NVIDIA Chip Instability Spreading to 17″ MacBook Pros?

Lonnie Lazar ()

Back in December we wrote about a potential land-mine of problems for owners of new MacBook Pro 15’ notebooks, related to possibly defective NVIDIA GeForce 9400 graphics processor chips that Apple may have knowingly shipped with some units in 2008.

So far, the major storm speculated about by the Inquirer in that report does not appear to have manifested. But new reports Friday regarding some threads in the Apple support forum indicate that some owners of the new MacBook Pro 17’ model are complaining about a persistent graphics issue related to the NVIDIA GeForce 9600 chip included in those machines.

Recently some NVIDIA notebook GPUs began failing that were used in many notebook computers from Dell and Apple among others. The GPU failures ultimately led to a lawsuit being filed against NVIDIA by some affected notebook owners.

The current issue manifests in green lines that appear all over the notebook screen. More than one user is having the same exact issue, even on new notebooks. The error appears to be limited solely to the 9600M GPU. At this point, if a replacement is needed for the GPU or a firmware fix will suffice is unknown.

Is your new MacBook Pro 17’ giving you graphics fits? Let us know in comments below.

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About the author

Lonnie Lazar

Lonnie Lazar is a writer-musician-web designer-attorney. He writes about Apple for Cult of Mac and Mac|Life, and about VoIP and telecommunications for Voxilla. Follow Lonnie on Twitter @LonnieLazar, join the Cult of Mac on Facebook, and find Lonnie's photos on Flickr.

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Posted in Hardware, News |

  • Ron

    I’ve had this anomaly on my 1st gen Macbook Pro with ATI X1600. I think it was after I upgraded to Leopard. But the green raster lines are horizontal, not vertical. It happens daily but I’ve reluctantly learned to live with it. Maybe that’s why I’m not changing to any new Macbooks yet, cos I’m disappointed with Apple’s quality control on graphics in recent years. I’m still scanning all reviews of any new Macbook Pros coming out of Apple.
    As for desktops like the Mac Pro, they are fine. No anomalies of any kind! Just fast, reliable, dependable, etc. What else can I say? Mac Pros are the best machines on the planet!

  • http://razuna.com Nitai

    I have a new 15″ MBP since 3 month and I see at least 4 times a day a flickering on the screen. It has gotten worse with the latest NVidia Firmware update. I have only owned MBP’s in the last couple of years, but never seen something like this before. Otherwise the MBP is a great machine.

    Kind Regards,
    Nitai

  • imajoebob

    Up to now I inferred the delay in the 17″ MBP had something to do with making the one-piece frame. I’m now thinking it may have been otherwise.

  • http://attayn.com Yan

    I am rocking the new 17 Macbook Pro and have no issues. Perhaps this is a slow news week for this site. Perhaps.

  • bowdenski

    My powerbook had a recalled battery that I was never contacted about, memory card slot problems that were covered on machines right after mine (but not mine), bad wifi, and a screen that broke. I was on the phone for hours trying to get help while everyone was busy selling phones. It seemed many on the net had the same problems,
    my LAST APPLE was a LEMON.

  • Carl

    I have this exact problem when runnign the 9600 discrete Nvidia card on my brand new MBP 17″ – it starte 10 minutes after 1st boot – and gets worse as the card heats up (e.g. when gaming/working the GPU).

    Very very disappointing – my old 17″ MBP has none of this rubbish :(

  • Mihai

    Probably similar to Nitai, I see a really annoying flickering of the screen, but only when using the “better battery life” graphics card. After a while the screen refresh rate becomes so slow, you can actually see white screens between frame changes. Loging out and back in solves the problem. The “genius” guys claim it’s not a hardware problem, but firmware.
    I have a late 2008 Macbook Pro.
    I’m really really annoyed about such a basic bug in a 2500+$ machine…
    Regards,
    Mihai

  • pierre hivert

    Just got my new macBook pro 17″ to replace my 15″, with 4GB of Ram, the fastest 2.93 Ghz intel core duo processor and the fastest drive. It works slower than my MBP 15″ which had similar settings. slow to move from one window to other in spaces, slow to get opening of softwares, getting the wheel too often….
    Called the apple support, was asked to run the test from disk one on opening
    all is normal…… any body could help would be great, apple cant!
    Regards,
    Pierre