2011 15" & 17" owners: Are you having random freeze issues?

I've been following this thread

Apple - Support - Discussions - MacBook Pro 2011 17" hard freeze ...

with increasing interest. I've noticed that I've been having some stability issues in OSX since moving over to my 2011 and thought I'd inquire generally to see if anyone at NBR is having the same problem.

I haven't found any rhyme or reason to it yet, but I will occasionally (maybe once a day or a little less) find my system either "soft" locks (where I can move the mouse but everything is frozen or "hard" locks (where everything freezes)...both requiring a hard restart (holding the power button down). It doesn't seem to be dependent upon running any intense applications or games; it just happens.

Earlier today, I was just surfing the web and listening to music when it hard-froze.

Chime in and let us know if your machine has had any of these symptoms, and if so what apps you typically use.

 

I can easily get it to hard freeze if I let the temp stay for a few minutes over 90... which it does on its own fan control when I play games. If I manually stick the fans up at 5500 and keep the temperature down, the same things will never lock the machine up.

A couple games if I try to turn on some advanced graphics features with the 6750 on, its hard locked.... usually to do with AA or shadows... but theres usually problems with things like that through Wine anyways, so I haven't worried about it much.

 

interestingly, it's happened to me without any load being put on the system at all.

just a web browser, music player, Word document. that's it.

if it were limited to temperature or games, at least we'd have some general idea of what might be happening.

also: it doesn't happen in Windows. I can game in Windows for 10 hours and there will be no issues. Sustained CPU temps at or above 90C.

$0.02

 

some people blame auto graphic switching...

I always keep auto switching off, and never happens randomly... if its happening a lot to you, try to kill the auto switching and see what happens.

then it might also be the AMD, so try gfxCardStatus and force it to the Intel only and see what happens.

 

I'll try it. I don't think it's the graphics switching, though. When plugged in, I leave mine on dedicated discrete.

I'll try it on just integrated though, for the sake of the test. It doesn't happen "a lot", but I'd say it does happen maybe 1x/day. twice today.

 

pretty sure they will patch it up if anything went wrong so i am not worried.
Although i am not getting freezes when i work, happened in games few times, specifically happens EVERY time i exit dragon age II, but i was blaming the porting.

 

I keep having these random lockups in Steam, where HL2 just freezes for a half a second, and then resumes. I believe this has got something to do with the graphics switching too (or Steam maybe?)

Last couple of times when I was quitting the game, the system froze and I had to reboot. No problem of high temps for me. System idles at ~45 C.

I have been having other problems with MS Word 04 for mac, where scrolling is very erratic. While fast scrolling the system just stops and resumes after ~ 2 sec. Checking the activity monitor, it shows 100% CPU activity.

I did a disk utility verification and repair through the installation CD, with no luck.

So far no problems in lockups with itunes, Chrome, Ffox or anything else.

Hopefully its a software issue that will be resolved soon.

 

people have reported those types of problems fixed if you disable the automatic switching so that the GPU is on before you launch the game and steam

 

I read the thread you posted. I run some of the tests people posted:

1. Run 7 'yes > /dev/null &' commands for about 5 mins

2. Run the smallluxgpu interactive test for about 10mins

Nothing crashed. The automatic switching was turned on. In both cases the fans became very loud (I haven't used any program to control the fans).

 

@ajreynol - could be related to ssd. look into it.

 

I am running this right now without SMC fan control and I am getting no freezes now. It is software related.

 

I don't believe so. I'm using the same SSD I used in my 2010 and it's never been a problem.

Also, I'm pretty sure the number of people in that thread linked in the OP aren't all using SSD.

On a good note, it hasn't locked up in 24 hours or so.

 

This is a real issue, as I simply needed to let the programs run for 20-30 minutes and not 10. Well, I broke my own rule of buying first gen anything, and well I now remember why it is a rule.

I was able to run under windows like gang busters under a huge load with 8 cores maxed 100% and gpu maxed 100% (prime95 and gpu burnin together).


Still, it will be interesting to see what Apple can and will do with this issue.

 

Unfortunately, this freezing issue seems to be very widespread as of now:

2011 MacBook Pros Crashing Under Load? - Mac Rumors

Maybe this can be considered as one of those minor issues that explain why a number of people always say that it is not a good idea to buy Rev. A products (Rev. A of SandyBridge MBPs in this case).

 

the 2011 MacBook Pro's feature the fixed "Rev. B" motherboards.

 

I'm not talking about the Intel SB fiasco when I say Rev. A.

What I mean is that in general, hasn't it always been "widely acknowledged" for the 1st few batches of every iteration of the "major refreshes" (no matter what brand or what product it is) to be Rev. A products, where minor issues such as these kinds of freezes can & may occur? The so called unwritten rule whereby owners of 1st batches of new revisions/refreshes also act as free "beta testers" to help the company seek out & fix any previously unforeseen minor bugs...

 

fair enough.

and I'm able to continue to reproduce the issue by putting the system under various stresses. dev/null + a few other things = locked up system.

 

On a positive note, Windows gaming works perfectly for me, so I will be simply using my Win 7 partition for that till they update these damn buggy ATI Drivers...

 

Engadget has added to the furor too.

New MacBook Pros freezing under heavy load? -- Engadget

 

downloading the 10.6.7 update now. hopefully that resolves the issues. only time will tell.

 

^seems to have addressed my issues with freezes

 

Good to hear that. I hope it also fixes everyone's freezing issues. I will definitely keep a keen eye on this thread as I'm seriously considering getting a new 2011 17" MBP.

 

no problems here yet either. but the issues were very random, so we'll see over the next week. here's hoping.

 

Yesterday tried running the smallluxgpu at 8*CPU+GPU, the system froze within 5 sec

Today, after 10.6.7, tried the same test, went on for about 5 mins with no freezing, temps reached ~90.

I have had problems running HL2 on steam in OS X, where quitting the game immediately froze the system (even with graphic switching disabled). Will try that later tonight.

So far so good.

Update: I am happy to report that I tried HL2 and the system did not freeze on me and I was able to quit to the desktop successfully. Lets see if this was an exception or a rule.

 

That's very good news indeed. Thanks for sharing that info with us. Appreciate that.

 

I hope the issues are indeed resolved because I plan to buy macbook pro 17 this week or early next week.

 

No freezes on mine.

 

Looks like this is a pretty common complaint for the new MBPs. Apparently it was pinpointed to be the switch between integrated and discrete graphics when the MBP is under load.

See the link for further details.

Hopefully 10.6.7 fixed it for you guys. I'm not going to point fingers but maybe it has a little something to do with the GPU vendor...(not really an ATI/AMD fan)

 

That would be an entirely logical explanation for a problem which seemed to be occurring only under OSX & not Windows, and appears to have been fixed with a software update.

Edit: hmmm, so that patch didn't fix it?

 

One user in the long thread on the apple support site mentioned something about the problem being with the "DRAM timing" issues. The post eventually gets too technical for me. But here is an excerpt from that post.

"I believe a DDR3 timing parameter was changed for the shipping DIMMs. The kernel was updated in the 10.6.7 release from 10.7.1 to 10.7.3, this is where I believe these parameters are provided to the memory controller. If I were to predict the effect on memory performance of adding a 1-cycle idle gap between the Intel driving the bus and the DRAM driving the bus, for Read/Write turn-around, I would expect at least a 1% hit on throughput assuming lots of read/write/reads are present (vs read-read-read ... write-write-write). This may be the case in the Windows benchmark test.

Anyways, the reality is that the DDR3 bus is a source synchronous bus that moves slightly with temperature, and by design Apple would want to remove any overhead cycles. Here, either the DRAM vendor may have misquoted their exact timing relationship at the high temps, or Apple may have counted too much on some timing margin existing. Either way, the bus timing if tuned exactly will eventually fail at some max temperature (silicon slows down slightly, jitter rises due to high switching currents present).

When the DRAM bus fails timing, I would expect the CPU will run out of cache for a while, graphics access should be fine but obviously any action (such as a mouse click) that causes a DRAM access would not complete."

Any ideas if that indeed was a major issue?

 

could have been.

I don't think we'll ever really know.