Screen faded to white?

[Dalton63841]

Last night I was using Handbrake to convert a movie on my 2009 13" MBP. Bear in mind I've done this about a thousand times. Well about 15 minutes into converting this movies, my screen suddenly started fading lighter. Over the course of about 10 seconds it went from normal to pretty much white with 7 or 8 vertical lines on the screen. Of course I hit the power button until it shutdown, and when I turned it back on it was fine again.

What caused this and is it an issue? I assume the nVidia chipset started to overheat, but iirc Handbrake taxes the CPU, not the video.

 

[Dalton63841]

Just to add a little extra info to this, in the Console around the time this occured there are several errors from Hyperdock Helper saying "imgToLayerWithAlpha: No graphics context".

Don't suppose this helps does it?

 

[AlphaDogg]

What caused this and is it an issue? I assume the nVidia chipset started to overheat, but iirc Handbrake taxes the CPU, not the video.

Handbrake uses all of the CPU power it can get. This means that the CPU will get very hot. But, the CPU and GPU share the same heatsink and thermal sensors. This means that the CPU will heat up the GPU. I don't know how much it will heat it up, but because of thermodynamics, it will heat it up some amount.
Also: see this picture from when I reapplied thermal paste on my 2010 13" MBP.

You can see that the NVidia chip is below the Intel chip (keep in mind the image is upside down), and therefore will not get so hot because of the CPU, but will still heat up.

This is kind of hard to explain.... See this picture that I took while reapplying thermal paste, with the heatsink attached. You will see that the NVidia chip is below the Intel chip, so the Intel chip's heat will be routed out by the fan before the heat of the NVidia chip.

If you are under warranty, I would recommend taking it to Apple for them to check out. It could be a defective 9400M...

 

[Dalton63841]

Hmm...Well I think I have about 2-3 months of warranty. I haven't been able to afford the Applecare, although I hope to get it before the year is up...

Perhaps I will give apple a call...The only thing is whether or not I can reproduce it. To be honest I'd rather not try to LOL.