll just get the stripes again and have to keep trying. Last night I was doing this cycle for like three hours before it finally booted into OS X successfully.

sitting here on my freshly repaired early 20011 MBP 17 ($310 from apple depot)..... very hot on my lap and just went to a black screen with cursor only visable, had to hard reset and back to normal-ish...but very hot on my lap.

This is a follow up on my previous post regarding the symptoms of failure with my 2011 MacBook Pro last month: 15", i7 2.3 Ghz, AMD 6750M

The Mac would not boot and would stick on the grey loading screen, the only way to boot to desktop was with safe mode and stay on the integrated card via gfxCardStatus. This pretty much made the mac unusable for my work needs and even for email or web use never mind graphics and video editing work.

And even worse this was 18 days after my 3yr Apple Care expired 😢.

I took my MBP to a Apple Store for a Genius appointment (Hong Kong) first chance I got, the genius I spoke with was very fair and professional and took my MBP to the store workshop to perform some random tests (OS, ram etc) and returned saying he was unable to boot the mac at all. A logic board replacement was prescribed at the cost of $4500HKD ... I had by this point already mentioned my own research and the slew of reports of the GPU failure with the MBP 2011 model and used my iPad to illustrate my point (see attached image!).

Fortunately for me the repair fee was discretionarily waived by the manager on account of the geniuses *recommendation and in recognition I had previously taken my MBPwhile still covered by warranty to a Genius bar 6 months earlier and mentioned symptoms where the MBP screen was blacking out and shutting down randomly which they were unable to recreate. The result for me was a replacement (used) logic board and some faith in Apple restored!

*Apparently from other sources online I have read a genius is able to authorise a repair without charge up to 45 days beyond the warranty expiration.

Having had my MBP back 3 weeks with a replacement logic board it seems ok so far, though it still ocasionally runs unusually hot for such low CPU usage of 10% or less. Hope this replacement logic board wont fail once beyond he 3mth warranty as others have reported in the thread.
The idea of selling this machine to upgrade like I have in the past is almost like passing on a ticking bomb to someone else and probably bad karma ☯.

Coincidentally I originally came across this thread whilst investigating for my friend whose MBP 2011 died on him in early April, he ended up paying for a logic board replacement in Amsterdam out of neccesity. And then another friend who works as a designer just had his work MBP 2011 die the same week as mine in London in early May.

All these 2011 MBP have had various degrees of use but their failure in such a close proximity is more than coincidental for Apple hardware in my 20 years of work use and experience. Also the genius candidly admitted seeing more than a unusual amount of this 2011 models coming into the Genius bar recently.

 Apple please acknowledge the fault with this premium 'Pro' computer and start a official recall programme, a 3 year life expectancy for any Apple Computer model is not acceptable.

I ahve had this issue since Dec 13. I am now really upset because this is the third GPU crash in 6 months. Apple Care has replaced the logic board 2 times (Dec 2013, May 2014). Apple you need to deal with this, now! I have 3 deadlines this week alone and this is interfering with my work.

Posted this yesterday but it must have gotten erased somehow during the forum maintenance.

Got my machine back a few days ago. Sent it in for repairs the second time. The first time was back in April 2014 to fix the screen distortion/artifacts and eventually machine only booting to a grey screen. They ran the Apple Hardware Tests and saw nothing wrong (noticed I upgraded the memory but no issues with it) even though visually they can see the issue with the machine. Paid the standard $310 depot repair fee and they replaced the MLB.

Started seeing problems again with the machine. This time, the machine would run hot, fans would be going at max speed, and machine would intermittently shutdown by itself. Sent in to have it looked at and this time they did more than just replace the MLB. See below.

I will give them credit where it's due--the repairs were performed within a day of them receiving my machine (Apple sent me a box to ship the machine to them) and was overnighted back to me once the repair was completed. As to how long the repair will last, only time will tell at this point.

I got my Early 2011 MBP 17 back from Apple Depot repair....I opened up photoshop and now get this Error...see attached image.

Did they disable something so my computer wouldn't work so hard and heat up?

Update:

23 Jun.

In the past week i managed to get another Mac.. (my first iMac actually) from ebay (late 2009, 21.5 £284 Delivered )… very pleased, and relieved to have rescued my data before having my MBP shipped off.

fast forward to today, and i just called apple care, they did the usual tests on booting up the machine with me over the phone. As you would expect, no dice. it would boot to blue screen with dark vertical lines and run hot.

they are having it picked up on wednesday to be repaired and then delivered back to me. (I have Apple Care)

we'll see how this goes.. i hope with Apple Care the logic board is brand new and not refurbished. Either way, if this issue happens again and again i will be taking it to the apple store, and demand a new macbook.

i also took HQ DSLR photos of my laptop's condition.. as it is truly immaculate and i made that clear with the AC representative on the phone, he encouraged me to take pictures and not to worry - but if i do received it back with damage or a scratch, to simply follow it up with my case and it will get taken care of.

better quality picture of the issue:

Same issue here with my mbp early 2011. This is after resetting PRAM and SMC multiple times. Plus a wipe and clean reinstall. Using gfxCardStatus to force the system to no longer use the AMD card is the only option I have found to offer more stability.

Really disappointed after spending over $2k on what was supposed to be a quality system to have a component failure like this and Apple not address it with a reasonable solution.

Apple just deleted my last message and their reason was that I was ranting because I said that nobody at Apple answered my e-mails directed to the Tim Cook address.

Apple: stating a fact is not ranting, just look at your own dictionary.

If Apple invested as much energy to solve the issue with the 2011 MBP as they invest in "managing" those forums, we'd all have new computers by now.

I bear a good news for who has been disappointed by apple client! If you ever have a little experience of assemble and disassemble the laptop or PC hardware you can use these lines for knowing what to do for repairing your MacBook 2011 early! But if you have not any experience don't do that cause can damage your logic board:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ti8LqIHMnlQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkGmgvSw4Bk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tjWXExWM4RU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlMxoHK0Os4

i hope it will help you as it was for me!

THIS, amongst other things, started happening last month after I started using Photoshop and iPhoto a lot. See my post at MacBook Pro Repeatedly Loads Purple & Teal Stripe, Gray, Light Blue, Bright Blue and Bright Blue Stripe Screens Instead …

March 2011 MacBook Pro.

I paid nearly $3700 for it so this post will come in handy. I documented everything that went wrong since I bought it and it has had graphics issues this entire time. The only reason I still have Apple Care is because of my documentation and that the major screen issues started happening after a repair.

I'm just not going to pay for a hardware design flaw on a $3600, three year old Mac. That's sheer lunacy. At that price all parts, especially parts related to necessary functions, should last longer.