2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

Hi mate, please add value to your complain by directing it to Apple feedback channel because Apple do not monitor this forum. cheers

http://www.apple.com/feedback/macbookpro.html

Does anyone here get this blue stripe screen? Is it related to the GPU issue or a different issue?

akamyself wrote:

you probably thought he meant being a UI developer because web developer doesn't imply you can get around all interfaces across the web like you the one who designed it.

1. Please don't imagine that you know what I thought, you were wrong.

2. I don't think that pushing the latest reply link (in blue near the top of the page) is very complicated, for anyone, let alone a 'web developer'

But as I see that some can't figure it out I posted a picture for them to look at.

Here it is again for those who are lost.

Blocked ports due due to dust. The computer has been used a lot but I will check this every couple of years.

As you can see there is too much thermal paste on the CPU and GPU. You will notice that the contact points had lots of gaps particularly on the GPU.

After cleaning and preparation.

Fortunately the blocked ports can be easily cleaned by simply removing the fans, obviously changing the thermal paste requires a complete removal of the logic board and heat sink - this much more involved and would only recommend to those who are confident and have no warrantee. Otherwise I would let apple fix it.

The computer appears to be operating perfectly now so fingers crossed. I use this computer daily for my work and up to now has been faultless, we have a lot of other apple computers and they have all been reliable With no heat issues.

Hope this helps.

Hi there,
exactly since today is my MacBook Pro early 2011, a strip on the display, all attempts were to no avail, rid this.
Apple Care Protection Plan I had finished, but that expired on 29/06/2014.
Does anyone have any idea whether accommodating reacts Apple because of Apple Care has expired just a month ago and now such hardware error show.
What would it cost to repair, this is worth considering for a device by early 2011?

Sadly, I'm part of this club, too with my MacBook Pro 15" Early 2011. The most annoying part is that my logic board was replaced for HKD 4,300 last year. Only after the replacement I started observing the problems with the graphic chip.

For a €2,000+ laptop, I'm expecting a longer lifetime than mere 2 years.

Dear Apple Team,

I have problem is Mac book pro 15 inches 2011

This problem is related with display card. It will happen when I open the movie or open the Adobe programs which are Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign. The green line will occur as the picture I have attached. I bought this machine on 20 February 2012 and have this problem on 13 June 2014. Before this, I also have a problem with hard disk on 27 May 2014 and it has been fixed by Istudio. Staff there couldn’t tell me the exact reason of this problem yet. They told me that it is rare case which could happen by dropping this computer or else in which I never drop this computer and also took care of it very well. The cost for this is around 3,500 Baht which is acceptable for me.

However, after that the display card also have problem which I am not sure it is because of we fixing HDD with Istudio. The cost for this time is 29,000 baht which is too high for me. From what I research, many people also have the same problem using this computer. So, this should be the problem that occur from Apple Company. If it is from what I do i.e. water drop, break the display, drop the computer. It would be fine for me but this is not. And the fixing cost is almost half price of buying new computer.

So I would like to ask the apple company to responsible for it like the macbook pro case that produce during may 2007. It is not fair for the user that bought this model and has to responsible for these entire problem. I believe the company should know that there are many cases similar to mine. We trust apple and always royalty to your brand. So, I think it is not fair for the user at all for this case.

I am so disappoint with the apple product and apple’s responsibly. Also, losing trust with the brand. If you would like to build your brand to be high positing brand you should build your product to match with it.

hi Akamyself.. thanks for letting me know.. cool misnomer.. first time I've posted anything .. pretty much anywhere.. :-) since I saved what I'd said I'll remove the offending whatever it was.. voici

+just want to add that I'm another guy getting the same problem with the graphics card.. MBP early 2011.. bought July 2011 .. started happening in June this year and has got progressively worse.. last night 3 kernel panics.. when it boots the screen displays lines and then starts overheating.. have to hard shutdown and try again.. if it boots without showing the lines it goes through to the login screen.. using GFXcardstatus v2.3 helps when its on integrated only.. but as soon as photoshop launches it freezes.. its obviously the card problem everyone is having.. (snip) seems pointless to have a new logic board etc installed since the problem will just come back.. or so I've read.. since all the boards manufactured at the time had the same defect.. an apple guy in catania, sicily, explained the scenario when it first happened.. and said not to bother getting it fixed.. nice of him .. complete waste of time trying to sort it and to all intents and purposes the machine is pretty much bricked .. paid up for applecare on previous occasions.. but didn't this time.. so might just have got it replaced with a couple of weeks inside the 3 years.. but clearly if its lapsed sods law sods justice.. remember reading at the time that ifixit had said there might be issues with the globs of heat paste.. didn't expect to be impacted.. ach..

here’s a pic..

just my tuppence..

I posted an advise before not to replace the logic board, you will be loosing your good logic board to a much worse one, I don't know why people insist to go that track which cost them more and give them more trouble and even with the slim chance of getting a good used logic board you still get only three month warranty and most probably you will be going into the same problem again, the only real solution is reballing and I am not saying that because I repair them, I have more business than anyone can imagine so I am not looking for more. Also for people who suggest that just replacing the thermal compound is a fix , tat is absolutely not a fix, MacBook has a very sensitive logic board and taking it out and reassembling it is not as easy as people think , the picture I am posting here is an example for someone tried to do that and he end up with a broken - mostly unrepairable or replaceable screen port - so rather than getting things better it went far left and became much worse and also much more costly to fix.

This is the best I can do to take such a picture but you can see- even if not very clear - that the screen port is internally damaged and here is its replacing pictures :

Of Corse not an easy repair and not a cheap repair so avoid getting into that and don't risk your logic board.

ps3specialist wrote:

I posted an advise before not to replace the logic board, you will be loosing your good logic board to a much worse one, I don't know why people insist to go that track which cost them more and give them more trouble and even with the slim chance of getting a good used logic board you still get only three month warranty and most probably you will be going into the same problem again, the only real solution is reballing and I am not saying that because I repair them, I have more business than anyone can imagine so I am not looking for more. Also for people who suggest that just replacing the thermal compound is a fix , tat is absolutely not a fix, MacBook has a very sensitive logic board and taking it out and reassembling it is not as easy as people think , the picture I am posting here is an example for someone tried to do that and he end up with a broken - mostly unrepairable or replaceable screen port - so rather than getting things better it went far left and became much worse and also much more costly to fix.

This is the best I can do to take such a picture but you can see- even if not very clear - that the screen port is internally damaged and here is its replacing pictures :

Of Corse not an easy repair and not a cheap repair so avoid getting into that and don't risk your logic board.

I'm beginning to think that we've had this discussion before.

But it is simply not true that simply changing the thermal paste does not work - I have a computer that could not even play an HD video or use a second monitor without crashing - Since cleaning and applying thermal paste (MX4) I have hammered this machine for a week with HD, 30" full res monitor, virtual machines, 3d apps - the machine has been perfect and not a single glitch. It is also much cooler and the fans are running much less time and at lower speeds - so while this might be temporary it certainly appears to have fixed the issue (for now). Obviously some logic boards will need reballing but I don't think every board will.

As you say this is not an easy task - it should be only carried out by someone who is confident with handling this sort of repair.

If the computer does subsequently fail - all I've lost is $15 and an hour and half of my time - hopefully by then Apple might have come to a solution for everyone or I'll send the board to you for reballing :-)

In your last sentence I found a clue for further investigation that correlates with my last reply:

ifixit.com

SMC chip (F2117LP...) that failed to a guy jensgoehler is very close to switching processor that from 2010 doesn't have heatsink connected to fans.

Vcore (pink) is next to GPU but on the bottom side of logic board:

ifixit.com

And with "the gobs" of thermal paste, we know where we are with overheating 😉

Unfortunately none of the refurb boards we have had through our doors for repair have any revised parts which would indicate a burying of heads in the sand at HQ.

In regards to the memory, it is most likely the system has allocated 512MB to the integrated is because he is running upgraded RAM capacity (16GB??)

As to the Samsung VRAM, these boards have either Samsung or Hynix fitted from factory. Manufacturers commonly use both. They have the roughly the same spec so it is most likely a refurb board with exact same spec as original.

And to confirm the expertise of the rework some of them have had look how bad this GPU was when we lifted it from a refurb board (and before you ask - no we did not use to much heat and we did not cause this)

Many of the experts on here will know that there has been too much heat when this GPU had been replaced. 100% this was an apple replacement and not a 3rd party. It had same Apple glue and also board was retagged with serial, Mac Address etc. Also EFI chip had been changed or reprogrammed off the board - meaning it was most likely a recycled board from a previous owner.

1st Picture - This is the condition of the refurb board under the GPU ( Too much heat has been used during the rework process - reworked by Apple or under Apple's instruction

2nd Picture - This is the condition of the a board board that has had no previous rework - the rework was carried out by ourselves.

DMC440 wrote:

kishin094 - minor pedantic point: can you describe what you mean by the "Blue Screen Of Death"? That is a particular Windows phenomenon (and OS/2, for those who remember it) and doesn't really describe the symptoms most users here are experiencing.

Actually, one of the symptoms of this GPU failure can be a "blue screen of death," as I experienced myself. I experienced this particular problem every time I tried to load the Mavericks install.

My issue is similar, it frequently exhibits as alternating blue lines starting from boot.

I found that Option+D booting to Apple Hardware Test, then rebooting, would allow it to boot normally.

I should specify, mine is a Late-2011 15" MacBook Pro with the Radeon 6470M and Intel HD 3000.

I want to take this opportunity to do 2 things:

1) thank rdbrwn for this temporary fix, which is the only thing that allowed me to use my Macbook Pro without having to resort to Target Disk Mode using another computer

2) outline what I've experienced for posterity's sake and help anyone who has had a similar issue, including keywords that I had originally searched. It's amazing that despite the over 14000 signatures on the current petition to apple at change.org and these discussion threads, it took me over a week to find this thread.

I am using a MacBook Pro, 15 inch, early 2011, Processor 2.2GHz Intel Core i7, Memory 8GB 1333 MHz DDR3 Graphics AMD Radeon HD 6750M 1024MB, OS X 10.9.4 (13E28).

On about 8/31/2014 I started having issues after waking the laptop from sleep, the screen had these vertical bars:

Then, after a few restarts and a few resetting of NVPRAM, it seemed to work again. During that time, I did install gfxcardstatus, but could not identify whether one or the other graphics card was the problem.

Then, on about 09/05/14, it failed again with horizontal green pinstripes at the login window. After entering my password, it would boot into a grey screen that I could not interact with.

My choices were to force a shutdown my hitting the power button, or wait in which case it seemed to shut itself down after some time (as far as I could tell, it was not going to sleep because the status light was not blinking.

I was able to boot into Single User Mode, with the green horizontal pinstripes. But fsck found no errors, and a reboot didn't lead to any changes.

Finally, following rdbrwn's instructions, I was able to get the computer to boot into a relatively usable state, despite the lag and green horizontal pinstripes:

As rdbrwn points out, the Mabook now thinks it's using an external display, which means gfxcardstatus won't allow me to switch tot the integrated graphics card.

Is there anyway to force the Macbook to boot only using the integrated graphics card? Would this even be helpful? Given everyone's experience with bad replacement logic boards, I would just prefer to be able to use the Macbook as a lower end graphics-weak laptop rather than have it keep failing?

hey there everyone!
unfortunately im also on the same boat as you all.

i tried moving all the AMD/ATI kext files from the /Extensions folder into another one so it would disable this drivers.
but in the end it got worst than when i was trying to just use the integrated card with the gfx software thingy.

SO MY QUESTION IS:

how do i go back to the original way the AMD/ATI drivers were setup??

at first i thought it was just a matter of moving the kext files back to the /Extensions folder.
but that didnt do it! are there special procedures to be done?

i got this error while running in safe mode

then i tried doing the kextload thingy and this is what i got:

any ideas?!?!

**macbook pro late 2011 AMD 6750M

thanks in advance!