Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

vichalley wrote:

Please, I need a solution for that. This computer is not older than 2 years and a half and this is a factory failure as many many people is running the same issue.

Are you asking the people or the company....?

Company: No use asking, especially here..

People: Best chance is a reflow of your GPU and your machine might be better then ever before. My machine died 100%. Had the GPU reflown and it's rock solid and steady every (long) day for 2 full months now.

FrankFenn wrote:

I also joined the Canadian Class Action but thinking of taking on Apple Canada in

small claims court. Has anyone experience in this?

Hi Frank,

I don't have experience with that, but I would like to mention the specific reply I got from one of the lawyers at Whitfield Bryson & Mason in Washington:

"We do have an expert working on the case, but he is not performing this x-ray scanning service, which could be very helpful. Our litigation budget is stretched very thin right now, so I don’t think we can contribute to scanning. But if you were able to perform some testing, we could definitely try to use that in our case. And I think it would be extremely helpful because Apple is arguing to the judge that no defect exists!"

The last sentence makes quite clear that our future doesn't look great regarding getting some real help/service for our MBP GPU issues here...

FrankFenn wrote:

I also joined the Canadian Class Action but thinking of taking on Apple Canada in

small claims court. Has anyone experience in this?

FrankFenn, I knew a small landscape contractor in Houston who took someone to small claims court for failure to pay their bill, and even though he won a judgment in his favor, there was no means/recourse for him to obtain enforcement of payment, so it did him no good.

Almost 12,000 replies ...

I called Apple tonight. I started having some crazy heat issues back in August. I opened it up, cleaned out the dust, replaced the Thermal Paste, and installed an SSD (Samsung 840 Evo). On a clean install with nothing running, it was still too hot. I installed smcFanControl and it was around 100 degrees F (like before the Thermal Paste (arctic silver 5 or 6. can't remember) and the SSD installation.

If I open Safari, it increases 10+ degrees F. If I navigate to a web page, it increases 10+ degrees. Normal temperature was around 150 with nothing installed / running other than a few tabs in Safari.

I've also reset the SMC and PRAM several times.

What FINALLY showed some results was when I installed "gfxCardStatus" and switched to "Integrated Only" to bypass the graphics card. It dropped ~20 degrees immediately.  I can now run with smcFanControl at a constant 3500 rpm (so I can't hear it running all the time) and on the "Integrated Only" setting and it will run around 110 degrees F.  Otherwise, it's near 160 degrees or more.

My call tonight was fairly short. The guy (very nice actually) told me to take it to a local, authorized dealer to do a hardware test.  My concern is I will get the "let's replace the logic board at your cost" line bc Apple won't do the right thing. Even when they have $178 BILLION DOLLARS CASH.  (To be fair, most it off shores to avoid paying a maximum 35% tax on it.) Because if it's not bad enough that they won't support their customers, they get to legally not pay taxes / use loopholes to avoid paying much of anything.

**** this. I just bought a Lenovo.

Hi All,

I had the same problem as everyone else, and the only option I had from the Apple Store in Ottawa was the $610.00 logic board replacement. The tech who replaced the logic board also indicated that my hard drive needed to be replaced, even though it's a 2 year old 1TB drive and not the original. The hardware test that the Genius did when I brought the laptop in did not show a hardware fault with the hard drive. So, I declined and checked it myself and it has no errors. I have joined the Canadian class action suit against Apple for this issue. I'm trying to stay positive about the company, but my enthusiasm is declining and I may re-think my impending iPhone 6 and iPad Mini 3 purchase...

Good luck to everyone! 

Went through with the logic board replacement

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Interesting to note,  I've been performing and recording numerous tests (alas, a perpetual scientist)....  on/off, cmd+option+p+r, timed startup/shutdown/running, when fan kicks on/off, plugged in/not, combinations thereof. 

Result (pre-reflow): this problem with the GPU, on my particular machine, is absent so long as my mbpro is plugged in to an external power source and the battery charge is above ~ 80%.   If I'm running on battery only, any sleep event causes a GPU fault (wake/sleep get reversed, or I get a white screen on wake, or lines throughout, or scrambled images).

I can comprehend the issue with the AMD GPU as described by many authors in this thread, but find it odd the issue would be affected by the charge state of the system- as in, no problem when there is greater than ~80% charge.

My call tonight was fairly short. The guy (very nice actually) told me to take it to a local, authorized dealer to do a hardware test.  My concern is I will get the "let's replace the logic board at your cost" line bc Apple won't do the right thing. Even when they have $178 BILLION DOLLARS CASH.  (To be fair, most it off shores to avoid paying a maximum 35% tax on it.) Because if it's not bad enough that they won't support their customers, they get to legally not pay taxes / use loopholes to avoid paying much of anything.

FYI: The hardware test won't show any problems. I went through the same procedure at the Genius bar. Just tell them about this thread and that you are not the only one with the ADM overheat / meltdown problem, hope that will help. In my case, the motherboard was replaced for free. Since, I have replaced the paste on the chips but they still run quite hot.........

780 pages - WOW!

I am unfortunately joining the ranks of frustrated users.

Maybe when we get to a thousand pages Apple will acknowledge the problem and offer a replacement...

After a day and a half of not being able to get my Macbook to boot I got the idea to boot linux live image off usb with basic graphics.  That allowed me to boot the system in Linux and afterword boot OS X again.  Now I have not gotten it to fail for a couple hours.  Very frustrating as last time I reloaded OS X and installed gfxcardstatus the system failed within 10 minutes.  Hope I can reproduce an issue again as my Applecare expires in 3 weeks.

I thought my 17" (Early 2011) MPB was one of the lucky ones to dodge this issue, but not the case. I have begun experiencing the random screen issues

and freezes!

I will be forced to send my Macbook Pro out for a logic board repair as I depend on it for video editing & presentation. I have owned many Mac's over the past 30 years & was a Creative at Apple for 9 years. If Steve were still with us this issue would have been recognized and fixed for us all without question! Apple seems to have forgotten that it's a computer company & that the real money comes from

<Link Edited By Host>

JustmeeB wrote:

Apple seems to have forgotten that it's a computer company & that the real money comes from

Suppose you ment customers?

Well, think they turned in to a shareholder company.

They don't make mistakes and don't care about customers anymore.

JustmeeB wrote:

 

I will be forced to send my Macbook Pro out for a logic board repair as I depend on it for video editing & presentation.

Did you read the thread?

You do know they often/mostly fail in a very short time again?

If you rely on it for y our business, would be much safer to get a dasktop computers.

Laptops/notebooks are not really the best choice for that.

Especially not a macbook with discrete GPU.

Bad themal design.

D3us wrote:

 

JustmeeB wrote:

Apple seems to have forgotten that it's a computer company & that the real money comes from

Suppose you ment customers?

 

Well, think they turned in to a shareholder company.

They did that more than 20 years ago, now they have the same obligations as any other publicly held company.

Are you still making money out of motherboard repairs that are sent to you instead of Apple?

The way I replicated it was to throw loads at the Mac at once, so I created 4 new VM's in Virtual Box, downloaded Linux, set them all installing at once, at the same time as kicking some intensive graphics things off - took it all of about 90 seconds to fall over, I took a couple of photos of it for good measure before taking it into the repair centre (they actually didn't ask me to replicate it when I got in there - they were happy with the photos to be honest), they just said that they would run some diagnostics to prove the fault and replace the board.  They did warn me that the odds of it happening again are relatively high though.  Unfortunately I need a computer for work so I've let them relieve me of quite a few pounds for a new Macbook - frustrated doesn't cut it!