2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

Officially? (Edit: Obviously they do now, just checked the Apple link) My Macbook Pro "died" just 1 month out of warranty and I was lucky that I'd purchased my mac from a reseller who replaced it in goodwill, others weren't so lucky. They didn't acknowledge it officially, although NVIDIA did. IIRC they replaced it with the same faulty board (august/september '08).

modoc• 15 years ago

I had the same issue. Instantly cured it by disabling the "Automatic graphics switching" option. Hopefully there will be a better fix forthcoming, but for now it's pretty easy to solve. Even with that headache, this is by far the best laptop I've ever owned. Amazingly fast.

IanField90• 15 years ago

I guess that this doesn't occur on the 13" models then?

riffraff• 15 years ago

it would seem so even looking at the linked thread, at least I did not notice anyone reporting isues with the 13" models

Queue29• 15 years ago

I can vouch for my 13" model. It's rock solid, but when the fan does kick in, it sounds like a turbine spinning up. No freezes though, as this is almost definitely the fault of the ATI drivers (which the 13" model doesn't have).

swah• 15 years ago

About the speed: how can these laptops be getting twice the speed, twice the graphics performance, etc ? Didn't the previous model already had the i5 and i7?

joelhaasnoot3• 15 years ago

They did have i5 and i7, but Sandy Bridge versions is new as well as Thunderbolt

celalo3• 15 years ago

they are now with 4 cores with higher clock frequency

Maci2• 15 years ago

Same here, it would appear Apple is a bit too aggressive with it's power management and it's confusing the living daylights out of the ATI driver when it's on automatic.

Switching manually works a treat sofar... http://codykrieger.com/gfxCardStatus/

nikster2• 15 years ago

Good to know, thanks. I'd only ever run it in manual mode anyway. How is the computer supposed to know whether power or speed is more important at any given time?

bluekeybox• 15 years ago

Oh, the legendary ATI drivers.

incomethax• 15 years ago

I've had this problem when playing sc2 as well, and if I play for any appreciable amount of time, even disabling automatic graphics switching doesn't help.

I've actually talked to Blizzard about this (I thought it was a problem confined to SC2), and they indicated that Apple was working on a fix for this.

derefr2• 15 years ago

Is this just the new MBPs (the ones with Thunderbolt) or does it also apply to the batches of the previous model that shipped in early 2011?

CornishPasty• 15 years ago

I think the ones shipped early this year are referred to as 2010 models.

sycren• 15 years ago

Im having the exact same problem though with a 2007 mbp though so it could be a software update that I installed

l0nwlf• 15 years ago

Mine is 2009 model and I have yet to face this issue. Although my Optical drive died this January and it throws out DVDs when inserted but that is the only problem I have faced so far.

EDIT: Was just stating that 2009 MBPs have no such issues IMHO.

joelhaasnoot3• 15 years ago

Seems like all the reports are on the _2011_ version, with isolated incidents on the 2010 version. 2009 is mentioned nowhere.

azim• 15 years ago

My Fall 2009 model overheats and locks up and crashes when playing games like Starcraft 2 or Left 4 Dead 2. That's not to say every notebook from 2009 had cooling problems, but some certainly do.

uptown• 15 years ago

Somewhat off-topic, but I trust the judgement of those here. I'm in the market to buy one of these. I was wondering whether current owners feel the extra 2MB of L3 cache justifies the price-bump of the 2.3GHz processor.

zdw• 15 years ago

Depends on whether the code you're running will use the extra cache. In some HPC and gaming circumstances, people write in assembler to make sure a code loop or the data structure being worked on fits totally within the L1 or L2 cache of the processor, which can provide a huge performance improvement.

But, for standard use without such specialized workloads, $250 a minor clockspeed and cache improvement doesn't make much sense.

You'd probably get a much bigger boost from adding a SSD or going up to 8GB of RAM in the machine. I'd buy these aftermarket - RAM especially is a good deal as you can get 8GB of DDR3-1333 for less than $90 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148...

reitzensteinm2• 15 years ago

Definitely second getting an SSD instead. It's the single biggest upgrade you can do to a PC today, especially for laptops. If you can live with 128gb of storage, a RealSSD C300, the current performance king (although check Anandtech for updates, this is changing all the time) is $264 from Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148...

This thing will do 30,000 4k writes a second, which is orders of magnitude more than a 2.5" mechanical.

jpitz2• 15 years ago

Totally depends on what you do: I have a 2.6ghz 2010 MBP with an Intel SSD that has been the screamer at our office for quite a while now. My office mate just got a 2011, and even though he has yet to get an SSD in it yet, he runs our integration test suite ( java JUnit stuff, heavy mix of cpu and disk io ) in half the time I can ( thats 7 minutes vs 14 ), and where my cpus stay at 75-90% the whole time, his never breaks 15. Now, on the compile target that I run 10-20 times a day, my machine is still a second or two faster, but I suspect that advantage will evaporate once he has that SSD.

nikster2• 15 years ago

In my own tests compiling and building code I found that the OS X disk cache is very efficient and so the SSD advantage disappears after the first run.

Still the best bang for the buck upgrade by far but for the purpose of compiling much less difference than I had expected.

celalo3• 15 years ago

Actually it is not a good idea to upgrade from Apple store. It is much more expensive, it does not make sense, you can buy those from anywhere else.

Yet, there are some stuff you could only get from the Apple store like CPU upgrade.

As others mentioned, SSD upgrade makes more sense than RAM upgrade. Although you can buy the SSD from elsewhere, this time it makes a bit sense to buy it from Apple store because TRIM support is already out there for the disks you buy from Apple store in Mac OS X 10.6.6. The other SSDs are not supported yet.

ramanujam• 15 years ago

I had the 13" 2010 version and got bumped up for the free exchange since i was in the one month window and got the new 2011 version.

I noticed that when i started Parallels and opened my second windows VM instance everything came to a stand still and i had to restart. I also saw someone in the Apple discussion threads mentioning a similar issue while running Vmware fusion. I will try the 'Automatic graphics switching' and hopefully it gets better, else back to the Apple store!

lamnk• 15 years ago

Huh? Since when can the 13" model switch graphic cards ?

Pheter• 15 years ago

Could you provide more information regarding the free exchange please? I bought a 13" macbook within (I think) a month of them releasing the new models.

parasubvert• 15 years ago

My 2010 17" model will get corrupted graphics and eventual a full kernel panic due to issues with automatic graphics switching that are usually triggered by Safari+Flash. Uninstalling Flash, turning off automatic graphics switching, or just using Google Chrome for Flash sites fixed that.

My first-gen 2006 Macbook Pro used to crash under heat/load as well, which was suspected due to misapplication of thermal paste. I sent it into Applecare a couple of years later and they took care of it (even replacing my scuffed up shell).

TechNewb• 15 years ago

Chrome was causing my 6-core mac pro w/ Nvidia Quadro 4000 to have kernel panics a while back, but it seems to be working fine now.

jason_slack• 15 years ago

I have a 13-inch 2011 MBP, i7 Model with 8gb of RAM.

I am running 3 simultaneous video encodes that takes 3 Apple Keynotes and encodes to .mp4, .3gp and .ogv from a terminal + Playing 3 other Keynotes in Quicktime + Random music in iTunes + Playing The Social network all at the same time for the last 35 minutes and I am running fine.

Can I run any test for anyone to help out?

davidedicillo• 15 years ago

I already replaced this model once. Got the replacement and and had 1 freeze so far but none after I switch to discrete only

ZipCordManiac• 15 years ago

You used to be able to trust Apple for manufacturing quality. I now build my own for any work machines and only keep an iMac around for casual browsing/music/video. How the hell did this slip past basic TESTING ? This isn't the first manufacturing blunder that has been swept under the table with Apple, and it won't be the last. If you put down over $1000 for a computer, it should work.

rtaycher• 15 years ago

Obligatory a mac is a pc comment.

maqr• 15 years ago

Same issue here. Just got a MBP a few days ago, and I've had this happen twice while compiling in Xcode. It's not your average crash though. It's not a kernel panic. iTunes streams keep playing, so I know the wifi card is still working fine. It wouldn't surprise me if it's an ATI issue.

larrycatinspace• 15 years ago

I just got my 2011 15" - opened it up to put a new SSD in it and found that the heatsink/fan combo off to the back corner was missing all the screws that would have secured it. I bet this doesn't help. I have yet to run into any issues but haven't done anything to stressful with it.

Anyone else with issues going to pop theirs open?

2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

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