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.

- I stumbled upon your GFXCardStatus fix and I'm throughly confused.ĮDIT - success below was short-lived.

For MacBook Pro users who want to manually control their GPU use, you can use a third party tool like GFXCardStatus which has been around for quite some time and still works on most modern MacBook Pro models as well.

You can always return to the Energy preference panel to re-enable the GPU switching feature if desired.

This may decrease battery life.” – if you are not OK with that do not disable this option

Note the text which states this may decrease battery life on the MacBook Pro “When automatic switching is disabled, your computer will always use high-performance graphics.

Uncheck the box next to “Automatic graphics switching”.

Go to the  Apple menu and choose “System Preferences” and then go to “Energy” control panel.

This will disable GPU switching and force the MacBook Pro to use the higher powered discrete graphics card rather than the integrated GPU. 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.

Macbook pro a1286 logic board repair