Q: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card

Add my 15-inch, Late 2011 MBP to the list. I printed out a few of the many webpages dedicated to this problem to show the tech when I brought my MBP to the Genius Bar. I didn't have any resistance in being offered the $350 mail-in flat rate repair. Turn around time was pretty quick: shipped out Friday AM and got it back Tuesday AM.

They replaced my logic board and it's been running fine. They also swapped out my non-OEM RAM for some reason... I subsequently put my RAM back in since it passed the extended memtest. They replaced my trackpad as well, though that had been working fine as well. I'm almost wondering if they just swapped the HD and gave me an entirely different MBP.

Anyway, pretty disappointing to take a hit to my productivity and my wallet when I already shelled out $2K for the laptop to begin with. Hopefully Apple will make some sort of reconciliation for this, e.g. a reimbursement or gift card.

Can add another one to the list.  Upgraded to Yosemite for the public beta and it started happening.  I thought it was just the beta and thought nothing of it.  Download Yosemite yesterday after it was release and had my screen go crazy.  Had to restart to get it to go back.  Have had this happen three times since updating.  So I came here to see if I could find a solution and instead found this thread.

Is that because gfxCardStatus cannot run under Yosemite and force to integrated only?

lkodk

gfxCardStatus works just fine under Yosemite - it's just not a fix flor the sloppy solder, thermal paste, etc.

Clinton

MacBook Pro (15” Late 2011), OS X Yosemite 10.10, 16GB Crucial RAM, 960GB M500 Crucial SSD, 27” Apple Thunderbolt Display

Same thing with my early 2011 macbook pro 13". The issue only started appearing after getting the OSX Yosemite Beta and has been like this since then. Hopefully apple will do something about it!

Absolutly not. You are right about that.
But as long as I can keep my MBP on integrated only also under Yosemite, this will have to do, until, hopefully, something happens from Apple.

yesterday I wanted to post my feeling about the yosemite public release, thinking we would see many new comers to this thread in the coming days and therefore warn people not to make the jump with a 15" or 17" 2011 mbp then I changed my mind.

there's already a few experiencing cpu-gpu artifacts after upgrading today so if you still running mavericks, don't upgrade, it can only make matter worse and if you're not affected yet, it will only accelerate the inevitable...

even downloading the beta installer a few months ago made my computer freeze when auto opening the installer after downloading it via app store.

My 2011 Mac Book Pro 17' started to show the gray screen from yesterday!... Apparently it is a graphic card issue because the system cannot boot in iOS as well as Windows. In Windows after showing windows 8 logo it displays a weird distorted screen  with mixture of colors. In iOS it starts to boot and shows the apple logo working after 40 seconds it shows white screen of death.

I tried to boot with Linux Mint live CD to recover my data and it shows the same distorted screen. The only way I could recover my data was using Hirens boot CD and choosing a special menu item to fix black/white screen issue!

I cannot install new OS because of this graphic card issue and my book could no longer work and is completely useless now!!

** I haven't upgraded to Yosemit, and the problem appeared on its own!

Translation:

Life is hard, but when you're stupid it gets harder . . . .

you don't have to upgrade to yosemite to experience the failure, you can still be running snow leo and get it, it is more a question of how much you stressed your cpu-gpu since day one.

yosemite will be more ressource angry than mavericks which was the same upgrading from snow leo and so on.

linux can help you only if you install the system and disable the discrete through grub loader or rEFind config file, then you will be able to boot without trouble and run your system without glitches or anything.

Interesting, I didn't know that it is possible to disable the discrete graphic card completely, because I searched a lot to disable it in windows but couldn't find  a workaround.

Can we do the same thing with OS X in a way (so we could use the mac temporarily again)?

unfortunately we can't because we don't such an access in mac OS, really wish we would for obvious reasons.

while gfxcardstatus can emulate such a control, there is no way we can disable it on boot so it's an inevitable struggle we have to face.

don't know about windows but since many people here are dual booting with a window system, somebody probably would have say something about it already.

hey all, i swung by the apple store to pick up my repaired 2011 mbp. the first time they fixed it, they only replaced the logic board. this time, having done some research, I told them the issue was that the computer overheated and destroyed itself. they replaced the logic board again but also the heat sink. i'm out of town for the weekend but i plan to run this thing hard when i get back and see how this plays out.

jmvana wrote:

 

hey all, i swung by the apple store to pick up my repaired 2011 mbp. the first time they fixed it, they only replaced the logic board. this time, having done some research, I told them the issue was that the computer overheated and destroyed itself. they replaced the logic board again but also the heat sink. i'm out of town for the weekend but i plan to run this thing hard when i get back and see how this plays out.

what do you mean by this time also the heat sink?

they usually just swap logic boards and does not provide such a job on specific parts, did they explicitly said they did?

Did Ps3specialist resolve this for you?