So the dreaded day came when my beloved “late 2011” 17 inch MacBook Pro died.\u00a0 The screen wigged out while it was in use, then it would only boot halfway before stopping at a gray screen.\u00a0 From experience, I knew that it was suffering from the dreaded AMD GPU logic board failure.\u00a0 What commonly happens is that the solder joints in or around the GPU daughter-card fail over time, resulting in a gray, blank or garbled screen.<\/p>\n
Ordinarily I would not attempt to repair any board with solder failure but new logic boards are simply not available for the late 2011 models and used ones are absurdly expensive (and may be close to failing anyway).\u00a0 The repair I describe below worked perfectly for my 17 incher and also applies to the 15 inch models from the same era.<\/p>\n
IMHO, Apple has never made a better laptop for the the specific use case scenario where some limited portability is required and screen real estate is more important than size\/weight.\u00a0 This was the last of the 17-inchers, perhaps forever, and I plan to keep using it until it is pried out of my cold dead hands.\u00a0 Okay, the last part is a bit of an exaggeration but my MBP does everything I need it to do and is still plenty fast.\u00a0 Over the years I’ve managed to keep it ticking by upgrading to 16 GB RAM–Apple only officially supports 8 GB, but this works just fine thank you very much–and a 1 TB SSD.<\/p>\n
Several people suggested that I should just put the old relic out to pasture and update to a new 15″ MacBook Pro.\u00a0 “You can fit even more stuff on the new 15 inch screen!” they say.\u00a0 Indeed, the 17-incher’s 1920 X 1200 pixel native resolution seems puny compared with the current 2880 X 1800 px Retina display.\u00a0 But my eyes ain’t what they used to be and cramming my workspace into 15 inches just makes everything too darned small.<\/p>\n
Anyway, back to the repair.\u00a0 The least intrusive way to make a MBP with GPU failure operational again is to disable the AMD GPU via software.\u00a0 The built-in Intel GPU will take over but video performance for demanding tasks would suffer greatly.\u00a0 I use my laptop for photo editing so that wasn’t a viable option.<\/p>\n
The other common fix is to reflow the solder in and around the GPU by using a heat source.\u00a0 Multiple techniques, ranging from reckless (and cheap) to professional (and expensive) have been applied, with mixed success.\u00a0 I hit the web to see what worked best.<\/p>\n
During my research, mainly on Youtube, solutions included:\u00a0 bake your MacBook in the kitchen oven at 350 degrees for an hour (like a cake?), disconnect the fans and leave it running and wrapped in blankets for a couple of hours (so snug and warm), open the bottom cover and hit the logic board with a hairdryer until you smell stuff melting, or (yawn) remove the logic board and put it though a programmed heating profile in an expensive professional reflow oven.\u00a0 This video<\/a> was one of my favorites.<\/p>\n So lacking a reflow oven but wanting to be halfway scientific about doing the job, I decided to reflow the GPU using a common hot air gun<\/a>.\u00a0 This video<\/a> does a good job at demonstrating the technique and is pretty close to how I did it.\u00a0 The time\/temperature points I chose are a little different based on my review of lead free solder reflow oven profiles, with times and temperatures increased slightly to compensate for hot air heating inefficiency.<\/p>\n Note that all temperatures are specified in degrees Centigrade<\/strong>.<\/p>\n So far my success rate with this process is 100% \ud83d\ude42\u00a0 During my web research, I saw several comments indicating that this repair should be viewed as only temporary because the original design is flawed.\u00a0 But if it my trusty 2011 17″ works for another six years, I’ll be more than satisfied with the couple of hours time invested in fixing it.<\/p>\n This repair was performed in March 2018 and I’ll make a follow-up post if the same failure occurs sometime in the future.<\/p>\nHot air reflow procedure<\/h3>\n
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Conclusion<\/h3>\n