2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load • Hacker News Board

Re: 2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

#21

Post by Queue29 » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 1:34 PM UTC

IanField90 wrote: post #6

modoc wrote: post #4

I had the same issue. Instantly cured it by disabling the "Automatic graphics switching" option. Hopefully there will be a better fix forthcoming, but for now it's pretty easy to solve. Even with that headache, this is by far the best laptop I've ever owned. Amazingly fast.

I guess that this doesn't occur on the 13" models then?

I can vouch for my 13" model. It's rock solid, but when the fan does kick in, it sounds like a turbine spinning up. No freezes though, as this is almost definitely the fault of the ATI drivers (which the 13" model doesn't have).

Re: 2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

#22

Post by lamnk » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 1:41 PM UTC

ramanujam wrote: post #20

I had the 13" 2010 version and got bumped up for the free exchange since i was in the one month window and got the new 2011 version. I noticed that when i started Parallels and opened my second windows VM instance everything came to a stand still and i had to restart. I also saw someone in the Apple discussion threads mentioning a similar issue while running Vmware fusion. I will try the 'Automatic graphics switching…

Huh? Since when can the 13" model switch graphic cards ?

Re: 2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

#23

Post by zdw » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 1:44 PM UTC

uptown wrote: post #19

Somewhat off-topic, but I trust the judgement of those here. I'm in the market to buy one of these. I was wondering whether current owners feel the extra 2MB of L3 cache justifies the price-bump of the 2.3GHz processor.

Depends on whether the code you're running will use the extra cache. In some HPC and gaming circumstances, people write in assembler to make sure a code loop or the data structure being worked on fits totally within the L1 or L2 cache of the processor, which can provide a huge performance improvement.

But, for standard use without such specialized workloads, $250 a minor clockspeed and cache improvement doesn't make much sense.

You'd probably get a much bigger boost from adding a SSD or going up to 8GB of RAM in the machine. I'd buy these aftermarket - RAM especially is a good deal as you can get 8GB of DDR3-1333 for less than $90 - http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148...

Re: 2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

#24

Post by celalo » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 1:49 PM UTC

swah wrote: post #13

modoc wrote: post #4

I had the same issue. Instantly cured it by disabling the "Automatic graphics switching" option. Hopefully there will be a better fix forthcoming, but for now it's pretty easy to solve. Even with that headache, this is by far the best laptop I've ever owned. Amazingly fast.

About the speed: how can these laptops be getting twice the speed, twice the graphics performance, etc ? Didn't the previous model already had the i5 and i7?

they are now with 4 cores with higher clock frequency

Re: 2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

#25

Post by Tyrant505 » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 2:03 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #8

patrickod wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What particular model of MacBook Pro are you referring to? Those with Nvidia GeForce 9400M ?

The early-2008 models, with the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT. http://support.apple.com/kb/ts2377

Mine is still rockin, same vid card... best machine I've ever bought! (first mac)

Re: 2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

#26

Post by reitzensteinm » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 2:30 PM UTC

zdw wrote: post #23

uptown wrote: post #19

Somewhat off-topic, but I trust the judgement of those here. I'm in the market to buy one of these. I was wondering whether current owners feel the extra 2MB of L3 cache justifies the price-bump of the 2.3GHz processor.

Depends on whether the code you're running will use the extra cache. In some HPC and gaming circumstances, people write in assembler to make sure a code loop or the data structure being worked on fits totally within the L1 or L2 cache of the processor, which can provide a huge performance improvement. But, for standard use without such specialized workloads, $250 a minor clockspeed and cache improvement doesn't make…

Definitely second getting an SSD instead. It's the single biggest upgrade you can do to a PC today, especially for laptops. If you can live with 128gb of storage, a RealSSD C300, the current performance king (although check Anandtech for updates, this is changing all the time) is $264 from Newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820148...

This thing will do 30,000 4k writes a second, which is orders of magnitude more than a 2.5" mechanical.

Re: 2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

#27

Post by beedogs » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 2:32 PM UTC

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #17

swah wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

About the speed: how can these laptops be getting twice the speed, twice the graphics performance, etc ? Didn't the previous model already had the i5 and i7?

They did have i5 and i7, but Sandy Bridge versions is new as well as Thunderbolt

Yes, but nothing uses Thunderbolt.

Re: 2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

#28

Post by jpitz » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 2:44 PM UTC

uptown wrote: post #19

Somewhat off-topic, but I trust the judgement of those here. I'm in the market to buy one of these. I was wondering whether current owners feel the extra 2MB of L3 cache justifies the price-bump of the 2.3GHz processor.

Totally depends on what you do: I have a 2.6ghz 2010 MBP with an Intel SSD that has been the screamer at our office for quite a while now. My office mate just got a 2011, and even though he has yet to get an SSD in it yet, he runs our integration test suite ( java JUnit stuff, heavy mix of cpu and disk io ) in half the time I can ( thats 7 minutes vs 14 ), and where my cpus stay at 75-90% the whole time, his never breaks 15. Now, on the compile target that I run 10-20 times a day, my machine is still a second or two faster, but I suspect that advantage will evaporate once he has that SSD.

Re: 2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

#29

Post by incomethax » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 2:53 PM UTC

modoc wrote: post #4

I had the same issue. Instantly cured it by disabling the "Automatic graphics switching" option. Hopefully there will be a better fix forthcoming, but for now it's pretty easy to solve. Even with that headache, this is by far the best laptop I've ever owned. Amazingly fast.

I've had this problem when playing sc2 as well, and if I play for any appreciable amount of time, even disabling automatic graphics switching doesn't help.

I've actually talked to Blizzard about this (I thought it was a problem confined to SC2), and they indicated that Apple was working on a fix for this.

Re: 2011 MacBook Pros Crash Under Load

#30

Post by joelhaasnoot » Sun, Mar 20, 2011, 2:58 PM UTC

beedogs wrote: post #27

joelhaasnoot wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did have i5 and i7, but Sandy Bridge versions is new as well as Thunderbolt

Yes, but nothing uses Thunderbolt.

Yes, but it's a good buzzword bingo addition. Ok, yes, it's overrated, and Apple wants you to buy a new one. The main point was the new Sandy Bridge processors. Which are supposedly lots faster (and I have an original i7 in my Lenovo which is a monster, can't imagine how fast it would be)