2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load | Hacker News Reader

2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

discussions.apple.com

206 pointsGeneralMaximus58 comments

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.

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/

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?

It doesn't really, anything using OpenGL / CoreGraphics triggers discrete graphics.

Even silly things like the mail client Sparrow. I had to use gfxCardStatus to get anything more than 2-3hrs of battery life because my mail client is trying to get "fancy" on me.

Oh, the legendary ATI drivers.

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.

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?

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

Yes, but nothing uses Thunderbolt.

Yes, but it's a good buzzword bingo addition. Ok, yes, it's overrated, and Apple wants you to buy a new one. The main point was the new Sandy Bridge processors. Which are supposedly lots faster (and I have an original i7 in my Lenovo which is a monster, can't imagine how fast it would be)

The internal display is Thunderbolt bus connected.

No, not really.

Even where that true, why the shit should anybody care?

No, it's DisplayPort.

they are now with 4 cores with higher clock frequency

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

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).

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

They're STILL replacing the old Macbook Pros with the dodgy Nvidia graphics cards from years ago, for free.

I wouldn't be too worried about this.

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).

What particular model of MacBook Pro are you referring to? Those with Nvidia GeForce 9400M ?

The early-2008 models, with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2377

Mine is still rockin, same vid card... best machine I've ever bought! (first mac)

Mine works, doesn't exactly rock, more like generates huge amounts of heat. This after a Powerbook g4 that needed 4 or 5 logic board transplants, and a plastic macBook (core 2 duo) that was dog slow.

Mine is still rocking too. I was just stress-testing it with, ahem, Warcraft...

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.

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...

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.

I would actually give the SandForce drives a try. They have better garbage collection. TRIM is coming in Snow Leopard, but it is always nice to have good garbage collection on the hardware.

SandForce wins right now in $/gb, and 4K writes. It loses in anything that is limited by the SATA2 bus, such as sequential transfers.

The stories about TRIM coming in Lion also pointed out that so far it was only supported on Apple's own SSDs.

Also, the major problem with Sandforce drives on Macs is that their firmware can only be updated a) under Windows, in Boot Camp, and b) with an MBR-formatted disk. That is bullshit.

http://eshop.macsales.com/Customized_Pages/Framework.cfm?pag...

Ah, good point about the lack of trim in OS X. The Sandforce controller would indeed be a better fit there.

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.

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.

I'll have to get him to run successive compiles and see.

The other advantage of this model is that it is upgradable to 16GB RAM, according to OWC and others [1]. The upgrade is a ridiculous cost right now, but it can likely only go down.

1. http://blog.macsales.com/9394-macbook-pro-2011-12gb-and-16gb...

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.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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

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.

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.

Obligatory a mac is a pc comment.

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?

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?

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

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?

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

They could try downclocking for temp fix.

Sounds like its graphics, not cpu

Exactly; downclock the graphics.

so down-clocking means, losing a bit of its power?

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

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.

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

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.

Why don't you return it? This would be an intolerable problem for me.

I don't expect to see any kind of lockups or grey-screen, ever. It just shouldn't be part of owning any computer, especially a mac.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com