Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

Been, as advice by Opera's Apple store in Paris, to 3 Apple authorized repairers to have my MBP repaired faster that in the Apple store (the Apple store its overloaded and they can't take any "genius" meetings, I wonder why...), The 3 Apple authorized repairers told me the repair would cost around 700€ and 10 to 15 days to do it!

One of the guys told me straight away that the problem is the GPU and the reparation price. No diagnosis no stress test, he told me as well that they have 80 devices to repair in their shop and 20% of them are MBP with this problem. They can't do reball because they're not authorized to perform this, only change the entire motherboard, how convenient, after confront him that even the replacement wouldn't permanently fix the problem he stayed in silence but his eyes said I know, bad for you, good for us the business will be better for us. I refused the reparation but I asked him if he could just register my serial number and communicate the problem to Apple, as was told me by the "Genius" in the Apple store yesterday, the technician told me no, so "Genius" lie too.

So after the shops I went to the Apple store to confront them with all this. Another "Genius" told me that he could report my problem and serial number to Apple, so yesterday wasn't possible but today its ok?

Back home I tried to work in Protools with the discrete card only, Waves plug ins work but no GUI, so no adjustments in the knobs, useless. I can't see what the cursor highlights so audio edition its impossible. My Macbook pro its useless.

I start to look for reballers and Hackintosh and see what is the next best move since Apple is doing the hiding game.

Of course its Apple fault, only fanboys would say the oposite.

I'm a client since 10 years, 1 imac, 1 ipod, 1 ipod touch, 1macbook, 1macbook pro my wife as a iPhone 4 and I offered my mother a Macmini one year ago. All this products had problems beside the macmini. I can list them if you ask.

I advised Apple to my friends because it worked, oh the irony...

I'm seeing an old lawyer friend tomorrow to see what we can do, I'm not expecting a replacement only but some other proposition from Apple too and not only the 10% reduction cr*p, its their bad design that has provoke this so they are totally responsible, this company makes billions with our money.

Do anyone knows a good reballer in Paris?

I have to stop writing, my eyes and head hurt of all this brightness, that I can't adjust, coming from my screen.

If your stuck for a repairer you can send over to us in the UK. We have many customers from Europe if you need a reference.

We have limited stock of these GPU's which do you have?

What do I need to do, how much will cost me, how much time?

If you email ebay@bgarepairs.co.uk with your serial and I will check stock and let you know exact details.

Kind Regards

bgarepairs, your mail quota exceeded, apparently

Now resolved. Thankyou

Like everyone else, in March 2011, I bought an Early 2011 15" MBP with the highest specs (at the time): 2.3GHz (w/ 8MB cache), 8GB RAM, 7200rpm drive, Hi-Res Antiglare Widescreen Display and off course the discrete "AMD Radeon HD 6750M with 1GB GDDR5" graphics chip.

And like everyone else, 2.5 years later (August 2013), I started having the same problem. Initial crash, unable to boot, vertical green lines (sometimes red), no Safe Boot, partial success by removing the AMD Radeon drivers, somewhat stable system with gfxCardStatus+Integrated mode until it went to sleep, then it stopped booting, luckily Safe Boot started working but system extremely slow, etc, etc, etc. No matter what I did, it kept getting worse and worse. At the end, I had to get it fixed.

My local Apple Authorized Reseller quoted me US $1,200++ to replace the logic board (used with 2.2GHz CPU plus 3-to-4 weeks for board to arrive!), and recommended I buy a new one instead. I was really upset, especially that I paid upwards of US $3,500 brand new. Besides, the "newer" 2012 base model wasn't as powerful as my old one (in some regards).

Thanks to this thread, I sent the laptop to the US, and sure enough, they replaced the logic board for US $310+tax.

I'm still waiting for my shipment, and I really hope they didn't "downgrade" my CPU. I also hope I won't have to send it to Apple again for the same problem, and I'll keep bga_repairs email handy.

Meanwhile, I ordered the new 15" Retina MBP from the US, this time with AppleCare. To my disappointment, my shipment never arrived despite FedEx claiming it was "delivered". To make a long story short, I contacted Apple, which started a shipping inquiry, asked me to give them 48 business hours, and asked me if I preferred my "money back" or a "replacement". Less than 2 days later, I received an email confirming my replacement is on its way, while the investigation is still ongoing. So I have to give Apple credit for that.

But I'm still angry about my Early 2011 15" MBP, and I join your voices in that a recall is a must.

Cheers,

-hq

Yes it is the graphics issue. Both pre repair and after repair have the same results. The apple store confirmed the problem. I was advised the repair was completed by an offsite company and they have no wiggle room after the 90 days.

I'm going to try the trick removing the drivers. Hope that works for the time being.

so to give some of you hope, here is my story.

In August of this year my Early 2011 MBP went "berserk" with all the typical blackscreen/bluescreen/splitscreen/greyscreen nonsense. I must have spent over 100 hours trying to get my machine to work. Finally relenting, I took it to the Apple store as I have a 3 yr warranty. First time they did a clean install of Mountain Lion claiming my problem was likely corrupt software. Upon getting home and backing up from TimeMachine it started "screwing up" almost immediately. About a week later I took it back this time with the screen frozen in a wierd state under SAFE BOOT. This convinced them to replace the logic board. A week later I picked up the machine and returned home and started using it and initally all seemed well. But about a week later the behavior came back with a vengence. Many more lost hours trying to salvage something. It was at this time that I found this thread. The good news was that I no longer was alone. The bad news is that I've come to the conclusion that, like cancer, rather than "fix" it I am going to have to learn how to live with my damaged machine.

Recall that I spend countless hours rebooting, PRAMing, rebooting, repairing permissions, rebooting, reinstalling software, rebooting, cleaning out unused apps, rebooting. Did I mention rebooting? Since August until recently I never got more than a few days without experiencing MBP GPU ****.

Anyway, I'm here to report that my machine is now stable for the past two weeks (a record for me!). Here's what I've done (I can't claim what actually is the key, so take it with a grain of salt). The order of changes is approximately the order I implemented the changes.

• removed keyboard cover
• removed Speck hard plastic laptop case
• removed 16Gb of OWC RAM and returned to original Apple RAM
• new logic board care of AppleCare (Note: this definitely did NOT fix the problem by itself, but "perhaps" together with the other changes is actually beneficial, however, there is no way to know for sure)
• installed swcFanControl and set the left fan to 4000rpm
• unchecked Automatic Graphics Switching from Energy Saver
• clean install (not an "upgrade") of Mavericks
• backup of Apps/Users/Data from TimeMachine
• upgraded all of my current GPU-intensive apps to the latest versions
• stopped using Firefox and removed all plugins from Safari (especially Unity Plugin as used by Facebook)
• closed the lid of the MBP and plugged into a 27" Apple monitor via miniDisplayPort

Since implementing the above, in these past two weeks I have had precisely ONE screen "freakout" requiring rebooting -- fortunately it came right back without any trouble. So clearly I have not "fixed" the root cause -- I admit that. But I can say that I am now doing real work again on my MBP for the first time since August! My Applecare runs out next Spring so I have a few more months to try to get to the bottom of this. Should things turn for the worse (i.e. the machine becomes unusable), I will alert this thread that pershaps the above steps are in vain. But for now, I'm comfortable running pretty much any of my GPU-intensive programs and I might even reinstall my 16Gb ram soon just so I can power ahead like I used to before August. Or put another way: I hope to be able to live with this until next summer (knock on wood!).

Michael

I've just talked for over an hour on the phone with a reballing specialist. This is what I'm told: since the Kyoto protocol, companies are no longer allowed to use lead in their solder, which generates a lot of problems, since the solder will start to melt down once the microcomponents start heating up and cooling down. He told me it's only a matter of time until most notebooks manufactured today start failing, specially in hot countries, but failing after only 2 years is more of a design flaw or poor quality control.

First of all that wasn't the Kyoto protocol prohibiting lead-based solder but the European RoHS which had to be implemented as law in all Europoean countries by the end of 2004. In essence you can't sell a product a non-compliant product in Europe in 2005, although Apple only fully complied to that in June 2006 by stopping shipments of certain products. Secondly if properly manufactured the quality is not any worse than with lead based solder. Thirdly, if the products would necessarily start failing after 2 years why is it that older products have far better longevity and that in most cases only the GPUs fail and not the CPUs or other "hot" packages on the board?

I totally agree. Why do we not see Intel GPU's fail? Why does the Intel CPU not fail? Also soldered with lead free solder??

The failures are down to either bad design or usually down to poor chipset manufacture. Not due to the BGA lead free balls they sit on.I accept they are more susceptable to thermal cycles but are still, more than adequate.

Nvidia 2007/08 Chipsets - Internally Faulty.

ATI Chipsets have been failing badly in the Radeon 4250 (just goodle Dell 7 beeps)

I think there is the same failure in 2011 MBP which indicates ATI manufacturing faulty GPU's

Not Apple's fault but as they are supplying the end user, they must take responsibility.

Dont forgot Nvidia paid out Apple, Dell, HP etc in 2007, Apple and Dell passed this on to their customersbut HP and others did not....

One of the major factors I suspect is the switching GPU's. This means the ATI GPU will experience more heat cycles than in a non switching machine which may make the situation worse.

Has anyone tried replacing the logic board with a newer 2012 or 2013 logic board? Even for a price? I'd be willing to pay if I knew this problem won't happen again and also that it's an upgrade.

Is there anyone know whether or not the switching GPU scheme applied for BootCamp ? if not, which GPU is the default ? Discrete GPU ???? the Display Adapter is AMD Radeon HD 6770M shows on the Device Manager

My 15" 2011 MBP is still intacted lol, I mostly use the graphic related programs on Windows environment.

Does it make any different ?

I'm in the same bucket as everyone else.  My 2011 Macbook Pro with an AMD GPU just died.   I can boot it into Safemode and use the integrated GPU, but the AMD one locks up and kills my machine.   It's a shame Apple hasn't responded to this.  There's over 200 posts between forums now. 

Yes, Windows is affected as well since it's a hardware issue. Windows always uses descrete as far as I can tell. I could get it to boot in safe mode but never normal - got a BSOD when it was booting.