Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

GavMackem wrote:

 

The MBP 2011 properly cooled is a great Mac notebook.  The problem was the 45 Watt Sandy bridge chip with huge die to cool and with a hot old architecture 40w AMD GPU generated too much heat for the chassis as it was setup with largely the same guidelines as the earlier unibodies until this repair program was finally launched.

 

The Sandy Bridge was one of the biggest jumps in performance Intel made over its predecessor I can remember.  The 2011 MBP 15/17 felt easily 20-25% faster than the 2010 equivalent.  Every new Intel design since and in the future it's incremental jumps, say 3-8% with new CPU instructions, much better gains with lower power/less heat and longer battery life.

 

With my current 17 2011 and 16Gb Ram with 1Tb 840 Evo SSD it doesn't feel much slower than the current retinas in real life usage.  But none of them can hold a candle to my 5 year old upgraded Mac Pro which will be my default OS X/Windows workstation for the next 5 years as it can handle anything I throw at it, at a much faster pace with far less heat unlike all the other notebooks and all in ones.  It's an awesome gaming rig too.  In fact I'd say the Mac Pro models including the current black can are the only Macintosh models that 'Pro' is backed up by substance and not marketing.

I am reminded of the story about Pablo Pascal being recognized while riding a train.  The conversation that followed came to accusing Pascal of not producing realism.  When asked for an example of realism the man reached in his pocket for his wallet and produced a picture of his wife.  Handing the picture to Pascal he said that is realism.  Pascal looked at the picture, turned it to look at the edge and said something about thin isn't she.

A lot depends on how we look at things.

The judges stations for the 1972 olympics didn't use microprocessors even though the Intel 4004 was available.  It did use 64 bit PROMS connected to external logic such that reprograming the PROM created different logical functions much like the programable logic arrays of today. It also contained in internal shadow that tested hardware functions and reported via LEDs hardware failures as they occurred. Today nothing about that machine is revolutionary.

ji

moase wrote:

 

GavMackem wrote:

 

The MBP 2011 properly cooled is a great Mac notebook.  The problem was the 45 Watt Sandy bridge chip with huge die to cool and with a hot old architecture 40w AMD GPU generated too much heat for the chassis as it was setup with largely the same guidelines as the earlier unibodies until this repair program was finally launched.

 

The Sandy Bridge was one of the biggest jumps in performance Intel made over its predecessor I can remember.  The 2011 MBP 15/17 felt easily 20-25% faster than the 2010 equivalent.  Every new Intel design since and in the future it's incremental jumps, say 3-8% with new CPU instructions, much better gains with lower power/less heat and longer battery life.

 

With my current 17 2011 and 16Gb Ram with 1Tb 840 Evo SSD it doesn't feel much slower than the current retinas in real life usage.  But none of them can hold a candle to my 5 year old upgraded Mac Pro which will be my default OS X/Windows workstation for the next 5 years as it can handle anything I throw at it, at a much faster pace with far less heat unlike all the other notebooks and all in ones.  It's an awesome gaming rig too.  In fact I'd say the Mac Pro models including the current black can are the only Macintosh models that 'Pro' is backed up by substance and not marketing.

 

I am reminded of the story about Pablo Pascal being recognized while riding a train.  The conversation that followed came to accusing Pascal of not producing realism.  When asked for an example of realism the man reached in his pocket for his wallet and produced a picture of his wife.  Handing the picture to Pascal he said that is realism.  Pascal looked at the picture, turned it to look at the edge and said something about thin isn't she.

 

A lot depends on how we look at things.

 

The judges stations for the 1972 olympics didn't use microprocessors even though the Intel 4004 was available.  It did use 64 bit PROMS connected to external logic such that reprograming the PROM created different logical functions much like the programable logic arrays of today. It also contained in internal shadow that tested hardware functions and reported via LEDs hardware failures as they occurred. Today nothing about that machine is revolutionary.

lol - you are older than me in the computer game!  Mine was pre Macintosh but I did see all the old PDP-11's and Vax's getting scrapped and being replaced by (what I thought was tiny at the time) successors.  Winchester disks the size of a coffin, and I had an original Seagate ST-506 10Mb 5.25 with the platters out as an ashtray

The nice and exceptional thing to this normal rule about my Mac Pro 5,1 is I can retrofit new current generation parts such as the Apple SSD blade and soon a GTX 980 to keep it still ahead of nearly every current Macintosh sold today.  There is very much life in my old beast yet!

Here is something interesting

http://www.apple.com/support/macbookpro-videoissues/

After searching a while for a solution to this annoying problem many users are facing (myself included), I found out a post Apple uploaded a few days ago (if i'm not mistaken) regarding this issue.

They acknowledge this as their problem, and, I quote, "Apple or an Apple Authorized Service Provider will repair affected MacBook Pro systems, free of charge"

Please if anybody can check this out, would be great.

Thanks!

Yes, it's happening now. You have until 27/02/2016 to take your machine in for service.

I just got mine back today.

jimoase wrote:

I am reminded of the story about Pablo Pascal being recognized while riding a train.  The conversation that followed came to accusing Pascal of not producing realism.  When asked for an example of realism the man reached in his pocket for his wallet and produced a picture of his wife.  Handing the picture to Pascal he said that is realism.  Pascal looked at the picture, turned it to look at the edge and said something about thin isn't she.

 

A lot depends on how we look at things.

The man accusing Picasso of not painting what was "real", produces as evidence a photograph which is an illusion produced by exposing paper coated with silver halides to light. The photograph is not "real", but representational, a re-presentation of something that is real. The man was accusing Picasso of not creating representational art. Picasso points to the fallacy of something that looks real but isn't. Artists of Picasso's day were concerned not with what merely "looks" real, but with communicating the spiritual essence of reality, which is why they created what are called "abstract" works of art, not necessarily a suitable term for what they were attempting.

Technology is an abstraction like the photograph, something that looks real but isn't, an illusion. Those who worship at the clay feet of technology's Babylonian Tower of Babel, by which humanity seeks to divinely empower itself by commodifying the natural world, will continue to play the fool in the human end game. Babylon the great is fallen, and when the reality of that becomes evident, fools will weep and sob together with the merchants.

Darrell Stall wrote:

 

jimoase wrote:

I am reminded of the story about Pablo Pascal being recognized while riding a train.  The conversation that followed came to accusing Pascal of not producing realism.  When asked for an example of realism the man reached in his pocket for his wallet and produced a picture of his wife.  Handing the picture to Pascal he said that is realism.  Pascal looked at the picture, turned it to look at the edge and said something about thin isn't she.

 

A lot depends on how we look at things.

The man accusing Picasso of not painting what was "real", produces as evidence a photograph which is an illusion produced by exposing paper coated with silver halides to light. The photograph is not "real", but representational, a re-presentation of something that is real. The man was accusing Picasso of not creating representational art. Picasso points to the fallacy of something that looks real but isn't. Artists of Picasso's day were concerned not with what merely "looks" real, but with communicating the spiritual essence of reality, which is why they created what are called "abstract" works of art, not necessarily a suitable term for what they were attempting.

Technology is an abstraction like the photograph, something that looks real but isn't, an illusion. Those who worship at the clay feet of technology's Babylonian Tower of Babel, by which humanity seeks to divinely empower itself by commodifying the natural world, will continue to play the fool in the human end game. Babylon the great is fallen, and when the reality of that becomes evident, fools will weep and sob together with the merchants.

Re-Presentation aka counterfeit of the original.

If we are all alike, like bricks, have the same language, the same customs, the same education we can build the Tower of Babel.

Can we build something slightly round or does that require other shapes of building blocks?  Other points of view, other educations, other experiences, other failures.  Better memories for how to spell Picasso?

Our lives are finite.  When is a good time to start taking the road less traveled?  Who gets to decide for you?  Thin isn't she?

GavMackem wrote:

 

ji

moase wrote:

 

GavMackem wrote:

 

The MBP 2011 properly cooled is a great Mac notebook.  The problem was the 45 Watt Sandy bridge chip with huge die to cool and with a hot old architecture 40w AMD GPU generated too much heat for the chassis as it was setup with largely the same guidelines as the earlier unibodies until this repair program was finally launched.

 

The Sandy Bridge was one of the biggest jumps in performance Intel made over its predecessor I can remember.  The 2011 MBP 15/17 felt easily 20-25% faster than the 2010 equivalent.  Every new Intel design since and in the future it's incremental jumps, say 3-8% with new CPU instructions, much better gains with lower power/less heat and longer battery life.

 

With my current 17 2011 and 16Gb Ram with 1Tb 840 Evo SSD it doesn't feel much slower than the current retinas in real life usage.  But none of them can hold a candle to my 5 year old upgraded Mac Pro which will be my default OS X/Windows workstation for the next 5 years as it can handle anything I throw at it, at a much faster pace with far less heat unlike all the other notebooks and all in ones.  It's an awesome gaming rig too.  In fact I'd say the Mac Pro models including the current black can are the only Macintosh models that 'Pro' is backed up by substance and not marketing.

 

I am reminded of the story about Pablo Pascal being recognized while riding a train.  The conversation that followed came to accusing Pascal of not producing realism.  When asked for an example of realism the man reached in his pocket for his wallet and produced a picture of his wife.  Handing the picture to Pascal he said that is realism.  Pascal looked at the picture, turned it to look at the edge and said something about thin isn't she.

 

A lot depends on how we look at things.

 

The judges stations for the 1972 olympics didn't use microprocessors even though the Intel 4004 was available.  It did use 64 bit PROMS connected to external logic such that reprograming the PROM created different logical functions much like the programable logic arrays of today. It also contained in internal shadow that tested hardware functions and reported via LEDs hardware failures as they occurred. Today nothing about that machine is revolutionary.

lol - you are older than me in the computer game!  Mine was pre Macintosh but I did see all the old PDP-11's and Vax's getting scrapped and being replaced by (what I thought was tiny at the time) successors.  Winchester disks the size of a coffin, and I had an original Seagate ST-506 10Mb 5.25 with the platters out as an ashtray

 

The nice and exceptional thing to this normal rule about my Mac Pro 5,1 is I can retrofit new current generation parts such as the Apple SSD blade and soon a GTX 980 to keep it still ahead of nearly every current Macintosh sold today.  There is very much life in my old beast yet!

I saw a hard drive with a 3' x 6' drip pan under it to catch hydraulic fluid.  The 30...36" platters were about a half inch thick.  I don't have a picture of it, in my mind's eye there were 7...10 platters about 4...5 inches apart.  The read/write heads were moved by hydraulic actuated stainless steel arms.

It was so long ago that the picture in my mind is in black and white.

That is something like I saw in the old ICL headquarters by Putney bridge in London which was partly a museum when I went on a school trip.  It was 1981 and the highlight was a computer with a GUI interface and a mouse for the very first time - a PERQ.  That was black and white too

And my iPhone 6's CPU has about the same horsepower as a PowerMac G4 and runs rather cooler.

Which makes my 5/6 year old Mac Pro very much the exception to the rule, though I have upgraded the CPU in the current Mac Pro 6,1 for clients to an Ivy Bridge E 3.3 (an 8 core that Apple do not sell) and hopefully will be able to do the same with the Mac Pro 7,1 which has Haswell EP Xeons but the next generation Broadwell EP models will be pin compatible with it.  That's if Apple don't make it too difficult which could be likely, though the community of Mac Pro users on Macrumors and netkas are extremely resourceful and skilled at getting past that!

GavMackem wrote:

 

That is something like I saw in the old ICL headquarters by Putney bridge in London which was partly a museum when I went on a school trip.  It was 1981 and the highlight was a computer with a GUI interface and a mouse for the very first time - a PERQ.  That was black and white too

 

And my iPhone 6's CPU has about the same horsepower as a PowerMac G4 and runs rather cooler.

 

Which makes my 5/6 year old Mac Pro very much the exception to the rule, though I have upgraded the CPU in the current Mac Pro 6,1 for clients to an Ivy Bridge E 3.3 (an 8 core that Apple do not sell) and hopefully will be able to do the same with the Mac Pro 7,1 which has Haswell EP Xeons but the next generation Broadwell EP models will be pin compatible with it.  That's if Apple don't make it too difficult which could be likely, though the community of Mac Pro users on Macrumors and netkas are extremely resourceful and skilled at getting past that!

Is that the ICL building that was an old airplane hanger filled with offices and meeting spaces? The machine for the 1972 olympics was a subcontract from ICL.  German companies were primary contractors, ICL a secondary, the machine selected as the judge's station was from Roseville, MN.  

jimoase wrote:

Re-Presentation aka counterfeit of the original.

If we are all alike, like bricks, have the same language, the same customs, the same education we can build the Tower of Babel.

Can we build something slightly round or does that require other shapes of building blocks?  Other points of view, other educations, other experiences, other failures.  Better memories for how to spell Picasso?

Our lives are finite.  When is a good time to start taking the road less traveled?  Who gets to decide for you?  Thin isn't she?

No, "she" isn't "thin". The photograph of her is thin. She is as she exists ontologically — in her being.

In order to truly understand, you have to take the road less traveled, the one outside the box of Western Renaissance/Enlightenment/Modernism/Post-modernism with its worship of mechanics, and silly notion of the clockwork universe.

Truth is not either-or, but both-and. It's not traditional vs. progressive, conservative vs. liberal, or individual vs. community/culture. It's not quantitative, but qualitative. It's not left brain or right brain but whole brain.

Language, customs, and education (aka "culture") did not build the Tower of Babel.

Human arrogance and pride, which is hubris, built the Tower of Babel. Though different languages, customs, cultures have formed out of a homogenous Babylonian culture which built the Tower of Babel, human hubris (pride and arrogance) have remained common to all. That is what the Tower of Babel is - human arrogance, human pride in itself as "self made", which is hubris, which aspires to "reach to the heavens", that is be God, god-like, godly, apart from God through purely physical (building blocks) instead of spiritual means.

Truth is not relative but absolute. It's not 1960s "different strokes for different folks". Truth is unity in diversity that transcends the modern insipid diversity for diversity's sake, art for arts sake (shock and "awe", aka "innovation").

See - Pieter Brueghel the Elder, the Tower of Babel

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder

Especially see - http://www.visual-arts-cork.com/famous-paintings/tower-of-babel.htm

The Dutch may not have invented capitalism, but they took it to "newer", "greater" heights of "progress" than ever seen before. They went gaga over tulip bulbs, for god's sake, and speculated in them to their own ruin.

How many more examples of human foolishness does it take to get educated in wisdom?

Probably as many Apple "geniuses" as it takes to provide a Mountain Lion installer for a Mac Mini 2012 that didn't come with one.

The HQ was two buildings either side north and south of Putney Bridge, very expensive real estate.  I think the hangar was at one of the old Marconi sites which computer subsidiary became part of ICL, though which one I can't recall. I was too young plus there were so many places when us Brits used to make lots of things.  I saw the final death knell of really big UK electronics manufacturing with buying up surplus kit and it wasn't a pretty sight.

Darrell Stall wrote:

 

...

The Dutch may not have invented capitalism, but they took it to "newer", "greater" heights of "progress" than ever seen before. They went gaga over tulip bulbs, for god's sake, and speculated in them to their own ruin.

How many more examples of human foolishness does it take to get educated in wisdom?

Probably as many Apple "geniuses" as it takes to provide a Mountain Lion installer for a Mac Mini 2012 that didn't come with one.

We are getting far a field ....   The tulip story is interesting

As we know the Tulip based economic system started because some very rich people had a very rare tulip in their garden.  People wanted to have a tulip like that so they were willing to pay large sums for a bulb.  Since the tulips were not native to the area the source of bulbs was controlled.

The rareness of the bulbs turned into speculation market which people could use tulip bulbs as collateral for a loan.  One thing led to another and soon other strains of bulbs, also rare, were developed.  The "desire" market created a sellers market and the price of tulip bulbs increased and increased.  More and more people grew tulips and sold bulbs, flooding or inflating the supply of bulbs.  Then one day someone refused to take tulip bulbs as payment and the highly inflated house of tulip bulbs came tumbling down.

Tulip bulbs initially were rare and the supply controlled, therefore they were a stable reference for currency, IOUs, folding money.  As more and more bulbs came to be, more and more IOUs were placed into circulation.  Pretty soon we had what George Washington experienced, in 1780, while camped outside of Morristown under 3..4' of snow, it took a wagon load of Continental Dollars to buy a wagon load of supplies, the market was inflated with currency and its buying power was deflated.

I thought I would share my experience today when I brought my early 2011 MBP into the authorized dealer today....

I brought my MBP into the store and they were very friendly and aware of the issue. They booted the mac up and the video was clearly distorted and the fan kicked on high right away. Then they proceeded to tell me I needed to pay them $50 to run a "diagnostic test". I told them apple.com says its a free repair program and they say there is no way of knowing if it is the graphics, but if it is, they will refund the money. They tell me the diagnostic test will take a "few hours" worth of work on their part. I told them to look at the screen and how the video is distorted and the guy told me it could be the RAM and not the card. I was like, yea, I'm not giving you $50 only for you to tell me I'm not getting my money back when you "find something else wrong with it".

I left the store and went to the other authorized dealer in town. They ran the diagnostic test at no charge, which took less than 5 minutes. The guy told me they still had to get approval from apple, but he was very certain it was indeed the logic card based on the diagnostic test he ran.

I'm glad i didn't stick around at the first store and give them a "$50 deposit". Good luck everyone....

Thanks, you make a good point.  Apple Stores might be more accommodating and might handle cases more uniformly than Apple Service Providers, let alone merchants that just sell Apple products but aren't official Apple Service Providers (if, indeed, such even exist).  I think I read somewhere that there is an option to mail the machine to Apple, but I might be wrong.

This was my experience. I live 2 hours away from the nearest apple store so I didn't want to drive that far twice and opted for the mail-in option. I found out about the repair on Saturday(been dealing with the issues for months now) and I called apple. The nice representative took down my information and told me my repair was covered. On Monday morning, a box was at my front door. I followed the instructions and mailed my macbook (17' late 2011) to them on Monday afternoon. Tuesday morning I got an email saying they had received my laptop and were working on it. Wednesday morning, my laptop arrived back at my door. Not only did they change the logic board, but they also replaced the bottom case(due to a defective latch) and a "clutch barrel" (the black strip where the macbook opens and closes, mine had a crack in it) and they fixed all that for free. They performed an adjustment/realignment on it and it passes all hardware testing. I'm using it right now and it's as fast and smooth as brand new. Thanks again Apple for restoring my faith in your company to do the right thing.