Nvidia and MacBook Pro issues

Posted by Samuel Williams Wed, 23 Jul 2008 10:47:00 GMT

While I was in Japan, I bought a new MacBook Pro (identified as MacBookPro4,1). It is a really nice machine, and a great upgrade from my aging PowerMac G4. I do a lot of compiling, and the two cores really makes a huge difference. However, I’ve had quite a few issues that all point towards something a bit faulty with the hardware. With the recent admission from Nvidia about faulty graphics cards, one has to wonder what is going on here, and what Apple plans to do about the problem.

Firstly, let me describe the problem. There are many variations, however it generally goes like this:

  1. Typically after waking up (but can occur at any point in time)
  2. The machine goes in to a strange cycle of being very slow or completely frozen, for about 3-10 seconds, and then usable again for 3-5 seconds.
  3. There may be graphical anomelies, ranging from small graphical glitches, to major psychedelic episodes.
  4. The only way to fix this is by restarting the machine.

Here are some examples of point 3. Please note that I’m only giving examples that I’ve found on the internet which look identical to experiences I’ve had with my laptop.

  1. YouTube: MacBook Pro - Screen gone crazy
  2. YouTube: Graphical corruption
  3. YouTube: GeForce 8800 GS Corruption on POST
  4. Flickr Photos and information about repairs

Number 1 is really typical. Number 2 is another variation of it. Number 3 is one that I’ve seen a number of times on my computer - but not when booting up - I can’t recall any issues ever when booting up. Number 4 is very interesting and goes into details how multiple repairs to the logic board did not solve the problem.

In the console log, you might find errors such as:

23/07/08 2:18:54 AM /usr/libexec/hidd[37] IOHIDEventQueueEnqueue: Error enqueuing memory.

I get the above error frequently, sometimes it shows up without any other associated problems. For people who are non-technical, HID stands for Human Interface Device, and generally refers to USB. The keyboard and trackpad on most (all?) Apple laptops is considered a USB device.

I’ve only ever got the below message once, however I’ve seen other people mention the relation of this log message and graphical problems.

May 27 23:28:46 Mochi kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel timeout!
May 27 23:28:54 Mochi kernel[0]: NVChannel(GL): Graphics channel exception!  status = 0xffff info32 = 0x3 = Fifo: Unknown Method Error
< ... snip a whole bunch of numbers and other junk ...>

There is also some further discussion about this issue on the Apple Discussion website, here, and here.

I think this is pretty crappy - the YouTube video linked above is exactly what has happened to me several times. The strange thing is, the computer is still running “fine” - i.e. it is possible to quit apps and shutdown the machine normally (most of the time - sometimes it locks up completely).

Also, I enjoy to play games, typically ones that use OpenGL or DirectX. Many of the games I play run under Windows. I’ve had many games cause this machine to crash to a blue screen randomly. I know that people might say that blue screen is typical of Windows.. well I have a feeling they are actually related to graphics. One thing I noticed was that in Windows, the computer seems to get very hot.

I think even though the computer gets hot, it shouldn’t crash. Apple should design the laptop and its firmware to deal with situations where it is being pushed hard, and apply appropriate cooling. In other words, I don’t think it is wrong to push the machine to its limits - heck, its designed as a “Pro” machine.

The next strange thing I read, was about Nvidia chips being faulty. The Inquirer’s article (3rd one) is particularly good.

  1. Engadget: All Nvidia 8400M/8600M Chips Faulty?
  2. Ars Technica: Nvidia denies rumors of mass GPU failures
  3. The Inquirer: Nvidia G84/G86 bad

Some of the comments to these articles indicates that the problem is affecting other laptop manufacturers, such as Dell and HP.

  1. HP Laptop Thread with image

At this point, I wonder what to do?