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You are here: MacNN Forums > News > Mac News > Apple launches Repair Extension Program for 2013 Mac Pro video issues

Apple launches Repair Extension Program for 2013 Mac Pro video issues
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NewsPoster
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Feb 6, 2016, 01:44 PM
 
Apple is establishing a Repair Extension Program for 2013 Mac Pro models, according to details provided in a leaked internal notice. It is said Apple and Authorized Service Providers will be able to repair certain Mac Pro systems manufactured early last year, after determining that graphics cards used in the production of the Mac Pro at that time were error-prone, causing freezing, restarts, video distortions, and in some cases preventing the Mac Pro from booting entirely.

According to MacRumors, Mac Pro units manufactured between February 8 and April 11 of 2015 will be eligible for a free repair, via Apple itself or an authorized service partner. Appointments can be booked with both the Genius Bar at an Apple Store or via the service partner to determine if the Mac Pro is affected and covered by the program, with the repair itself said to be free to customers.

It is believed Apple will not publicly announce the program, though it may elect to contact some customers already identified to be having video-related issues who could benefit from the program. It is unknown how many Mac Pro users are affected by issues, as Apple does not provide a sales breakdown for individual products, but it is said to have sold around 4.5 million Macs in total during the quarter in question.
( Last edited by NewsPoster; Feb 6, 2016 at 08:11 PM. )
     
machilfe
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Feb 6, 2016, 03:04 PM
 
Just as a note for anyone trying/thinking to buy and use a LG 31MU97-B connected to a MacPro 2013 or any other Thunderbolt equiped Mac.
This monitor (and probably others as well) do have a sync problem if you use Displayport, miniDisplayport or HDMI connections and want to use resolutions above 2560x and below 4096x. In this range of resolutions, it happens up to 90% of the time, that afte a cold start, the last setting of the resolution and (don't know why) the desktop background will change back to 4096x and the default system desktop background.
I've spend the last 6 month batteling with Apple Support Hotline as well as with LG Europe. (And I lost, sadly)
So my advice is to check the monitor together with your Mac to be used, befor buying any 4K Monitor.
     
Mike Wuerthele
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Feb 6, 2016, 03:41 PM
 
Can you email us more details about your problem to [email protected] please? Thanks.
     
panjandrum
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Feb 7, 2016, 02:30 PM
 
OK, let's face it. This is extremely likely to be a result of the same issue Apple (even during the Jobsian era) has been designing into their products for over a decade: Overheating video chipsets. Doing this, repeatedly, over and over, destroys the video card. They need to include proper cooling. Even if they have to sacrifice 5% of whatever their "ultimate" industrial design is at the time, and even if they have to (gasp) make the fans run a bit faster. It's an ongoing, ever-present, continuous issue with Apple products, from the iMac to the Mac Pro to the MacBook Pro. (Word of warning and advice to those of you hitting your GPU hard on Apple hardware, whether it's rendering or gaming; and whether it's in the Mac OS or Windows Bootcamp, absolutely, positively, run MacsFanControl or another fan-control app and crank every fan in the box up all the way whenever hitting that GPU hard. Keep the entire interior of your "box" as cool as possible. Don't install your system under a desk or in any environment that blocks heat from escaping by trapping a pocket of warm air. If you absolutely, positively, can't install your system in a place with good ventilation then purchase a small, quiet, box fan and use that to increase ventilation around the unit. If you EVER start seeing video-artifacting then things are not running cool enough and you need to do something to sort it out. Finally, if you run games in Windows, cap your frame-rate at the lowest setting that still plays well. For example, I cap the vast majority of games I play on my MPB at 30fps, even though many of them will run faster. This means less workload on the GPU and lower heat.) This is a design-flaw Apple really needs to resolve. It's been the single biggest most-consistent single-issue hardware failure I've ever seen (outside of traditional HDD failures).
     
demani
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Feb 7, 2016, 02:35 PM
 
We had 9 of 9 machines fail-all would have been under that program.
     
Steve Wilkinson
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Feb 9, 2016, 02:23 PM
 
@ panjandrum - Yea, and this was supposed to be the whole point of the Pro!

I'm glad they are taking care of it, but sheesh. I've harmed some of my own machines over the years running 3D renderings or Folding@home. It seems they (non-Pro) are built for bursts of performance, but not being pushed for hours or 24x7 (CPU or GPU).

My solution has been, as you say, to take extra cooling precautions... stand and external fans over laptop case... upping the internal fans (which burns them out more quickly)... or reducing the CPU/GPU load by some percentage. For example, I run F@H 24x7 on my iMac, but I have it only using 2 of the 4 cores. Easier done in some apps than others!

And, that's the whole reason I'd like a Pro, so I could just put it to work and not worry about it. Hopefully this is just some flaw in a particular manufacturing run.
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panjandrum
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Feb 9, 2016, 06:05 PM
 
I expect it would very easy to design a good, quiet, external cooling solution for the so-called "MacPro" (IMHO, the entire design is a bad joke anyway, so I'm not exactly surprised that Apple didn't bother to design their powerhouse-computer to actually function in the role it is supposed to fill.) Someone might have already made an external cooler I would imagine.

To be clear, I've never encountered a single Mac with a baked CPU, only GPUs. The CPU throttling seems to "work well" (if you consider under-cooling a unit and then forcing the CPU speed to throttle vastly more often than it should, "working well") enough to prevent the CPU from actually self-immolating. However, if you are hitting the CPU hard you can benefit from cooling your system, either via. the internal fans (if you have them of course) or externally. I'm able to keep my MBP cool enough with MacsFanControl in Bootcamp that playing games that peg all 4 cores near 100% all the time will still never throttle the CPU. So, basically, if you want to get consistent, reliable, maximum performance out of your Apple hardware, you better be cooling more than Apple's default cooling scheme allows...
     
Steve Wilkinson
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Feb 10, 2016, 01:12 AM
 
Originally Posted by panjandrum View Post
To be clear, I've never encountered a single Mac with a baked CPU, only GPUs. The CPU throttling seems to "work well" (if you consider...
Yea, my last MBP was eventually just flaky. While it exhibited GPU issues when hot, it would also totally freeze up without much of any GPU use if the CPU was stressed at all. So long as I kept it cool (i.e.: on a stand with an external fan cooling it, it ran like a champ. I hosted a Minecraft server on it for a couple years until going with a service for that, and even sold it to a guy, who to my knowledge, is still using it. The caveat was that it's basically a desktop now... it has to have that stand and fans (I used a couple of silent magnetic bearing fans mounted behind the stand.

My theory is that maybe the excess CPU heat, while not taking the CPU itself out, damaged the GPU or other aspects of the system. A friend even helped me disassemble it and redo the thermal compound and such, but that didn't help.

Anyway, I had stuff like that happen to a few machines over the years, so I've always warned people not to run non-Pro macs at 100% for too long.

The Pros, I thought, were fine doing so... but maybe not? I know my friend ran a whole batch of them for over a week as maxed out as he could make them before implementing them into a project, and he didn't report any issues. So, hopefully this is an isolated case.

I'm not doing it much any longer, but I used to do a lot of 3D rendering work... been thinking of picking some of that back up again, as some of the 3D work I've seen locally for building sites and such has been really bad (I was doing *much* better stuff back in the late 90s). I loved it, too... but it became more of a too-many-irons type thing.
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Steve Wilkinson
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