Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

What I mean exactly is :

- Your GPU has suffered during 2-3 years of very bad thermal dissipation (improper use of thermal paste)

- The cost of GPU itself is not so high : about 40-50 USD

- Reballing is an opportunity to replace the GPU with a new one (and why not an upgraded one).

What I mean exactly is :

- Your GPU has suffered during 2-3 years of very bad thermal dissipation (improper use of thermal paste)

- The cost of GPU itself is not so high : about 40-50 USD

- Reballing is an opportunity to replace the GPU with a new one (and why not an upgraded one).

That's exactly my point and I totally agree apart from the fact that it is completely misguiding to use the word reball here since a replacement is something completely different than a reball.

Tristemente el Mismo Problema, Tarjeta 6570, MUchas cosas: cuelgues, bandas, sonidos (2,3...) y todo lo que dicen los demás foristas, y todo por la misma época. Yo compre mi mac en enero 2012 y está en la serie con problemas.

Es muy triste, porque es demasiado profundo el daño que dicen, tiene.

Aquí en Bogotá Colombia no me dieron razón, solo lo supe por Internet.

Es muy triste, he tenido powerboog g4, Ipad, Imac. y no pensé que un producto de mac pudiera tener un fallo tan flagrante.

Espero que haya alguna ayuda para nosotros, porqueno es justo pagar 4 millones de pesos colombianos por un producto que no dura dos años bien.

SALUDOS.

You are more than welome.  We have to stick together as Apple appears to have abandoned us all.

Sorry, but I hope NONE of you has an iPhone.

I am in the same situation, but crying does not really help here, complaining yes, and stop buying Apple products.

After all the truth is that Apple earns every 3 months 10 Billions. Exchange programme is feasible to pay from this, but this means less profit. Too bad for the investors.

In the last two weeks I have had several things start happening that never happened before. When I heard about this thread I got rather excited.

The issue I am having shows a variety of symptoms:

• The display will randomly move the left edge of the screen to the center of the display so that the mouse pointer, when at the right edge of the screen is actually just left of the centerline of the LCD panel.
• The display will suddenly go "fuzzy". Multiple instances of all display elements but in a blurry, indistinct sort of way, with jittery or fidgety motion.
• Complete lockup... ALL activity halts. A hard restart brings the computer up to a gray screen that will sit there for days until the computer is hard restarted again.

As I've been in IT for 20+ years I recognized this as video card issues from my hardware days back in the 90s (funny how some things stay the same)... but upon reading some of the comments here I have realized that the hard lockup with the gray-screen-of-death reboot happens at very specific times, generally associated with specific actions:

• Accessing YouTube or other video sites
• Starting up Photobooth
• Opening certain PDF documents in Preview
• Hitting refresh in a photo album viewed in Safari
• Starting certain games

It's annoyingly inconsistent (i.e. it's consistently the same set of triggers but they don't cause the symptoms every time), but it does follow one key pattern: activating the high-end graphics card.

Add my voice to the growing mob saying that this is a manufacturing defect... I am not entirely sure that I feel that Apple should entirely foot the repair bill on their own, but I think they should at least partially subsidize the repairs. Obviously since they're all failing en masse there's a manufacturing defect at work here.

Add me to the list of early 2011 MBPs with failed GPUs.  Every time I start my computer I get a pinkish apple logo with lines thorughout the screen.  It then switches to a complete grey screen. 

Sent my MBP off to ps3specialist.  Hope it all goes well.

Couple of questions about options. So from what i have read our only options are below

1.Reflow is stick in (non food) oven, solder melts and reconnects to board. Quick fix lasts weeks.

2.Reball is to fit exisiting gpu with new solder which is hard and time consuming. Possible failure. months

3.New gpu £30, remove old chip and clean area. Gpu will have reball already? so not time consuming or hard. This option should be cheaper than reball as less specialist equipment will be needed? But usually costs around £190. Should last over a year +

One last question. Can we upgrade the gpu? original 6490M upgrade to the 6770M? 

Hundreds of people are getting their macbook pros reflowed, reballed, fixed on ebay. Apple really dont care that we have to get third parties involved to fix the problem they made.

I HATE Apple now. When Jobs left so did the company.

rplayer wrote:

 

Couple of questions about options. So from what i have read our only options are below

 

1.Reflow is stick in (non food) oven, solder melts and reconnects to board. Quick fix lasts weeks

 

...

well i did more than one notebook, including my mbp 17" early 2011 some time ago, all working and kicking after two hot summers so it's definitively a vaiable and durable option, and in the case it fails again, one can always redo it, for free

If some one wants to replace the GPU instead of reballing do you just need a new chip? can you actually buy these seperatly? It would also be interesting to know if anyone has successfully upgraded the GPU to the 6700M.

@rplayer I understand your pain! I paid the apple premium thinking I was getting a quality product that would also have a high resale value... looks like I got non of those.

You're right, replacing a GPU is not strictly reballing, but it implies using good leaded soldering different of that used at Apple factory.

SkyFoxXP wrote:

 

You're right, replacing a GPU is not strictly reballing, but it implies using good leaded soldering different of that used at Apple factory.

There's no general problem with leadfree solder, it only requires a stricter temperature profile but more precise manufacturing in typically also leads to better products...

In fact you'll have a hard time sourcing components that will come with leaded solder so if you desperately want that then you'll have to reball your new chip anyway. In that case you might as well just stay with reballing.

I took my mac into the mac certified shop, paid $50 to be told that my logic board is bad. I asked for some sort of report and they said they don't do that. Is that what I should expect?

Looking through this forum I can tell that my late 2011 mac book pro taken down by the same problem. All the symptoms, including gradual failure the the gray screen and temporary fixes with reinstalling OS very recognizable.

Mac shop wants $850 for the new board replacement. Makes no sense to me to pay this much for 2 years old computer repair.

Can anyone recommend a shop that can replace the GPU, as it was recommended in some of the threads? I am in US.

After going through  the Apple "support" run around, I felt that this is the end of my customer loyalty.

I got mine early 2011 mbp repaired by $310 in retail Apple Store, with 90days warranty.

Several folks here did the reballing with a guy/repair shop namely ps3specialist.