2008 MacBook Pro display flicker & freeze

[Chris6632]

Hello,

My early-2008 MBP just started this problem yesterday, the display will start to rapidly flicker and will freeze with whatever was on the screen at the time.

I recorded a short video of the flicker here: http://youtu.be/LyRongHmLxI

It does seem to be heat related, when it happened last night I tried rebooting many times but the screen would freeze on the grey screen with the spinning circle, although from the sound of the disk activity it seemed like it was still booting just the screen was hung.

This morning it booted up fine first try, and then after using it for a little while it once again started to flicker and froze, and would hang on reboot. After leaving it for awhile and trying again it booted fine, if I leave it idling it seems ok as well.

I will be taking it into an Apple store, but just wondering if anyone has seen these symptoms and if it could be the NVIDIA 8600M GT issue that some of these model's were known for (http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2377).

Cheers,
Chris

 

[InTheUnion]

I've been having this exact same problem recently and I've been thinking it's to do with the GPU fault. I've also had an issue (no idea if it's related) where everything freezes/hangs up, the screen goes blue, and it re-logs me in. Also been having more frequent graphical issues like scrambled video when doing things like opening new tabs in safari. I'm on my second logic board, with the first having died in january last year. The only thing is, when the first one went, I didn't seem to have any of the same symptoms (Virtually no problems until it decided not to display anything at all on the screen.)

I have a strong feeling that these problems are GPU-related, but I haven't made a genius appointment or anything because im not sure they're prominent enough for them to do anything about them (Or show up on the test they carry out). Please do let me know what they say to you.

EDIT: I have a late 2007 MBP.