Resolved (Mis)adventures with a MacBookPro4,1 [A1261] and a faulty… G84-603-A2

[B S Magnet]

(This was supposed to be a thread for sharing some good news. That good news will probably have to wait a while longer.)

Spoiler: Story time!

Back in 2019, I acquired a 17" A1261 T9300/2.5GHz with hi-res glossy LED LCD in a local trade. I knew it had the faulty OEM GeForce 8600M GT G84-602-A2 chip, and the plan at the time was to set aside that project until I could afford to have the GPU replaced with a G84-603-A2.

Last month, I found a source on eBay which was selling a refurbished logic board. (Their rating is 100%, with feedback in the four figures, and they’ve been around for, well, a few decades. And the product comes with a 30-day warranty. So on that front, I’m not too worried.).

What caught my attention was it was the T9500/2.6GHz variant of the early 2008 boards. I figured what I could do is get one of these boards at a reasonable price and set aside my OEM board until I can procure a T9900 CPU and a fresh G84-603-A2 (and then have both swapped in at the same time by someone who knows their stuff, such as @dosdude1), whilst getting some use out of the remarkably clean A1261 in the meanwhile.

Fast-forward to today.

Although tracking hadn’t been updated, the board arrived and was packaged extremely well. Hurrah! Per the listing photo, the RAM bridge has the green dot and the GPU is the G84-603-A2. But the manufacture date on the GPU is much earlier than I was expecting — really early, as in early-2008 stock.

Next, I pulled out my OEM board, broke out the Noctua paste, and I went to work on swapping boards.

After reassembly, I put in an old testing HDD (running Snow Leopard 10.6.8, an OEM donor from my long-gone 2009 13" MBP). Then I crossed my fingers.

Compared with the OEM board, which has never POSTed, this board chimed as soon as I connected it to the MagSafe. Promising! The screen lit up (also yay!) and a non-verbose boot took about 90 seconds.

Then the screen… went dark.

Huh.

I put the screen underneath a lamp to check if the login window was there (it was). I logged in, but there was still no backlight. I used the lamp light to open the Displays prefPane (which showed max brightness), set the date to today, connected it to wifi, and opened terminal to set nvram to verbose boot. Then I rebooted.

This time, with verbose boot, the backlight stayed on, even with the login window!

I logged in and reached Finder, and it looked as it did when I last used that HDD in 2011. (I migrated to an SSD back then.) Next, I promptly checked to see whether the fans were running in iStat (they were, both around 2200+rpm). Then, I launched a Software Update check. There were a few items which required reboot, so I began to run it.

During the installation of items, the screen began to show weird artifacts and rapid degradation to the point where when moving the cursor, it would only intermittently show that I had moved it. Something was wrong.

Without past experience of seeing a GPU fail, this looked to possibly be just that. The time between powering on and when this appeared was maybe 10 or 15 minutes.

Maybe 30 seconds after the display started to get weird with the artifacts, I force-powered it off with a long power button hold. (Software Update could wait.) The temps on the top case and beneath were typical, “just-run” warm, but otherwise fine (the last temp I read on the CPU before leaving Finder and entering Software Update was a moderate, but average 55°C, while the GPU temp was I think a couple of degrees above that). Again, nothing unusual.

So I let the MacBook Pro rest for a few minutes. Then I powered it on a third time.

Verbose boot completed as usual, but when windowserver started, the display went bright grey, not blue, and it flickered several times, followed by some strange, garbled pixels within the top-left 5-by-5 of the screen. I hard-powered it down again.

Next, being ultra-cautious, I placed a cold pack, fresh from the freezer, underneath the heatsink area, waited until the top case felt cold to the touch, then tried a Safe Boot. As expected, there was no verbose boot, and the grey Apple and spinning clock took its time to finish before the screen showed up as blue. But within maybe 5 or 10 seconds of the blue screen, what appeared to be the cursor pointer in the usual top-left area was vaguely visible under what looked like scan lines. I could not move it. The login window did not appear. Then the system powered off on its own.

Shy of having the 3T108 Graphics Processor Test diagnostic handy (I don’t), I think it’s a good bet this has a faulty GPU despite it being the 603 revision. Are the 603 GPUs known to fail?

Anyhow, if you’ve read this far, I’m thinking this board will have to come right back out and be returned to the seller. I hope I can share much better news sooner than later. I was really looking forward to finally showing a photo of the A1261 and my A1139, running side by side, to post to the Club 17 thread, but I think that moment is going to have to wait.

Pic 1 is the new board (top) over the OEM board (bottom)
Pic 2 is the new board’s GPU (showing the early manufacture date)
Pic 3 is the old board’s GPU (after wiping away the old thermal paste)

 

[dosdude1]

(This was supposed to be a thread for sharing some good news. That good news will probably have to wait a while longer.)

Spoiler: Story time!

Back in 2019, I acquired a 17" A1261 T9300/2.5GHz with hi-res glossy LED LCD in a local trade. I knew it had the faulty OEM GeForce 8600M GT G84-602-A2 chip, and the plan at the time was to set aside that project until I could afford to have the GPU replaced with a G84-603-A2.

Last month, I found a source on eBay which was selling a refurbished logic board. (Their rating is 100%, with feedback in the four figures, and they’ve been around for, well, a few decades. And the product comes with a 30-day warranty. So on that front, I’m not too worried.).

What caught my attention was it was the T9500/2.6GHz variant of the early 2008 boards. I figured what I could do is get one of these boards at a reasonable price and set aside my OEM board until I can procure a T9900 CPU and a fresh G84-603-A2 (and then have both swapped in at the same time by someone who knows their stuff, such as @dosdude1), whilst getting some use out of the remarkably clean A1261 in the meanwhile.

Fast-forward to today.

Although tracking hadn’t been updated, the board arrived and was packaged extremely well. Hurrah! Per the listing photo, the RAM bridge has the green dot and the GPU is the G84-603-A2. But the manufacture date on the GPU is much earlier than I was expecting — really early, as in early-2008 stock.

Next, I pulled out my OEM board, broke out the Noctua paste, and I went to work on swapping boards.

After reassembly, I put in an old testing HDD (running Snow Leopard 10.6.8, an OEM donor from my long-gone 2009 13" MBP). Then I crossed my fingers.

Compared with the OEM board, which has never POSTed, this board chimed as soon as I connected it to the MagSafe. Promising! The screen lit up (also yay!) and a non-verbose boot took about 90 seconds.

Then the screen… went dark.

Huh.

I put the screen underneath a lamp to check if the login window was there (it was). I logged in, but there was still no backlight. I used the lamp light to open the Displays prefPane (which showed max brightness), set the date to today, connected it to wifi, and opened terminal to set nvram to verbose boot. Then I rebooted.

This time, with verbose boot, the backlight stayed on, even with the login window!

I logged in and reached Finder, and it looked as it did when I last used that HDD in 2011. (I migrated to an SSD back then.) Next, I promptly checked to see whether the fans were running in iStat (they were, both around 2200+rpm). Then, I launched a Software Update check. There were a few items which required reboot, so I began to run it.

During the installation of items, the screen began to show weird artifacts and rapid degradation to the point where when moving the cursor, it would only intermittently show that I had moved it. Something was wrong.

Without past experience of seeing a GPU fail, this looked to possibly be just that. The time between powering on and when this appeared was maybe 10 or 15 minutes.

Maybe 30 seconds after the display started to get weird with the artifacts, I force-powered it off with a long power button hold. (Software Update could wait.) The temps on the top case and beneath were typical, “just-run” warm, but otherwise fine (the last temp I read on the CPU before leaving Finder and entering Software Update was a moderate, but average 55°C, while the GPU temp was I think a couple of degrees above that). Again, nothing unusual.

So I let the MacBook Pro rest for a few minutes. Then I powered it on a third time.

Verbose boot completed as usual, but when windowserver started, the display went bright grey, not blue, and it flickered several times, followed by some strange, garbled pixels within the top-left 5-by-5 of the screen. I hard-powered it down again.

Next, being ultra-cautious, I placed a cold pack, fresh from the freezer, underneath the heatsink area, waited until the top case felt cold to the touch, then tried a Safe Boot. As expected, there was no verbose boot, and the grey Apple and spinning clock took its time to finish before the screen showed up as blue. But within maybe 5 or 10 seconds of the blue screen, what appeared to be the cursor pointer in the usual top-left area was vaguely visible under what looked like scan lines. I could not move it. The login window did not appear. Then the system powered off on its own.

Shy of having the 3T108 Graphics Processor Test diagnostic handy (I don’t), I think it’s a good bet this has a faulty GPU despite it being the 603 revision. Are the 603 GPUs known to fail?

Anyhow, if you’ve read this far, I’m thinking this board will have to come right back out and be returned to the seller. I hope I can share much better news sooner than later. I was really looking forward to finally showing a photo of the A1261 and my A1139, running side by side, to post to the Club 17 thread, but I think that moment is going to have to wait.

Pic 1 is the new board (top) over the OEM board (bottom)
Pic 2 is the new board’s GPU (showing the early manufacture date)
Pic 3 is the old board’s GPU (after wiping away the old thermal paste)

That would definitely be a first for me... I have never seen a G84-603-A2 fail. I have one machine with one of these very early 603s, and it works just as well as the brand new ones I install do. May have just gotten really unlucky with that one.

As for your CPU upgrade, the T9900 is not compatible with that board, as it has an 800 MHz FSB (the T9900 needs a machine with a 1066 MHz FSB). The best CPU you can install into the A1260/A1261 (or any machine with the Intel 965 chipset) is the 2.6 GHz T9500, which really isn't worth doing if you have a T9300.

 

[Amethyst1]

The best CPU you can install into the A1260/A1261 (or any machine with the Intel 965 chipset) is the 2.6 GHz T9500,

What about the 2.8 GHz X7900? Wouldn't make sense for the 2008 MBP but for a 2.2 GHz 2007...

 

[B S Magnet]

That would definitely be a first for me... I have never seen a G84-603-A2 fail. I have one machine with one of these very early 603s, and it works just as well as the brand new ones I install do. May have just gotten really unlucky with that one.

As for your CPU upgrade, the T9900 is not compatible with that board, as it has an 800 MHz FSB (the T9900 needs a machine with a 1066 MHz FSB). The best CPU you can install into the A1260/A1261 (or any machine with the Intel 965 chipset) is the 2.6 GHz T9500, which really isn't worth doing if you have a T9300.

You know, when I had the Intel page open which lists all the C2D-series chips in that table, I should have noticed this FSB discrepancy. Somehow, I either missed it or completely forgot.

As for this board which appears to have failed almost immediately, I’m left to wonder how rigorous the post-repair testing regime was. (I’m under the impression Apple or an Apple-authorized repair centre did the GPU-swap, given the green-dot sticker.) My guess is it was probably a quick test to see whether the board POSTed and reached Finder — in all, less than five minutes of active use.

 

[B S Magnet]

(This was supposed to be a thread for sharing some good news. That good news will probably have to wait a while longer.)

Spoiler: Story time!

Back in 2019, I acquired a 17" A1261 T9300/2.5GHz with hi-res glossy LED LCD in a local trade. I knew it had the faulty OEM GeForce 8600M GT G84-602-A2 chip, and the plan at the time was to set aside that project until I could afford to have the GPU replaced with a G84-603-A2.

Last month, I found a source on eBay which was selling a refurbished logic board. (Their rating is 100%, with feedback in the four figures, and they’ve been around for, well, a few decades. And the product comes with a 30-day warranty. So on that front, I’m not too worried.).

What caught my attention was it was the T9500/2.6GHz variant of the early 2008 boards. I figured what I could do is get one of these boards at a reasonable price and set aside my OEM board until I can procure a T9900 CPU and a fresh G84-603-A2 (and then have both swapped in at the same time by someone who knows their stuff, such as @dosdude1), whilst getting some use out of the remarkably clean A1261 in the meanwhile.

Fast-forward to today.

Although tracking hadn’t been updated, the board arrived and was packaged extremely well. Hurrah! Per the listing photo, the RAM bridge has the green dot and the GPU is the G84-603-A2. But the manufacture date on the GPU is much earlier than I was expecting — really early, as in early-2008 stock.

Next, I pulled out my OEM board, broke out the Noctua paste, and I went to work on swapping boards.

After reassembly, I put in an old testing HDD (running Snow Leopard 10.6.8, an OEM donor from my long-gone 2009 13" MBP). Then I crossed my fingers.

Compared with the OEM board, which has never POSTed, this board chimed as soon as I connected it to the MagSafe. Promising! The screen lit up (also yay!) and a non-verbose boot took about 90 seconds.

Then the screen… went dark.

Huh.

I put the screen underneath a lamp to check if the login window was there (it was). I logged in, but there was still no backlight. I used the lamp light to open the Displays prefPane (which showed max brightness), set the date to today, connected it to wifi, and opened terminal to set nvram to verbose boot. Then I rebooted.

This time, with verbose boot, the backlight stayed on, even with the login window!

I logged in and reached Finder, and it looked as it did when I last used that HDD in 2011. (I migrated to an SSD back then.) Next, I promptly checked to see whether the fans were running in iStat (they were, both around 2200+rpm). Then, I launched a Software Update check. There were a few items which required reboot, so I began to run it.

During the installation of items, the screen began to show weird artifacts and rapid degradation to the point where when moving the cursor, it would only intermittently show that I had moved it. Something was wrong.

Without past experience of seeing a GPU fail, this looked to possibly be just that. The time between powering on and when this appeared was maybe 10 or 15 minutes.

Maybe 30 seconds after the display started to get weird with the artifacts, I force-powered it off with a long power button hold. (Software Update could wait.) The temps on the top case and beneath were typical, “just-run” warm, but otherwise fine (the last temp I read on the CPU before leaving Finder and entering Software Update was a moderate, but average 55°C, while the GPU temp was I think a couple of degrees above that). Again, nothing unusual.

So I let the MacBook Pro rest for a few minutes. Then I powered it on a third time.

Verbose boot completed as usual, but when windowserver started, the display went bright grey, not blue, and it flickered several times, followed by some strange, garbled pixels within the top-left 5-by-5 of the screen. I hard-powered it down again.

Next, being ultra-cautious, I placed a cold pack, fresh from the freezer, underneath the heatsink area, waited until the top case felt cold to the touch, then tried a Safe Boot. As expected, there was no verbose boot, and the grey Apple and spinning clock took its time to finish before the screen showed up as blue. But within maybe 5 or 10 seconds of the blue screen, what appeared to be the cursor pointer in the usual top-left area was vaguely visible under what looked like scan lines. I could not move it. The login window did not appear. Then the system powered off on its own.

Shy of having the 3T108 Graphics Processor Test diagnostic handy (I don’t), I think it’s a good bet this has a faulty GPU despite it being the 603 revision. Are the 603 GPUs known to fail?

Anyhow, if you’ve read this far, I’m thinking this board will have to come right back out and be returned to the seller. I hope I can share much better news sooner than later. I was really looking forward to finally showing a photo of the A1261 and my A1139, running side by side, to post to the Club 17 thread, but I think that moment is going to have to wait.

Pic 1 is the new board (top) over the OEM board (bottom)
Pic 2 is the new board’s GPU (showing the early manufacture date)
Pic 3 is the old board’s GPU (after wiping away the old thermal paste)

UPDATE!

Spoiler: replacement board #2 arrived

After a handful of messaging rounds volleyed back and forth with the seller overseas and sharing video clips (of the booting up) and the HDD’s crash logs of the GPU’s failure, I managed to get them to honour their warranty (system failure occurred when the NVDA50Hal kext/bundle group was invoked when WindowServer/SystemUIServer was called by the kernel). I volunteered to send back the faulty-GPU logic board. They replied to not bother with that step. Which, well, I guess makes sense (they wouldn’t be able to re-sell it), but I wanted to be as clear about this as I could and would have liked to have had them test it on their own and verify the fault, just so we were truly on the same page. (And also, something-something-something about the cPTSD of surviving an abusive caregiver long ago who‘d call me a “liar” as it suited their whims, and they had maaaany whims…)

The new board arrived today. (A separate order I’ve been waiting on for aeons, an m.2-to-2.5" SATA adapter, is still somewhere out there in postal transit-land). This evening, I inspected and put it in with the usual Noctua NT-H2.

Unlike the previous board, two things were different from the previous board they sent: first, the new board had a previous owner who installed rEFIt (which I used to use a really long time ago, with my first MacBook Pro 15, before it was stolen in ’09); and second, this board, after finishing boot and handing over to SystemUIServer and WindowServer, didn’t shut off the backlight. (Actually, there was a third difference: with the first board, when I launched Software Update, one of the update options, which it never reached before the board dithered out and failed, was a firmware update for 2007–2008 MacBook Pros, but related to graphics. This time, with the replacement board, the only firmware update to appear was related to the SMC, and it ran fine.)

With everything powered on the first time, I noticed the GPU thermal sensor (the small twisted cable which emerges from the top of the board) was showing “-” in iStat Menus. So I powered down, took out the board, and noticed the cable had gotten pinched somewhere along the way. I fixed those with kapton tape, double-checked the cable routing for everything, and then re-assembled. This time, the sensor returned, and readings for the three heat sinks and the GPU thermal sensor all showed a range between 39° and 44°. The GPU diode showed about 56°. I didn’t leave it up and running for long, but those values looked good, and both fans were spinning fine.

Pictures (and maybe even a time-lapse clip) will follow once that SATA adapter arrives and I can find a new battery at a decent price (I currently don’t have one for it).

UPDATE of UPDATE:

The time-lapse video:

 

[B S Magnet]

To those of you with a GeForce 8600M GT or other GPU from that same family:

What target idle temperatures do you look for on this GPU, when nestled inside a tight case like a MBP or Mac mini?

Given my (obvious) cautiousness with this GPU, I’ve set Macs Fan Control to run higher than automatically, which is keeping the GPU Diode sensor idling at around 60–64°C and the GPU heatsink sensor around 48–54°C (the heatpipe nearest the GPU holds at around 49–53°C).

(The idling CPU die and heatpipe values, respectively, are holding around 48–53°C and 41–43°C, which seems about right, given the moderate fan speeds I’m running.)

For the GPU, what kind of temperature tolerances (both under idle and at load, like with YT) have you all worked with?

 

[philgxxd]

I try not to go higher than 70°C. I remember getting artifacts when i still had the original chip in whenever it was higher so i take that as max.

 

[B S Magnet]

I try not to go higher than 70°C. I remember getting artifacts when i still had the original chip in whenever it was higher so i take that as max.

Thank you for this helpful feedback!

The thermal paste appears to be finally settling into place and I’m now seeing GPU diode readings between 58 and 62°C whilst under low load. This is, mind you, in tandem to running the fans under manual control (and higher than if controlled automatically). Until I get a battery into this beast, I won’t be able to put everything through full-power motions.

Hey @Amethyst1 — wanna chime in here?

 

[philgxxd]

Just for completeness. I'm talking about my early 2008 15" MBP which had the chip 2 times reflowed and finally replaced.
I also have a 17" MBP with the BTO glossy screen just like you, that i already bought knowing it had
been repaired but i setup the fancontroller software just the same.

 

[Amethyst1]

Hey @Amethyst1 — wanna chime in here?

I don't care about temperatures as long as the system is stable to be honest.

 

[dosdude1]

Well, I've finally got one. A failed Apple-installed G84-603-A2 board. However it wasn't the chip that was the issue, but poor soldering on Apple's part (or whoever they outsource the board refurbishing to). Check here for my full post about my findings: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...easure-macbook-pro-2008.2122634/post-30016888

This could very likely be the same issue as the OP was experiencing.

 

[B S Magnet]

Well, I've finally got one. A failed Apple-installed G84-603-A2 board. However it wasn't the chip that was the issue, but poor soldering on Apple's part (or whoever they outsource the board refurbishing to). Check here for my full post about my findings: https://forums.macrumors.com/thread...easure-macbook-pro-2008.2122634/post-30016888

This could very likely be the same issue as the OP was experiencing.

For reasons which should be apparent, after reading your other thread’s post, viewing the photos, and reading about the symptoms of what you identified was poor soldering, I’m… astonished.

I mean, it makes sense, but it’s also so surprising that the one I dealt with (and had to convince the seller offering the 30-day warranty that I wasn’t kidding about the fault) was probably not the only one to fail.

And your post’s timing comes only maybe an hour or two before a time-lapse YT clip of my installing the replacement-of-the-replacement logic board was to go up (and linked from this thread).

 

[B S Magnet]

(This was supposed to be a thread for sharing some good news. That good news will probably have to wait a while longer.)

Spoiler: Story time!

Back in 2019, I acquired a 17" A1261 T9300/2.5GHz with hi-res glossy LED LCD in a local trade. I knew it had the faulty OEM GeForce 8600M GT G84-602-A2 chip, and the plan at the time was to set aside that project until I could afford to have the GPU replaced with a G84-603-A2.

Last month, I found a source on eBay which was selling a refurbished logic board. (Their rating is 100%, with feedback in the four figures, and they’ve been around for, well, a few decades. And the product comes with a 30-day warranty. So on that front, I’m not too worried.).

What caught my attention was it was the T9500/2.6GHz variant of the early 2008 boards. I figured what I could do is get one of these boards at a reasonable price and set aside my OEM board until I can procure a T9900 CPU and a fresh G84-603-A2 (and then have both swapped in at the same time by someone who knows their stuff, such as @dosdude1), whilst getting some use out of the remarkably clean A1261 in the meanwhile.

Fast-forward to today.

Although tracking hadn’t been updated, the board arrived and was packaged extremely well. Hurrah! Per the listing photo, the RAM bridge has the green dot and the GPU is the G84-603-A2. But the manufacture date on the GPU is much earlier than I was expecting — really early, as in early-2008 stock.

Next, I pulled out my OEM board, broke out the Noctua paste, and I went to work on swapping boards.

After reassembly, I put in an old testing HDD (running Snow Leopard 10.6.8, an OEM donor from my long-gone 2009 13" MBP). Then I crossed my fingers.

Compared with the OEM board, which has never POSTed, this board chimed as soon as I connected it to the MagSafe. Promising! The screen lit up (also yay!) and a non-verbose boot took about 90 seconds.

Then the screen… went dark.

Huh.

I put the screen underneath a lamp to check if the login window was there (it was). I logged in, but there was still no backlight. I used the lamp light to open the Displays prefPane (which showed max brightness), set the date to today, connected it to wifi, and opened terminal to set nvram to verbose boot. Then I rebooted.

This time, with verbose boot, the backlight stayed on, even with the login window!

I logged in and reached Finder, and it looked as it did when I last used that HDD in 2011. (I migrated to an SSD back then.) Next, I promptly checked to see whether the fans were running in iStat (they were, both around 2200+rpm). Then, I launched a Software Update check. There were a few items which required reboot, so I began to run it.

During the installation of items, the screen began to show weird artifacts and rapid degradation to the point where when moving the cursor, it would only intermittently show that I had moved it. Something was wrong.

Without past experience of seeing a GPU fail, this looked to possibly be just that. The time between powering on and when this appeared was maybe 10 or 15 minutes.

Maybe 30 seconds after the display started to get weird with the artifacts, I force-powered it off with a long power button hold. (Software Update could wait.) The temps on the top case and beneath were typical, “just-run” warm, but otherwise fine (the last temp I read on the CPU before leaving Finder and entering Software Update was a moderate, but average 55°C, while the GPU temp was I think a couple of degrees above that). Again, nothing unusual.

So I let the MacBook Pro rest for a few minutes. Then I powered it on a third time.

Verbose boot completed as usual, but when windowserver started, the display went bright grey, not blue, and it flickered several times, followed by some strange, garbled pixels within the top-left 5-by-5 of the screen. I hard-powered it down again.

Next, being ultra-cautious, I placed a cold pack, fresh from the freezer, underneath the heatsink area, waited until the top case felt cold to the touch, then tried a Safe Boot. As expected, there was no verbose boot, and the grey Apple and spinning clock took its time to finish before the screen showed up as blue. But within maybe 5 or 10 seconds of the blue screen, what appeared to be the cursor pointer in the usual top-left area was vaguely visible under what looked like scan lines. I could not move it. The login window did not appear. Then the system powered off on its own.

Shy of having the 3T108 Graphics Processor Test diagnostic handy (I don’t), I think it’s a good bet this has a faulty GPU despite it being the 603 revision. Are the 603 GPUs known to fail?

Anyhow, if you’ve read this far, I’m thinking this board will have to come right back out and be returned to the seller. I hope I can share much better news sooner than later. I was really looking forward to finally showing a photo of the A1261 and my A1139, running side by side, to post to the Club 17 thread, but I think that moment is going to have to wait.

Pic 1 is the new board (top) over the OEM board (bottom)
Pic 2 is the new board’s GPU (showing the early manufacture date)
Pic 3 is the old board’s GPU (after wiping away the old thermal paste)

I never, ever believed this moment would ever come to pass.

I can’t believe I’m even posting this:

So I came home this afternoon from meetings, to find my green-dot, 603-GPU-revised MBP, is ice. cold. dead.

Its last duty, in dosdude1-patched High Sierra, was idling on my desk, serving a volume to another Mac, via smb.

All the routine hard resets — SMC reset, yanking the comically bad battery, disconnecting it from MagSafe — didn’t matter. It now behaves just as it did back when I acquired it in 2019 with a dead, OEM 602 board. I know heat is (was) very much not a culprit, especially following that thermal pad modification I completed last year.

All in all, I’m baffled and, frankly, sort of devastated, as it ushers a lousy end to a tough week. Except for cycling through three sketchy af batteries, I really, really love(d) everything about that setup. (I’m leaning on past tense because I’m disinclined at this moment to dunk more into fixing this. This… suuuuuuucks.)

Given the above finding, I think I’m sitting on a second instance of this happening, which is why I’m mentioning you here explicitly, @dosdude1 — for your future reference.

 

[dosdude1]

I never, ever believed this moment would ever come to pass.

I can’t believe I’m even posting this:

So I came home this afternoon from meetings, to find my green-dot, 603-GPU-revised MBP, is ice. cold. dead.

Its last duty, in dosdude1-patched High Sierra, was idling on my desk, serving a volume to another Mac, via smb.

All the routine hard resets — SMC reset, yanking the comically bad battery, disconnecting it from MagSafe — didn’t matter. It now behaves just as it did back when I acquired it in 2019 with a dead, OEM 602 board. I know heat is (was) very much not a culprit, especially following that thermal pad modification I completed last year.

All in all, I’m baffled and, frankly, sort of devastated, as it ushers a lousy end to a tough week. Except for cycling through three sketchy af batteries, I really, really love(d) everything about that setup. (I’m leaning on past tense because I’m disinclined at this moment to dunk more into fixing this. This… suuuuuuucks.)

Given the above finding, I think I’m sitting on a second instance of this happening, which is why I’m mentioning you here explicitly, @dosdude1 — for your future reference.

What exactly does it do now? The poorly-soldered Apple-installed-revised-GPU board I repaired would power on, but the fans would NOT spin, and the optical drive did NOT initialize. The usual symptoms of failed 8600M GT GPU chipset on these is the machine powers on, the fans DO spin, and the optical drive initializes.

Regardless of the issue, if you were to send it in, I can just install another brand new revised 8600M GT GPU, which will fix the issue regardless of if it's a soldering issue, or somehow a bad chipset.

 

[B S Magnet]

What exactly does it do now? The poorly-soldered Apple-installed-revised-GPU board I repaired would power on, but the fans would NOT spin, and the optical drive did NOT initialize. The usual symptoms of failed 8600M GT GPU chipset on these is the machine powers on, the fans DO spin, and the optical drive initializes.

Much as when I acquired the laptop in a 2019 local trade (then, with its original logic board in place, and known to be DOA when the trade was made), one could plug in the Magsafe adapter, and the adapter would respond normally (i.e., green LED, or orange if charging), but absolutely no response whatsoever from trying to power on the system (whether by pressing the power button itself or by connecting the Magsafe without battery installed). It also meant no latch button LED indicator response at all, nor any initializing from the optical drive.

So I got around to replacing that board in 2021.

This is how this current logic board (the one I bought in 2021) is now behaving (“behaving” here may not be the best word, as it’s presenting no functioning behaviour at all, much as the OEM board of yore).

[There was also an interim logic board, from the same place which ultimately accepted that the board they’d sent was faulty, almost from the get-go (i.e., functioning for only a few minutes, once, just after installing and powering it up for the first time, before it abruptly kernel panicking, then upon restart, presenting with a white screen and fans blowing hard).]

All of which to say, if keeping score:

1) OEM 602 board, 2008–2019: dead dead dead
2) interim 603 board, 2021 (one day): white screen, fans
3) replacement 603 board from same place as interim, 2021–today: functional until today, presenting identical absence of life as with the OEM board

(Yes, I still have all three boards, the first two neatly boxed up and put away in storage.)

Regardless of the issue, if you were to send it in, I can just install another brand new revised 8600M GT GPU, which will fix the issue regardless of if it's a soldering issue, or somehow a bad chipset.

Before going through the steps to ship off to the U.S. from Canada (and vice-versa for its return), in the event this is a BGA solder failure which decided to “mature” today (possibly there from the time when the vendor Apple dealt with at the time for handling the 602-to-603 issue, fixed this board), is there anything to be said or done about looking at giving a heat re-flow a go, or no?

 

[dosdude1]

Much as when I acquired the laptop in a 2019 local trade (then, with its original logic board in place, and known to be DOA when the trade was made), one could plug in the Magsafe adapter, and the adapter would respond normally (i.e., green LED, or orange if charging), but absolutely no response whatsoever from trying to power on the system (whether by pressing the power button itself or by connecting the Magsafe without battery installed). It also meant no latch button LED indicator response at all, nor any initializing from the optical drive.

So I got around to replacing that board in 2021.

This is how this current logic board (the one I bought in 2021) is now behaving (“behaving” here may not be the best word, as it’s presenting no functioning behaviour at all, much as the OEM board of yore).

[There was also an interim logic board, from the same place which ultimately accepted that the board they’d sent was faulty, almost from the get-go (i.e., functioning for only a few minutes, once, just after installing and powering it up for the first time, before it abruptly kernel panicking, then upon restart, presenting with a white screen and fans blowing hard).]

All of which to say, if keeping score:

1) OEM 602 board, 2008–2019: dead dead dead
2) interim 603 board, 2021 (one day): white screen, fans
3) replacement 603 board from same place as interim, 2021–today: functional until today, presenting identical absence of life as with the OEM board

(Yes, I still have all three boards, the first two neatly boxed up and put away in storage.)



Before going through the steps to ship off to the U.S. from Canada (and vice-versa for its return), in the event this is a BGA solder failure which decided to “mature” today (possibly there from the time when the vendor Apple dealt with at the time for handling the 602-to-603 issue, fixed this board), is there anything to be said or done about looking at giving a heat re-flow a go, or no?

Huh, so this board does nothing at all, not even front LED on? That sounds like it could be some other issue, not related to the GPU. To verify... The power adapter you're using is a genuine Apple 85W adapter? The fake ones are known to kill systems like that.

 

[B S Magnet]

Huh, so this board does nothing at all, not even front LED on? That sounds like it could be some other issue, not related to the GPU. To verify... The power adapter you're using is a genuine Apple 85W adapter? The fake ones are known to kill systems like that.

First: you are a mensch (for a laundry list of reasons which would be off-topic here, and I also wouldn’t want it going to your head) — namely because you gave a few moments of your weekend evening and shared your experiential knowledge help to isolate the issue.

---

On to the A1261:

This was 45 minutes I never knew I’d be spending tonight (but very glad I did).

First bit. Yah, all my Magsafe bricks are Apple/Delta. (I have one old PowerBook running a sketch brick, but it is what it is, and bona fide PPC bricks are getting tougher to come by.)

Second. I’m also glad you asked about that. It prompted me to check which brick the A1261 was using. Turns out it was on the 60W brick normally in use by my 13-inch MBPs, past and present. My 13-inch MBP had been using the 85W brick intended for the A1261.

Third. Battery still removed from earlier, I plugged the A1261 into the 85W and, lo, it came to life at half-speed, as one would expect.

Fourth. Me, looking over at that jank-battery — the third I’ve bought for this A1261 since 2021, I re-checked the onboard LED meter. It lit up with five LEDs (which means little, since the battery was showing a paucity of its original design capacity). So… I pulled out the multimeter and went to test the terminals on the battery interface. Nothing. Dead. And yet, the board inside attests it’s fully charged.

Fifth. Me, walking the jank-battery over to the Li-Ion battery recycling box in the next room. Safety fifth! I suppose I’ll be going for battery #4 soon, though this time I think I’ma find a NuPower unit in stock somewhere on this side of the border.

Happy — well, mostly happy — conclusion. Your considerable experiential, applied knowledge thought to go in a direction I hadn’t considered earlier. Once I saw the system wouldn’t do anything with a battery attesting five-LED lights on its meter and saw a green LED on the MagSafe adapter, but it still wouldn’t come to life with battery out, I deduced (incorrectly) that this logic board had gone south.

Thanks, C. Have a wonderful weekend.