Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

My Macbook Pro 15" is also freezing and the screen is full of verticle or horizontal lines, often reboots automatically and I get the grey screen with text. It is a nightmare and seems to be a major problem with MacBook Pros of this year. I have the top of the line with 2.5 GHz i7, 16GB RAM, intel and separate AMD Radeon HD 6770M card. This is a real bummer and I want to know if Apple is doing the right thing and correcting this problem for people at no charge?? I've owned over 10 macbook pros and never had this type of problem. The machine is too new to be breaking down like this. If anyone knows of a solution or how to get Apple to respond to the community with a solution, please chime in! Thanks.

There are a lot of people here who say they got their 2011 MBP repaired and then had the same problem happen within a few weeks or months.  Did you guys get it repaired by Apple or a different repair shop?  If you got it repaired by Apple then of course it will fail again - they don't know how to fix the problem.  But if you got the GPU replaced/reballed by someone else and then it still failed, that would worry me.  I'm thinking about getting my GPU replaced/reballed by a third-party repair shop, so hopefully it won't fail again after that.

Thankfully it was fully covered under AppleCare.. Still doesn't make up for the fact that I've got a useless computer right now though. We'll see what they have to say tonight.

I Have this issue with My Late 2011 MPB 15inch, It is Covered by AppleCare Warranty, they replaced the Logic Board twice, Yes twice last week. as first replacement was faulty before even leaving the store. I got it Back

Thursday Night  with 3rd logicboard & it only lasted 4 days before having the same issue again!!!

Have just been into Apple & the have agreed to replace for a New MBP. but they say a like for like replacement with option for Me to pay for a upgrade. & a 1-2 week wait. Im waiting for a call from Apple now.

Same problem here, 2011 / 6750M.

Repaired the 18th of may, new logic board, seemed fine, started acting up again last wednesday. That's 10 days.

Macbook Pro has always been running very hot. It seems the general overheating of the computer might exacerbate the problem.

It's under Applecare, let's see what the response will be (surely they will just repeat the same procedure).

OS X 10.10 DP1 like fixed this problem ?

I had my early 2011 17" MacBook Pro repaired on May 3rd (499 euros) and last sunday I experienced the Graphic Card failure again. I'm starting to not trust my Mac anymore...

I have the same problem, is a Macbook pro late 2011 with an AMD Radeon 6750M and it doesnt let me work at all, when Apple are going to give us a solution?

Same thing with my Late-2011 MBP 17" --- a $3K maxxed out machine that only had two years of useful life?  I have to reboot it 20 times a day and hope it goes to the Intel, then run gfxCardStatus and try to keep the Intel graphics "forced" on -- but Apple seems to try and reset to the (broken) AMD Radeon anyway.

****... same problem here in brazil... 3year using  this machine... i was quite glad with it...

this last week this glitches started happening... restarting done the job for a while... but yesterday, I plugged my tv on thunderbolt port and my mbp can't initialize anymore...

My replacement logic board is going out 6 months after Apple replaced it. I'm working with a very nice corp relations person and pretty cool genius dude. But it's in a sporadically failing state right now - it will die randomly during use and then on reboot, I'll have the "blue lines through the apple logo" followed by a crash at a grey screen. I do get a few interesteing variations from time to time. But then I'll make 20+ attempts to get it back up and it'll be rock solid for days. I've gone to the genius twice and they've run hours of stress tests to make it fail - and so have I at home - but it never done. Then a few days later the cycle repeats. This has happened twice - and it failed again last night. But this time it seems a little more "dead" then usual.

And it's not any kind of stress that's killed it - disk activity - Dropbox indexing or external USB file operations that send the processor activity / temp skyrocketing for no reason and then Finder locks. The problems start on reboot - to my knowledge the GPU wasn't engaged at all at the point of crash.

The last time it died I tried stressing multiple systems at the same time and it worked for the 3 hours I let it run: memtest, prime95, blackmagic disk test and Heaven benchmark demo. All of that at the same time and no issues.

Sounds silly, but I'm trying to get it to a 100% dead state before I go back so I don't waste anymore time with it passing all tests.

I'm not sure what the solution will be when it does fail for them - but I've had super customer support with this so far.

@ mcdawang:

don't do that, you would regret it a lot!

1/ this issue is a hardware issue, not a software one. Again, reballing is the best way to fix it.

2/ 10.10 is not stable, if you want to crush your mac once and for all, it could be a Great idea. Otherwise, well, reballing is the best way to fix it.

for Apple : I searched for this topic in the label search, and I couldn't find it. How weird, don't you want people to know about this ?

10.10 won't be able to address this since it's a hardware issue. Mine started breaking on 10.8.5 and was hoping that 10.9 would fix it. No dice.

I got a downgrade in storage space, 256GB from 500GB, but it's a SSD which is making my work much faster and I have no problems transferring my files over to an EHD to archive them, so I'm not too bothered by the loss. 8GB of RAM, up from 4GB, same 2GHz Intel core i7 processor. I wouldn't say it's the best upgrade in the world since I am losing so much space and the optical drive, but I'm willing to put up with it, speed of system and portability is a fair trade-off in my opinion.

Also @benedictros - I only had to pay $300 once, since they were never able to repair my system, the logic board they put in gave me the exact same problems I was having and I was coming back every other day to either drop off or pick up the computer, I never went outside of the 90-day warranty. Frankly, a $2000 computer for $300 is okay for me, even if it is just transitional until I switch back to PC products - that all depends on what happens in Apple's systems and customer service between now and whenever I decide to buy another system.

An update on my machine.. After they replaced the logicboard, hard drive, and RAM the first time, my computer worked for about an hour before it started having the same problem. Took it right back to the Apple Store and they claimed that since those repairs weren't all done at the same time (apparently they replaced the logic board, then ran tests and decided the hard drive needed replaced, and then did the same with RAM) that that could have been a reason why it isn't working right.

So this time they are sending it out to their repair depot to have the logic board, hard drive, and RAM replaced, again, but this time all at the same time. I guess we'll see what happens..