Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

Look at cnn.com:

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/23/tech/mobile/ios7-white-screen-of-death/index.h tml?hpt=hp_t3

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Just tweeted him

alexanderfromdoral wrote:

 

Look at cnn.com:

 

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/01/23/tech/mobile/ios7-white-screen-of-death/index.h tml?hpt=hp_t3

 

 

That artical was originally published by Mashable and re-fed by CNN.  I left the following suggested news topic (citing this discussion):

A sudden surge of GPU failures in 2011 Macbook Pro Laptops (mostly Early 2011, mostly 15" models) leaves customers with unusable computers as Apple refuses to acknowledge the problem, let alone provide it's customers with a solution.  The Incidents are increasing each day.  The discussion group on Apple's website is 185 pages long, and has almost 250,000 views.  Some customers are having their in-warranty (Applecare) laptops repaired with identical faulty parts.  Out of warranty customers are forced to pay anywhere from $300 to $1000 for the same faulty replacement parts should they opt for Apple's repair service.   Apple's official line (by way of the Genius's in Apple stores) is "We are not aware of any problem..."

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Curious about something I keep seeing brought up in this.  Several talk of this all starting after they upgraded to OSX Mavericks.  Is saying their is a possible connection with the new OS and this problem.  Are there those that are having the issue with ML or Lion etc?  Just looking at my notes on all this and this seemed to be something we need to maybe rule out or in?  Personally I don't see how that OS upgrade would cause this but just wanting to hear from others specifically on this question.   Thanks.

@lucas2104

I appreciate the effort. Come one people there's obviously a lot more than that affected by this issue.

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My experience with this issue started with Mountain Lion.  Based on the general consensus of the root cause (failed solder on the BGA Radeon chip), this would be exacerbated by prolonged use of the GPU versus the integrated Intel HD graphics.  Perhaps Mavericks utilizes the GPU for acceleration more than previous releases (for example, articles I found mention iTunes using the GPU for decoding videos, whereas previous OSX releases performed this on CPU), causing the GPU to more frequently heat up and cool down, but this isn't specific to Mavericks, simply higher GPU utilization overall.

missionarymac wrote:

 

Curious about something I keep seeing brought up in this.  Several talk of this all starting after they upgraded to OSX Mavericks.  Is saying their is a possible connection with the new OS and this problem.  Are there those that are having the issue with ML or Lion etc?  Just looking at my notes on all this and this seemed to be something we need to maybe rule out or in?  Personally I don't see how that OS upgrade would cause this but just wanting to hear from others specifically on this question.   Thanks.

I think we can rule an OS connection out pretty definitively - people have had issues crop up or persist with everything from 10.6-10.9.  If you look at the 500+ responses to the survey about 2011 MBP issues, you'll see that there are affected users using nearly every release of every version of Mac OS since these machines came out... plus flavors of Windows. 

These threads go back a couple of years, and one of the things that people have tried to do repeatedly is find an OS/software/firmware correlation.  There hasn't been one. 

Ok that is what I would have thought.   It did not make sense to me to be OS related but I kept seeing it hinted to so I just wanted some clarity on it.  I feel strongly that this is simply a bad hardware issue and needs a good response to deal with it from Apple. 

missionarymac wrote:

 

Ok that is what I would have thought.   It did not make sense to me to be OS related but I kept seeing it hinted to so I just wanted some clarity on it.  I feel strongly that this is simply a bad hardware issue and needs a good response to deal with it from Apple. 

I think we've all looked for something to blame when affected with this problem, and given that the 2-year mark for these machines coincided with the release of Mavericks... I can see why many users would see causality there!  If you look back to posts around the time of any OS update or firmware releases, each one of those got blamed as well. 

Odd you should mention it like that, and in the face of contradictory information on the community pages here, I tended to intuitively feel that having loaded Maverick something had changed in the watching high definition movies. Glitches I had not had previously. Then I downloaded, as part of a mountain lion update (bundled in) a remote programme. I had tried to not do this before as I don't use it, forgot and pushed the button, oh hum! However, I then noticed the more frequent freezing and patterns. Eventually it accelerated to death of the graphic element and then the boot.

I have not loaded Maverick on my eight core mainly cos of this feeling, also, I have taken care not to load the remote software. It's a little irrational, yet over the years I have learned I have time to see how these things bed in or not. Like entire OS changes and updates!

Applying some retrospective logic, combinations of software programmes in the past may have triggered the others computers to fail. I use heavy intermixing of programmes for graphics on my eight core for speed and performance, I get some of that on the MacBook yet not as good, so it has had other lighter uses. Maverick may have introduced a different loading (?) and routing. More running in the background etc., so when I played a HD movie plus stuff on it, it produced overheat? Certainly these were the last things it did!

Apologies for that non technical conversation, yet that's what you get from intuition often!

I would love a button on the updates which, once pushed, would stop presenting the update.

It's not a Mavericks issue, at least not for my 2011 15" MacBook Pro that's suffering from this plague: still running Mountain Lion 10.8.5.

Was still using snow leopard when mine died.

And mine is Lion

D3us wrote:

 

ciu5781 wrote:

 

The amount of thermal paste doesn't significantly affect the temp unless its too little.

 

Cius5781 It does matter.

Enough is enough. To much is bad, to little not good either.

 

There is no significant difference between too much and adequete.

Example from magazine.

No grease : 60 Celsius, 110 Celsius(load)

Adequate :  40, 62

Too much: 42, 66

Most core can survive around 100 Celsius. It's obvious that the amount of grease isn't the cause of this problem. Apple isn't stupid, and they knew things more than you.

Add me to the list !

A few days after upgrading to Mavericks, my mbp2011 would boot to a blue screen with black stripes !

Still, i removed the GPU drivers as explained here:

http://www.asyncro.com/2013/12/12/macbook-pro-discreate-graphics-card-issue-fix/

Give it a try, it worked for me

it works quite slowly but that's still better than a 2k paperweight.

There's a lot of people shaking the apple tree, what would Newton think of it  ?