15" MBP Early '11 failing

pleasant Co.

So this happens to my mbp, it started happening maybe 6-7mths ago, then stopped for a while but has started happening again. As well as the odd graphics glitches it will crash/shutdown for no apparent reason, whether it's under heavy load or not (it's crashed and shutdown many times right after boot). This will also happen if booted in safe mode.

It's a base model, 4gb ram, 2ghz i7, AMD Radeon HD 6490M/Intel HD Graphics 3000.

I had similar issues with my previous mbp, the one with the catastrophic nvidia chip failure that apple eventually began repairing at cost to them...so quite the bad bit of luck.

I came across this http://www.macworld.co.uk/news/mac/widespread-2011-macbook-pro-failures-continue-petition-3497935/ during my troubleshooting too, hopefully something might eventually come of it.

Any thoughts?

ZENER

What happens if you permanently switch the graphics to the ATI chip ? It used to be possible in earlier versions of OS X to select which graphics out was used. The Intel graphics (integrated into the CPU) uses system RAM whereas the ATI chip has it's own separate memory. Just wondering what happens if you switch between them if there's any change ?

Instructions and information here.

Ken

pleasant Co.

In the back of my mind I think this was one of the steps I took last time this issue cropped up (system prefs>energy saver>automatic graphics switching [off]) and it didn't change anything. BUT I'll do it again in case it was one of those things I meant to do last time.

ZENER

From what I can remember that 'switch' stopped the graphics from going to the non-integrated chip, i.e. the ATI. When the computer starts up it will be using the the integrated graphics anyway so this won't help. If you're using Mavericks or Yosemite it's possible from within Activity Monitor to determine which chip is being utilised. Your attached picture isn't very clear so it's difficult to get a good view of the issue but if you have an application like Aperture or FCP then they should automatically switch to the high performance graphics. It would be interesting to see what happens to the display when this occurs.

Where I'm going with this is that it might be a RAM issue if it's only the integrated graphics that cause the problem.

Ken

pleasant Co.

Ram issue was my initial diagnosis too, but after reading more I chickened out of buying more to test the theory. I'll leave the graphics switched and see how I get on over the next day or two with a decent amount of video encoding thrown in for good measure.

pleasant Co.

All good so far, so I guess the RAM call was a good 'un.