# Wierd Video Problem on MacBook Pro



## nathaningram (Nov 18, 2008)

I have about a 1.5 year old MacBook Pro (15" 2.33 GHz Intel Core2Duo). A few days ago, I was playing a video in Quicktime and the video card/driver went nuts. Ever since I've had little checkerboxes on the screen intermittently. See attached photo. I'm a PC guy till recently. Ive seen things like this happen on a PC and it was bad video memory or a driver issue. I have no basis to troubleshoot this on a Mac. All help appreciated.

Nathan in AL


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

Yes, it's a bad video card. You need to contact Apple for repair. I'll guess that your Macbook Pro has one of Nvidia's 8600M chips in it. And if you haven't heard, they were all bad, they cook themselves over time due to poor materials used in the die. If you talk nice, they may even do the repair for little or no charge as they are aware of the bad GPUs, and have done some for free.


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## nathaningram (Nov 18, 2008)

It's actually a Radeon X1600. Are there known issues with these?

So far, it may be a heat-related problem. I installed smcFanControl and have the fans running about 3500 rpm. No problem since... *fingers crossed*


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## sinclair_tm (Mar 11, 2005)

That would show that it is a heat problem, so I would get it to Apple as once glitches show up like that, it means that there is hardware damage. It maybe something as simple as the heatsink not properly attached, or as bad as the GPU being cooked.


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