I admit I'm really the motherboard changed by apple just died. I invested last year in 16Go RAM, a SSD hard drive and a new battery few months ago. Now I'm on an old computer and it's just so slow, I'm running crazy. The thing is: I work with my computer 12h/day and I need photoshop badly. My repairman said the "motherboard is dead". My hard drive is ok, mounted in another computer and running great.
What has me VERY confused is why would this work when the recall was for the discrete graphics chip? You'd think I would need to force my Mac to NOT use the discrete chip with GFXCardStatus.1 1/2 year ago, Apple replaced my motherboard as per their program on defectuous motherboards on this model. Forcing the MPB to use discrete graphics has appeared to help. I promptly ran GFXCardStatus and set it to Discrete Only and I appear to be running fine now.īeforehand, at most I could run the laptop for less than a minute and the screen would go black and I'd be forced to shut it down.
I got curious after reading your post and plugged in external monitor to force the discreet card to run and it booted up. The second replacement seemed to work but now years later I've got the vertical lines again and booting problems that I saw with the beginning stages of the other logic board graphics chip failures. During the recall period I had the logic board replaced twice. I suppose I do need to be only running on integrated to run the Mac now.
To turn off the dual graphics capability of the GPU, install gfxCardStatus for Mac
I’ve saved about twenty 2011 15” MBP using this gem, it’s also free -) It uses a completely different GPU and will last you a good while into the foreseeable future.
You may need to do a slight modification to the LCD cable to get it to fit in the new board. These use a different chip and will work. If you have a 15 inch, I'd say get a 2012 board for it. You can replace the battery with easy contrary to the 2012 and up Retina. These machines are nice as far as serviceability. The heat involved in reballing will do the same thing that a $30 heatgun from home depot will do. This again will only last for a short amount of time. Heat will make the chip work for a short amount of time. Sellers on ebay that claim to replace the GPUs are more often than not heating the chip up with a heatgun. Most supposed "New" AMD chipsets are either rejects or reballed garbage, so while soldering a new chip to the board is not a problem, getting a good chip that can last and be reliable is.
So with these, pretty much any chips we can get for them will not last very long.