Most likely dead A1286, need a second opinion on what might be literally a fire hazard...

Hello,

Apologies in advance, I'm not a Mac user, so I'll probably make an error or two.

A company MBP is having severe issues. It's user reported that it spent a while in a car in rather high heat. I believe it wasn't on at the time, but in any case if it was, it hit it's tjmax and shutdown.

It's a late 2011 A1286 with a 2.2 processor. The car story above may or may not be relevant, but the laptop suddenly stopped being able to boot.

If I try to turn it on, I get the chime, the logo appears and the spinning wheel appears. It'll stay that way for about a minute before the screen just goes white. Also, every fourth line on the display is off colour, like so:



Right off the bat this screams logic board issues.

I tried a couple of the startup key combinations for fun:

• AHT: Chimes, white screen with lines, hangs there.
• Startup manager: Chimes, shows me the disk/network options, still has the lines.
• Safe mode: Chimes, logo + wheel + super slow loading bar, displays the line. Hung at like 10% for 2 minutes, so I shut it down.
• Verbose mode: Chimes, the blue background is even more "line-y", no especially threatening messages pop up, eventually finishes and the screen goes white. Area around the fans/cpu/gpu gets a bit more hot than above.
• Recovery mode: Chimes, presents the correct menu (albeit with lines), does what it has to do then I get a white screen.
• NVRAM reset: Ha ha, yeah. Chimes, displays the logo + wheel with no apparent screen artifacts, kinda looks like it's going to make it, then it's a rapid succession of random screen glitches typical of a graphic processor flipping out because of overheating. Fans/cpu/gpu region becomes unbearably hot and after hitting what I'm guessing is the TJMax, themal protection kicks in and the laptop resets. Back to square one after that.

Did a quick tear down to look into a few ideas. Cleaned up any dust build-up and reapplied thermal paste, made sure everything is properly plugged in, confirmed the fans were working. There was no apparent damage, but it's not like you'll usually see any.

On the one hand the display problems point to a shot logic board, but the rapid heat build-up is throwing me off, as the graphic glitches might just be a symptom of hardware overheating.

If it's the latter, I'm not exactly sure what would be the cause. As I said, the fans look ok, it's not plugged in and there's a good contact between the sink and the cpu along with proper thermal paste.

Since it's out of warranty I'm not sure if I even want to pay for a diagnosis since at this point I'm pretty sure the solution involves dropping a thousand plus dollars on a part for a laptop that's no spring chicken.

Any ideas of what I could do to confirm logic board death? Thanks!

 

Your MacBook Pro has succumbed to "Radeongate," a fatal flaw not unlike the the infamous NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT that got companies sued a while back. The issue is the environmentally friendly lead-free solder breaking down due to heating and cooling cycles, causing the GPU to separate from the logic board. This defect is common to all 15- and 17-inch MacBook Pros from 2011. Normally this would require a replacement logic board, which would cost about $300-350 for a flat-rate mail-in/depot repair. However, this would just kick the can down the road because the new/refurbished part would have the same problem. The better option would be to have the GPU "re-balled" with better quality solder, finished off with a proper application of thermal paste and a tight connection with the heatsink. The process typically costs less than $200 and should provide a much longer lasting result.

This place is highly regarded among those who have had their Macs undergo the procedure.

 

Yup, that fits. Easy and cheap fix and I get to blame this on hippes, awesome.