Early/Late-2011 15" and 17" MBP (Sandy Bridge) GPU failures

[Swampus]

Fyi...

This was just posted on the Apple forums:

vicmacs
Re: 2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card
Dec 8, 2013 1:05 PM (in response to abelliveau)

Hello

Apple is investigating this in a serious manner, as an Authorized repair technician I have been told to gather all info about all cases of AMD graphincs issues of Early and Late 2011 15" MBP systems and we are reporting directly to Engineering for data collection. We are a medium sized repair center and have seen around 40 of these cases from as far as a year or so back, 1-3 cases trickling in every week.

Will keep you posted. This can take a while. :/

Word of advice, do not have your systems modified by third parties as this will void your possible extended warranty coverage.

Regards

To be clear, this is not any kind of official statement from Apple. It's just a forum post by a registered user.

 

[Gav Mack]

This was just posted on the Apple forums:



To be clear, this is not any kind of official statement from Apple. It's just a forum post by a registered user.

Seems like the re-ball is rolling..

 

[Trebuin]

There have been some discussions about thermal paste here and I thought I'd give an update. I've vote the 2.5 15" late 2011 mbp and just reapplied the thermal past...I was deployed for a year and turns out it really needed to get replaced from my initial application. Anyhow, the temp on mine dropped around 10C under full load.

I have found that temps seem to not relate compared to other peoples work, for instance, running my cpu under full load using handbrake gave me about 86C max where it was 96-98C. What I didn't catch the first round was the CPU speed. I'm assuming that mine was operating at 2.5 at the time. When I checked it after the application, I noticed that the temp peaked to 90ish and then dropped back down to 80. I ran intel power gadget and saw that it initially started at 3.6, then dropped down to 3.2 and stayed there at gradually increased to 86C. Running geek bench did not help much, I could see it drop and that affects my overall benchmark with others.

So, if I had initially messed up the application, it would have dropped to 2.4 and stayed there at 96 for me. If I did it well, it could have been 96 at 3.6...though I doubt that.

I recommend using intel power gadget to get your CPU speed while loaded. I haven't checked my GPU yet, but will post that soon. No issues with it as of now, even in 130F room temp (deployment).

 

[yjchua95]

Update on this old thread:

Mine gave up the ghost around early March 2014, 3 days after my AppleCare expired.

As I was based in Malaysia at that time (it was also purchased as a BTO off the Malaysian Apple online store), I could only send it in for repair at an AASP (Apple Stores don't exist in that country), where I was given the option of a USD700 repair.

Consumer protection laws don't exist much in the country either.

Right now, I'm still looking around for a place that does a GPU reball/reflow as the AASP blokes said that customers who opted for a logic board replacement suffered from Radeongate within two weeks. Apparently, all the Sandy Bridge logic boards had that same manufacturing flaw, so the only real solution is a reflow and/or a reball.

For the moment, I'll have to stick back to my 15" retina (which I don't really like because the screen attracts glare like a solar panel outdoors).