Freezes in graphics intensive programs

E

EvANighT

Registered
http://discussions.apple.com/thread.jspa?threadID=1697470&tstart=0

Computer: Macbook Pro 15" 2.0Ghz with Rosetta, ATI X1600 graphics card, 1 gig RAM.

Problem: There will be horizontal pixel lines when the temperature goes above 50 degrees celsius. The computer will freeze in games randomly (particularly Warcraft III).

What I've noticed:

Apple+Q and Apple+option+escape does not do anything. Because it forces me to restart, I have no logs.

Other Macs can run in temperatures over 60 degrees celsius perfectly fine while mine cannot. When I put it on an A/C unit set at 40 degrees fahrenheit, I don't get any horizontal lines or freezes. (maybe the mac shuts off things at a particular temperature to prevent overheating and the set temperature was lowered)

Freezes vary from instantly going to a black screen, a green screen with vertical white lines, or just a normal freeze.
In a normal freeze, if I have iTunes playing in background, it won't be affected and will continue to play the song. (background processes may still be fine).
The green and black freezes will make the same sound repeat over and over.

Warcraft III (in-game) will sometimes start flickering in large random areas of the screen and it usually leads to a freeze.

Sometimes it will freeze even when the temperature isn't hot. (without warning)

What I've done:
reinstalled the OS and just installed Warcraft III to test display (still froze)
replaced the thermal paste
cleaned out the dust

The link above shows other details from other people with the same problem.
 
I've searched the web countless times to try to solve this problem, and I've finally found someone with the exact same problem as me. The OP summarizes exactly my situation - however, running a apple hardware test did not help solve the issue. Everything came out fine, but if you saw the state my macbook pro is in, you would clearly find it is running 2-10x slower than it should be and freezes rampantly when I try to do anything remotely graphical. I believe it may have something to do with the ATY RadeonX1600 graphics card, since we seem to have that in common. Also, note that it isn't an over heating issue - my fan control monitor usually says around 52 Celsius when I crash, which isn't high at all from what I've heard. Can someone please help solve this issue?
 
As per Giaguara said, it sounds like a hardware fault - it only takes one component to overheat on a circuit board for (say) the video driver circuits to cut out and random things to start happening. The way to test this I think is to get a can of compressed refrigerant and spray it on the suspect component. I had a problem like this with my 3rd generation eMac (actually the reverse of your problem) whereby the video wouldn't work until the machine had warmed up. Eventually it would only boot in single user mode, and the problem was due to a blown capacitor - the single user mode didn't load in or use all of the functionality of the video card because it's designed as a "safe" mode, whereas in the normal login mode it did. Another possibility is that the board might need to be reflowed - some of the video chips are very densely packed ball grid array components, and changes in temperature might mean the connections are not all being made correctly. The fact that your problem happens more often with particular applications suggests that it is likely to be the video card, because WoW will be making much more use of it than Firefox or Photoshop.
 
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