Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

Is there any way, I too can get a replacement for my faulty MBP??

I just received a call from the Apple Store and Authorised Repair Centre people, saying that they would fix my machine for INR 33,500/- plus taxes which is roughly 400 Euros.

I need help on how to go ahead from here? Either to get a replacement or complain

Have the people at QuickIT assured that the Macbook will be okay to use after the repair?

I got my MacBook Pro back from the Apple Store, where they changed the logic board.
Within minutes, I get a grey screen upon rebooting with the fans going crazy and a really hot zone all around the E,R,3 and 4 keys.

Problem not solved yet.

Like some of you I have someone to talk to by phone or mail. And I hope he will come up with a satisfying solution.

Those who get new MBPr are indeed very lucky as it seems to be the only solution they've got until now.

I would encourage all of this forum members to try to reach to Apple regarding this problem which may help us in reviving our MBPs or getting a replacement.

<Edited By Host>

dr.felix wrote:

 

Sorry to tell you this guys, but I tried every remedy I could in terms of firmware updates and the like.  The fact of the matter is the logic boards are a weak point and you will need to get it replaced.  Contact Apple, really reiterate your unhappiness and you may get supplied a logic board and just have to pay the labour.  Wish I could suggest an easier fix but I don't believe there is one..

<Edited by Host>

I did not read the whole thread, but it seems that dr.felix and I had the same experience with Apple Customer Support. My Early 2011 MacBook Pro had the same issue with the discrete graphics card, and after some phone calls and help from a local reseller, I managed to get a free logic board from Apple (I only paid for the replacement job).

I had to drop my computer to a local premium reseller (Easy-M, Belgium) and ask for an estimate. They checked my laptop and had the same conclusion: the GPU was dead. When I called Apple Belgium back, they could compare my description of the problem with the diagnosis delivered by the technicians. The lady on the phone transfered the call to a higher level at Apple Support, and after some more explanations, they finally told me that the logic board would be replaced with a new one for free. They noticed that I am a good client, and as I told them earlier, it's quite sad to see such an expensive computer (more than $2500 when I bought it) fail just TWO months after the end of the warranty.

I was told by someone at my local dealer that Apple likes to treat these kind of problems case by case, and they need the estimate with the diagnosis to verify if the problem was not caused by the user. On the other side, when I see all these people in this thread having the same issue, I can consider myself lucky. I don't know what's holding Apple from opening an official replacement program for these faulty discrete cards.

I sent a email tomedia.help@apple.com, they answered me the same day.

I called on the phone and spoke to a person who took care of my problem, and told me to take him to the engineers so that they ascertain that this model of MBP have problems. If so we may have a repair plan.

they will respond tomorrow, but the more they complain that we will surely there are more possibilities.

Here in Uruguay costs me almost $ 2,000 to change the logic board in the official service. The same computer costs U.S. $ 1700 in perfect condition

Just sold my spares / repair / faulty 15" 2011 mbp on ebay for £480. Crazy how someone would pay that sort of money for a broken mbp.

beauchampy   Because they will turn it round and sell it as a working MBP to some mug on eBay/Craigs list. Then step away from the reasonable expectaion that what is bought in good faith will work for a reasonable time.  Now where have I seen that tatic before ?-) 

Yaah they said that they have repaired many 2011 MBP and they knew that there is graphic card issue in almost all 2011 MacBooks and they giving a guarantee that it Will be working and won't get broken anytime soon. I am taking my chance better than spending 700$ and you still know it won't work and I will be getting the new one so this will go to my mum so that they can just surf the net. Will update you that what is going on and will get it fixed in this week. Fingers crossed. Hope it doesn't break after this even I told him to get a high quality thermal compound so that heat depilation is good. Now its just wait and watch kinda situation. 

Swampus wrote:

 

SamCity123 wrote:

 

I have a feeling Apple might do something about this soon. The senior advisor I spoke to today seemed to know that it was a 'batch' of this version of MacBook Pros.

 

"Batch" is certainly an interesting word.  It would have to be plural since we'd be talking about at least one problematic "batch" in both the early and late 2011 production runs.

 

Has anyone gathered data around the build dates of these failures?  I wonder if we'd see clumping around certain dates? 

 

You can go to one of these sites and find the build week by entering your serial number:

 

http://www.appleserialnumberinfo.com/Desktop/index.php

 

http://www.chipmunk.nl/klantenservice/applemodel.html

 

If you post the results here, omit your serial number.  IIRC, if yours is a BTO or Apple Refurbished, the build week shown will not be correct.

 

I'll post mine as an example even though it's not relevant to this discussion (I'm not experiencing this problem and mine is a refurb, so it shows 2012):

 

Model:	- MacBook Pro (15-inch, Early 2011)
Codename:	- No codename assigned.
Build Country:	- This unit was built in China
Build Year:	- This unit was built in the first half of 2012.
Build Week	- Week 2 (January) or week 29 (July)
Production Nr.:	- This unit was number 915 to be built that week.

Tally so far (up to and including shadesofBlue's comment on 11/25):

By month:

Jan:  2

Feb: 7

Mar: 5

Apr: 3

May: 3

Jun: 2

Jul: 1

Nov: 1

By week:

Week 3:     1

Week 5:     1

Week 8:     2

Week 9:     5

Week 10:   3

Week 11:   1

Week 14:   1

Week 16:   1

Week 17:   2

Week 19:   1

Week 20:   1

Week 22:   1

Week 24:   1

Week 28:   1

Week 31:   1

Week 48:   1

I'm also tracking the production numbers of each week, but nothing interesting so far.  The five failures logged for week 9 production are 202, 867, 1072, 1534, and 1653.  The three reported failures for week 10 built machines are 343, 1179, and 1196.

Of course, there is very little to be gleaned from this information at this time.  This ain't exactly science and even if it were, the numbers at this point would not be statistically significant.  Still, I'm of the opinion that there is no such thing as too much information.  It can often turn out to be helpful in ways that you do not expect.

For as long as people want to do this, I will continue to add weekly totals.

ahashem2 wrote:

 

Here is my info. I have the same problem as others. I changed the thermal paste but no luck.

 

Machine Model: MacBookPro8,2

Name: MacBook Pro (2011 core i7) 15 inch

Family name: A1286

Model Number: MC723

Group1: MacBook Pro

Generation: 82

CPU speed: 2.2GHz

Screen size: 15 inch

Screen resolution: 1440x900 pixels

Production year: 2011

Production week: 28 (July)

Model introduced: 2011

Factory: C0 (Quanta Computer (Susidiary = Tech Com) China)

This is from the one person who chose the "chipmunk" link.  This site provides a factory code, but not a production sequence?  The factory code might be important too.  Mine says...

Factory: C2 (China)

I wonder how the production sequence numbers are distributed among assembly locations?  Anyone know? 

check this out:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1PuJ2QS2Ri7fw9HVaNHLQ4OYZCb99zonc96HmhTWEAoY/vie wanalytics

Disclaimer:  As I've mentioned before, don't take my posts here as the final word on anything.  I feel the need to say this because I think my writing style sometimes leads people to assume that I know more than I really do.  That would be an incorrect assumption.  Honestly, even on my best days, I'm little more than a hack.  Ignore my writing style and just know that my intention here at this time is not to provide answers, but to hopefully play a small part in figuring out what questions we should be asking.

ARCape wrote:

 

...That was till I decided to rip my mac apart & get to the cpu & gpu to do the all famous reapplication of the thermal compound to both. I dont know if I was lucky or the problem really is just a bad case of thermal compound...

My guess is that you were lucky.  Specifically, I suspect that the order in which you tightened down the heatsink screws (possibly combined with thicker compound?) slightly altered the mount pressure in favor of a broken solder joint.  To paraphrase Spock from episode # 35 TOS, random chance seems to have operated in your favor. 

I've seen this pop up a couple of times, but it never seems to be permanent.  This person, posting in another thread in August, said that it lasted about a month:

I managed to change the thermal paste about three months ago. It worked at first, but one month later, GPU problems appeared again hence I had to install smcFanControl and put my fans up to 6200 RPM.

Generally, I am highly in favor of replacing factory compound.  I did mine when it was only a few days old and got about an 8 degree difference at load.  This is about what most people report on the 2011 models.  Very nice for about 40 minutes of work.  Cooler temps mean better performance (less throttling and more thermal headroom for turboboost to do its thing). 

That said, let me get a couple of things out of the way in relation to this discussion:

     1) Thermal compound will not repair a broken solder joint.

     2) If I am correct above about why this seems to work for a short while for a few people, then there also exists a possibility that you could make things worse.  That is, if you've managed to lock down to the HD3000 and have bought yourself some time to see if Apple is going to do anything, I'd be very cautious.  I could also, of course, be completely wrong about all of this.

Why do I even bring it up then?  For those planning to do it anyway, I want to provide some additional information that is missing from the popular links and videos.  I also want to revisit a previous statement that I made on the subject and I'm curious about those who have had the motherboard replaced only to experience the same problem again after a short time.  There may be some questions worth asking for those who have had the motherboards replaced and have not yet experienced any problems.

Reattaching the heatsink:

The screws should be tightened down in this order:

The specific wording from Apple's Technician Guide is this (page 213):

"Install heatsink screws in the order shown, 1/2 way first, then tighten the rest of the way."

The wording isn't perfect, but they mean for you to follow the same pattern for both the "1/2 way" and "rest of the way" steps.

This would have come from Apple engineers and I've seen no indication that it isn't the exact best way to do it to get the most even distribution. 

My advice on choosing a compound:  In this case, I would suggest paying very little attention to the benchmarks and endless pages of debate about which product might be a third of a degree cooler than the other.  Depending on how information is presented, the graphs can look impressive.  But when you realize that these graphs only indicate about a three degree difference between the top 20 or so products and the results should be read with a 2 degree margin of error, there isn't that much difference.  By all means, get a top tier product, but focus more on the differences.  Focus more on things like viscosity, texture, and its ability to perform well under different amounts of pressure.  Generally a low viscosity compound is more desirable when two well-finished surfaces meet perfectly and high viscosity compounds are more desirable when dealing with imperfections.  The word "tacky" is sometimes used as a negative description in these reviews.  It's true that a "tacky" compound can be a little more difficult to work with, but it can also be very helpful in some situations.

Mine fit together very well and I got good results from my favorite low viscosity compound on both chips, but I don't think that's true of all of these.  I think we're dealing with some significant manufacturing variations in these heatsinks.

Which brings me back to a previous comment that I made on this subject.  About 10 pages back, I said that I think the excessive use of thermal compound at most only plays a role in causing these problems to appear a little sooner than later.  All else being equal, that's a true statement.  Tests show only a few degree difference between the right amount and way too much.  The rest of the difference that we see when reading user "before & after" reports comes from the higher quality of the compound chosen.  But taking a step back from everything that I think I know about this, things are not always going to be equal when you're dealing with two heatsinks on the same assembly. 

For an example, we can take another look at the popular iFixit teardown:

To my eye, the CPU part (top) looks okay.  Yes, a lot was used, but the extra got squished out the sides.  And it looks like there was a good flat meeting between the heatsink and the CPU die.  On mine, both chips looked like that.  That bottom picture, though?  I'm not even sure what we're looking at there.  If this were my machine, I'd consider using two different types of compounds for reassembly.  At minimum, I think we're looking at different mount pressures here, but it's not obvious to me that the GPU die and heatsink have ever even met or would recognize each other in a bar.  It's not the amount, but the quality of factory compound that could be problematic in this case.  If the bulk generic stuff is being left to play the role of thermal conduit on its own in some cases, that would lead me to believe that this could be playing a bigger role as contributing factor.  It would necessarily mean that more heat is being displaced through the PCB.

To understand what I mean, see this 2009 study by The United States Department of Energy.  Yes, it's a little dated, but it mentions compounds that are still popular today.  Also, it's far more sophisticated than the average benchmark comparison on an overclocking website.  In this image, you can see how 1/20th of one millimeter can effect the thermal resistance of some popular compounds:

Thermal compound isn't really intended to play the role of thermal conduit on its own.  It's intended to fill the micro-imperfections between the surfaces that meet.  Still, as you can see from the graph, some do far better than others when asked to play this role.  And all of these are likely far superior to the generic OEM stuff.

In another example, in this thread, the owner got "not so satisfactory" results from AS-5 and "really great" results from MX-4.  There would be no reason in the world for this if we were talking about things that fit together well.  Those are both fine quality products.  But MX-4, even though it doesn't stand out in any one particular category, can perform well under a wide range of conditions.  With AS-5, you're instructed to spread it out flat on this type of bare die surface.  A lot of user reports that previously confused me make sense when looked at in this context.

In this picture, we appear to be looking at an uneven spread:

Much thicker at the top.  Why?  Were the screws not tightened in the right order?  I don't know much about automated assembly, but I assume that this is still something that's done by hand?  Or is the problem here with the heatsink itself?  Or the heatsink mount points?  Also notice that we're already seeing signs of cracking in the compound at just under the two year mark for this photograph.

If you're using a new board with the old heatsink, it might be worth investigating?  I don't know if the depot repair uses the same compound that is used at the factory, but I'd imagine it's still a bulk generic low-quality type of stuff.  If there is an actual gap between the two surfaces, corrective measures beyond a different type of compound may be in order.  Ask a trusted technician about a new heatsink, a shim, or other modification.  A repair person who works on all major laptop brands will already be well familiar with this type of issue.

For those planning to redo the compound yourself, I'd take a minute to study the old stuff before cleaning it up.  I might then do a couple of test applications before putting it all back together.  Put a few small drops of compound in several locations and then screw down the heatsink following above instructions.  Then take it back off and see if you're satisfied with what you find.  Are they even?  To give yourself a baseline for comparison, put about the same size drop of your chosen compound between two flat surfaces (a mirror and a small piece of glass would be very nice for this).  Slowly press down on the glass and you can see for yourself how the compound spreads.

guaranna:

This is AWESOME information!!!

Hopefully Apple is paying attention!!! This is all such an annoying and irritating condition we are all in.