Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

I am afraid Apple are not willing to offer an ideal economical repair at this moment, I would advise anyone who has not got such good consumer law as in the uk not to spend the high cost of their refurbished logic boards of which the quality are not what I expect of Apple but to instead seek out a local third party in your region to replace your AMD GPU graphics chip on your own logic board.  They will normally also use better and more importantly less thermal paste to help cool the CPU and GPU more efficiently as I firmly believe their over application of paste is causing the GPU to fail more often,  The cost of of replacing the GPU is normally far less than what apple charge, but keep your invoice for the repair for the future if and when Apple launch a repair program and you will be refunded.

In amongst this huge thread there are many links to reballing services in many countries, if you give the users here your location I am sure there will be a suitable one for you.

A lot of users experience the failures of the GPU during newer versions of OSX and point upgrades because the installer is a basic slimline version of OSX run off the recovery partition and doesn't have optimal control of the temperatures of the CPU and GPU during the install process until it's complete and booting off the installed Mac OS.

Its not just a problem that affects Mac OS but happens installing windows too on other notebooks, but installing bootcamp on a MacBook Pro it gets even hotter. I am not joking when I say I've used a small fan to cool the left hand speaker side of the MacBook Pro often since the unibody MacBook Pro came out in 2008!

My Macbook Pro Early 2011 started doing this the last few days.  I have since saved all important stuff like photos,videos to an external drive. 

What I have done. 

So far I have tried safe reboot - did not fix

I have re installed OS Mavericks - did not fix

Ever since Mavericks came out I seem to have had a ton of problems - camera stopped working on all apps

Online they say this is a graphics card problem which looks to be the case.  I use my Macbook pro for video editing and photo editing for work and this is extremely frustrating as every days it mess's up it cost me money.  Please fix this Mac, I love your products and this makes me sad. 

I'm latest member to this gang_of_the_forsaken! I tried removing kernel modules both ATI and AMD in every combination that makes sense. For my macbook moving AMD files worked but using the machine was a real pain with alaising and rendering effects visible (read HORRIBLE) but colors were stable and normal-like. Trying out the overheating method worked after which I forced integrated card use using gfxCardStatus but for a few tries and now colors are messed up again. I guess the integrated card has suffered some heat damage. Now I'm back to the old way of moving modules and quirky graphics.

Thanks for your answer Gav, although did not make make me happy. think your solution with only replacing the AMD would be the best for now. Hope i can find such a repairer not far from my home/company. Still afraid that if it works it will be for a short time. That's why i was thinking about the mini, new with longer guarantee and the cheapest 'reliable' solution for now.          

An update on my end. Today I called the only authorized Apple dealer in my country (Jamaica). Even here they are aware of the problem with the problem. Since my apple care has expired just a few weeks ago, this will be out of pocket for me...cost of the "temporary repair" replacing the board...178,000 (JA $) which is about $1,800 US. Lol, and an additional $100 for them to fix it. So...I would be paying almost as much as I did for the entire computer.

Today is the 4th time I've been able to turn on my computer since the issue occurred, it wouldn't boot for me at all yesterday. The end is very near.

I got excatly the same problem with my MacBook Pro late 2011. The screen freezes when the computer switches from Intel HD to AMD, under Mac OS X or Windows 7, since three months.

There are thousands and thousands who suffer like us.

Apple must face it and fix it.

I seem to have the same problem on my 2011 MBP.

Same problem here....

The same issue started happening to me with my late 2011 MBP a couple of days ago. On Apple's UK site it states that Apple are required to provide 6 years warranty here in England, UK http://www.apple.com/uk/legal/statutory-warranty/ under EU consumer laws. If they refuse to fix the defect I intend to highlight this to them, i'll post an update on what the outcome is.

Is there any hard data regarding how many computers are affected? [maybe arrived at some significant volume of Mac affected will Apple start reacting] (I own both an early 2011 15" Macbook Pro and late 2011 15" Macbook Pro so I am getting a bit worried, even though both seem to work alright at the moment). Is there precautionary measures to take / which worked for some of you?

Are those of you affected use GPU intensive programs, or does it affect also more casual users?

I'm been largely a passive observer of this thread. I tend to be very pessimistic about customer movements like this and the responsiveness of big, heartless corporations like Apple. If we really look at it, only 13000 people signed that petition which is probably a tiny fraction of the amount of consumers that actually bought the 2011 model. In the end, a computer that costs such a premium should not last less than 3 years, let alone 4 years. I am typing this on my reliable 8-year old PC laptop, which i overheated hundreds of times. I take good care of my electronics and the only thing to have ever broken on me simply over time are my only two Apple products, the iPod touch (1st generation) and this MBP.

My 2011 Macbook Pro (15-inch) crapped out back in January. All I do is schoolwork, nothing too graphics intensive--some word processing and a few PDFs, youtube videos open in the background. Suddenly my computer gets these horizontal lines of death...I am able to reboot the computer, but whenever the graphics switches to dedicated the horizontal lines of death come on to distort my screen. I took them to the Apple genius bar outside of warranty who denied the validity of this thread at the time, offered to repair my Logic Board for some flat fee. They returned my computer a week later after I waited for hours at the store, then I came home to turn on my computer and the computer broke again within minutes. I took it back to the store and complained some more to the heartless/clueless "Genius" and they sent it back out to be fixed for the 2nd time.

Fast-forward until today, I'm reaching a critical point in my career, sending some applications out for the next step and this time I get the white screen of death. There is obviously some defective heating design going on here, it's unacceptable. Moreover, I backed all my stuff up to Time Machine, which probably means I have to get another Apple computer to restore my backup too. This is pretty much a fiasco of the highest order. I will bring my computer to the bar and they'll probably offer to replace my Logic Board for a price, if they don't do it for free, then I need them to recover my files. Luckily, I backed up some important ones through email. Long story short, the Logic Board is temporary fix...there must be some defective problem with the heat dissipation design.

Yes, please make sure that your machine doesn't heat up too much. For example, when the battery conks off suddenly that is a sign of things starting to go wrong. If I were you I would sell these machines off while they are still working,

A bit awhile somebody was saying that after removing AMD and ATI drivers Finder is unstable.

If Finder window has enabled Cower Flow view option it will immediately close the window after opening Finder.

Solution is to pres cmd+1 or cmd+2 or cmd+3 immediately after opening Finder.

Hope this helps somebody.

And another thing...

Maybe this is not linked with Yosemite, but for sure in Mavericks, when you search your Mac in Finder and specially in Cower Flow, even when the entire search is done, the computer heats up extremely due to intensive CPU work. It will heat up above 80°C just for searching the files. So if you search some files, be sure to close the Finder after your search is done.

Mybe this will help answer your question