My screen has messed up? Sign of worse things to come?

[cal296]

Hello.

I was watching a YouTube video on Safari and suddenly the screen 'muddled up'. The plugin also crashed and the machine was unusable. After a reboot it was fine.

The MacBook has been on for about 5 days so I think that is what caused it but I am worried it is a sign of bad things to come, like HDD failure or GPU failure.

I say this because my previous laptop (Compaq) suffered nVidia GPU failure and had the same symptoms.

So is the MacBook fine or is it a sign of bad things to come?

Specs:
2.4 GHz Core 2 Duo
2GB RAM
nVidia GeForce 320m 256mb
10.9 Mavericks
250GB HDD

Thank You

 

[cal296]

Console

The console is flooded with these messages.

20/04/2014 02:45:00.000 kernel[0]: NVDA(Video): Channel exception! exception type = 0x6 = DMA Engine Error (FIFO Error 6)

 

[borgqueens]

It might be the GPU. However some older MBP don´t handle Mavericks so well.
I´d trie to install an older OSX that might help.

----------

Ohh I looks like it is the GPU failing. Bad news then older OSX will not help.

 

[maflynn]

I'd say its the GPU going south on you

 

[cal296]

I'd say its the GPU going south on you

Really? I personally think that a $900 laptop should last more than 4 years. I have ran a 'Apple Hardware Test' and it said everything was okay and the MacBook has been running fine since I have restarted it.

Is there anything I can do to prevent this or delay it failing.

 

[leman]

Yep, looks like a GPU failure to me.

@cal296: unfortunately, the price of the computer has little to do with the expected lifetime. Its mostly about luck. And no, you can't do anything.

 

[cal296]

Yep, looks like a GPU failure to me.

@cal296: unfortunately, the price of the computer has little to do with the expected lifetime. Its mostly about luck. And no, you can't do anything.

What do you think Apple can do about it, I'm so frustrated, a £300 Acer would outlive this thing. I suppose because it is a 2010 I won't get any support.

I don't really know a lot about this, but the Mac is running fine and has been doing all day, how do I know when and if it is going die?

 

[cal296]

Update

Update: I have ran FurMark for 15 minutes on the MacBook and it there were no graphical issues and it ran fine. The only thing I can say is that the MacBook got extremely hot and I don't think iStat shows the GPU temp. If it does can you point it out, I think it could be the MCP.

I'm positive that this was issue was a one off because I'm sure a failing GPU can't run FurMark for 15 minutes without issues.

 

[leman]

Furmark is a stress test for the computation cores. From what you've told I so far I would believe the issue (if its hardware) is more likely related to the memory. You'd need some test that utilises a lot of video RAM, with plenty of texture copying and render to texture passes. Can't really help you with the choice of the test here though.

Still, if you haven't seen any symptoms for a long time after it happened, could have been a one time thing. Let's just wait and see what happens. I mean, if its really dying, you can't do anything about it either way.

 

[cal296]

Furmark is a stress test for the computation cores. From what you've told I so far I would believe the issue (if its hardware) is more likely related to the memory. You'd need some test that utilises a lot of video RAM, with plenty of texture copying and render to texture passes. Can't really help you with the choice of the test here though.

Still, if you haven't seen any symptoms for a long time after it happened, could have been a one time thing. Let's just wait and see what happens. I mean, if its really dying, you can't do anything about it either way.

Hmm, interesting. I am sure this GPU shares its RAM with the system memory. Shall I perform a memtest?

 

[cal296]

Update

The MacBook has been running fine for about 24 hours, I'm sure the GPU is fine.