Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

Found a dutch company doing reballing.

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History - Logic board replaced in 10/13 for this issue. Working fine until last week.

After talking with Apple corp and setting up a Genius appt for the issue - the darned thing fixed it self! I removed my upgrades (ssd, 16gb ram, opti-bay drive) and put it back to stock and it was still broken. Apple corp wanted the serial number - so I tried for 30+ minutes to get this thing up. Finally after a bunch of unusual screen flashing I was able to get it up and get the serial #. Aaaand the system appeared to be stable. I tried to crash it - and it did die a few times when I plugged in an external display but after that - it's completely solid. I can't kill it. The genius ran it through 24 hours of GPU stressing and couldn't reproduce it either.

Brought it home, put all of my junk back in (except for the optibay drive because it's a PITA) - and found one of my RAM chips was bad. Guess it has been going bad or I zapped it. But it's still running solid. External monitors and heavy Photoshop use off and on all day yesterday and no issues.

In October, it had fixed it self for 4 days before going bad again. I'm wary that I'm in for that again. But I'm also wondering if the bad ram could have contributed?

Anyway, Apple has been a pleasure to deal with for me - Corporate and Genius bar. I'm in Charlotte, NC and the store I went to was Northlake Mall. I haven't spoken to corporate since the genius bar, but I'd like to discuss next steps in case this happens again.

YMMV

I'm not reballing mine because I refuse to accept that a company can sell me a $3.000 computer that lasts 3 years. It's outrageous.

We all know that Apple's years of quality and design are long over and that there major concern now is shareholders not consumers. But there silence on this is borderline scam.

i can't afford to wait until Apple turns over, it's a production macbook....

it's going on for almost 2 years...

reballing is by the way about 155 eur, incl VAT

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Scam is right. Especially if you read the reports online showing that Apple knew about these problems before the release of the machine, and didn't do anything to fix it (apart from delaying release a little bit... Probably just to make sure the thing lasts longer than 1 year so they are clear of Apple care).

I've never been so disgusted with a company that I buy products from... Correction: used to buy products from.

oh my this looks cool...

Mine is also for professional use. I understand your need to do it and I'm not saying you shouldn't. But reballing is getting them off the hook on a problem that they have to face and it's hard for me to accept that.

That's it. Since first GPU glitch 3 days ago, my computer is finally a BRICK. I'm not able to boot anymore.

gfxCardStatus only helped for a few days. Resistance to the Radeongate is futile.

Well done Apple. After selling us expensive time bomb bricks as high end laptops, you don't acknowledge your faulty hardware and even delete posts of your users in pain. Well done Apple.

Ugh.. It looks like my dedicated graphics card is also spiralling the drain

I have an early 2011 MB Pro with AMD Radeon HD 6490M. I'm using gfxCardStatus to use integrated only, it's the only way I can keep my laptop from crashing into either a blue screen with vertical dark lines, a white screen with vertical black lines or an irrecoverable and total freeze. My laptop has been abnormally warm for the past month or two as well. All day yesterday I couldn't boot at all (got stuck at blue screen and spinning fans of death), but for the moment it's booting up most of the time. I'm afraid that it's only a matter of time before I can't boot it at all, and then I'm screwed (I use my laptop for graphic design work..).

Something worth noting, I have 3rd party (crucial) 16 gb of RAM and a crucial SSD... Not sure if that's contributing to the problem... Regardless, shouldn't be having these issues. I'm a former lifelong apple fan. It speaks volumes that apple is not willing to address this widespread problem!

From my experience, upgrading the GPU chip is not possible, the layout of the chips could be the same and it still won't work, I tried that before with a HP motherboard and it did not work, once I put the original one back it works fine so it is not just the layout.

@ps3specialist

do you some one in france for reabaling my macbook! because now even by using gfxcardstatus! while i am changing the GPU card! it crash!

Adding one more example of the same problems in a Late 2011 MacBookPro I7. Blue screen..split screen (1/2

a screen on each side of the laptop monitor) and white screen crashes when plugging in the thunderbolt cable to my 30" monitor. Seeing as there has been no resolution in this forum I am posting just to add the weight of another bad Mac experiance.....I hope it matters.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/21/is-your-new-macbook-pro-freezing-up-youre-not-the-only-one/

I really don't know any reballer in France, all I can tell you if you want to send me your logic board only and I will fix it and test it for you on one of my computers, that should lower the shipping cost for you both ways and make the repair cost reasonable enough.

I took my laptop to genious bar and they charge me flat rate rate $310 for fixing logic board and also graphic card. Is the cost too much or reasonable?