re: Late 2011 Macbook Pro continued issues-Need advice

Just pick up this 8GB for $50: LINK

Unless I'm mistaken (I just Googled specs for your model year), your DIMM slots are occupied by two 2GB modules, so the 8GB kit would replace all of your RAM.

Just put in the 8GB RAM, and although it was moving really well before, its still moving really great. Also, I can really tell a difference in temperature on the bottom of the MBP.

Its running much better than it was before.

It won't totally kill a process to free up memory. It will simply move it to your swap file, which is just virtual memory located on your storage drive. That's a very watered down explanation of how it uses the swap file because I'm not 100% sure how OS X treats it vs. how Windows treats it. When you run low on memory in Windows, it will move the currently least-accessed memory from a program into virtual memory, and when you start using that program again, it will move it back to RAM.

I imagine it's the same on Mac with maybe a few subtle differences. If a program gets paged to a hard drive, it can seem like it killed the application entirely since it's very sluggish to load when you start using it again until it's moved back to RAM.

I have a pretty stout Late 2011 MBP (2.5 GHz Core i7, AMD 6770M, etc.) that's had a ton of issues. It was one of the models recalled in the discrete GPU failure debacle. Because I was positive that the design was faulty, I fought with Apple for over a year refusing to pay for the $700+ repair with them denying repeatedly that people were experiencing the same issue. Finally, after a year of having a paperweight of a MBP, they recalled and fixed them. It's been 5-6 months, and I'm already seeing similar behavior from prior to the GPU failing. I'd imagine that it has a few months left.

That's just the latest problem. The day my new RAM came in 2 weeks after purchasing the machine, one of the stock sticks bit the dust. No big deal, though, because I had RAM on the doorstep. Not long after, my drive failed the first time. It was replaced, again, without much hassle. Logic board failure 8 months before the GPU failed? Check.

My point here is that I paid for the best they offered of that model, and I've had almost every major component fail over 3-4 years. The mid-2011 and late-2011 models just seem to suffer from a ton of issues. My girlfriend had a 13" early-2011 or mid-2011 model that had similar issues. Personally, I have always believed that the design was always going to fail as they were shoving a ton of hardware in such a small form with the chassis being responsible for a large amount of heat dissipation. If you can't manage your fans (see BootCamp), your machine will become a hibachi grill. That is also the last model right before a major redesign that included Retina screens and much more efficient hardware. I regret buying when I did.

I'm not far off from buying a new stacked MBP for development purposes. I said I'd never buy again after all of this, but frankly, why not both? The best advice I can give you is to try to get away from the 2011 models. For every lucky soul who has one still trucking along unharmed, there are a ton of us out there who have stayed together for the kids. If you can offload that one for any solid amount or can eat the cost of a new laptop, I'd say that the benefit of not fighting with it anymore is worth the cost.

The issues seem to affect models with discrete GPUs. If I'm not mistaken, one of the 2011 iMacs also had similar issues. Outside of the switch from Nvidia to AMD and a bit of a jump in GPU power on the high-end models, there wasn't much in the way of major changes in the hardware or design. From the day I got mine, though, the heat that it put off astounded me. I'm also pretty sure that around 2011 AMD was having issues with their GPUs running hotter than usual. The increase in power along with a run of hardware that's running hotter than anticipated probably lead to the design being doomed over prolonged use.

My guess is that the increase of heat along with a bad run of solder lead to a ton of issues on the board as such drastic thermal cycling dramatically increased the rate at which the connections started to get more brittle and unstable. The fact that they were about to launch the 2012 models with Retina and more "efficient" designs probably didn't help the cause of the 2011 models as they were pretty much obsolete before most of them left the shelves.

Yeah, I try not to be biased, but I won't lie and say that I didn't at any point suspect that Apple replaced Nvidia GPUs with AMD GPUs without accounting for the extra heat that they produce. I'd say that the chipset planets aligned and that year produced a really bad combination of hardware behavior to be shoved into a small aluminum chassis with little more than weak fans and my lap to combat the heat.

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From the day I got mine, though, the heat that it put off astounded me

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Well, thats certainly one of the major differences I'm finding with the SSD, theres a lot less heat. Im still under a year since the mother board replacement, so hopefully the combo will allow me a good time of use.

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Once I get the replacement for this one, I'm going to throw a decent SSD in it, clean install, and see what I can get out of it.

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Yeah, its not a bad idea. I'm thinking that I got lucky with all of those other issues unrelated to the HD or temperature, and lucky Apple forked over $650 worth of repairs (I was pretty POed) to replace to motherboard, so now that the new SSD is in it the mother board is no longer receiving the same temperature exposure.

If you want a Samsung SSD, this thread gives you pretty much a good blue print. Let me know how it goes.