Is it worth repairing the graphics card/logic board?

Is it worth repairing the graphics card/logic board?

I have had this laptop since 2011 and it has held up pretty well along the way. I had the logic board replaced years ago during the recall program that Apple had. The repair was due to damage to the GPU presumably caused by lots of overheating, which I hear is common with this particular MacBook Pro model. Anyway, I've had it replaced once, and it's kicked the bucket again, leading to blue lines across the screen on boot and not being able to get passed the loading screen.

Asked by: Guest | Views: 181

Total answers/comments: 4

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bert [Entry]

"So with these, pretty much any chips we can get for them will not last very long. 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.

Sellers on ebay that claim to replace the GPUs are more often than not heating the chip up with a heatgun. Heat will make the chip work for a short amount of time.

Others will claim to reball the GPU. This again will only last for a short amount of time. The issue is not the solder balls. It's the bumps in the die itself. The heat involved in reballing will do the same thing that a $30 heatgun from home depot will do.

These machines are nice as far as serviceability... You can replace the battery with easy contrary to the 2012 and up Retina. If you have a 15 inch, I'd say get a 2012 board for it. These use a different chip and will work. You may need to do a slight modification to the LCD cable to get it to fit in the new board.

The board you want is a 820-3330. It uses a completely different GPU and will last you a good while into the foreseeable future."

bert [Entry]

"I’ve saved about twenty 2011 15” MBP using this gem, it’s also free ;-)

To turn off the dual graphics capability of the GPU, install gfxCardStatus for Mac

Download https://gfx.io

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

Go to the  Apple menu and choose “System Preferences” and then go to “Energy” control panelUncheck the box next to “Automatic graphics switching”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. This may decrease battery life.” – if you are not OK with that do not disable this optionClose out of System PreferencesYou can always return to the Energy preference panel to re-enable the GPU switching feature if desired.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.https://gfx.io/switching.html"

bert [Entry]

"http://www.powerbookmedic.com/xcart1/pag...

I’m about to ship my laptop into these guys. Looks like they do great work!"

bert [Entry]

"Check this post on how to deactivate the discrete AMD chip.

very useful!

https://apple.stackexchange.com/question..."