I got the 2011 MBP for free from a customer who didn't want it anymore, and I paid around $110 for a donor 2012 MBP from eBay. I swapped the board in my 2011 15" MBP because it didn't cost me much in total. There's not a whole lot that you could really screw up if something did go wrong (but chances are it won't), and even then parts are pretty cheap. Doing a board swap with these machines isn't too difficult, but if you're wanting to get into electronic repair stuff it's a good place to start. I ended up paying less than the price of a fully functional 2012 MacBook Pro, and mine is in pretty good shape overall. The logic board was bad (GPU failure, but it isn't broken in the normal way, and it can't be fixed), so I bought a cheap 2012 MBP from eBay, swapped the logic board over, and now I have a fully functional 2012 15" MacBook Pro. I recently did this with a 2011 15" MacBook Pro myself. You could even sell the rest of the parts from the donor machine (along with the failed 2011 logic board) to make up some of the money from buying the donor in the first place. Just swap the board into your chassis and you've got a 2012 MacBook Pro in decent condition.
Even if the rest of the computer is broken it's fine so long as the logic board works. You could find a 2012 15" MBP (non-Retina, of course) that has a working logic board. If you want to have a secondary computer and you feel like putting a little bit of time into the 2011 MBP you already have then this could be a good option. Dosdude1 offers that service if you want to look into it.Īlternatively you could swap the board out with a 2012 logic board. You could disable the dedicated GPU entirely and rely on the integrated Intel HD graphics, but you'd have to spend money to flash the board or pay to have someone flash it for you. The computer isn't worth much, so investing more money might not be worth it.Īt what point do you accept that the computer is broken and not repair it? Or is my computer still worth fixing? If so, what are some resources I can use to repair my 2011 Macbook Pro?Īt this point it's probably not worth fixing the 2011 logic board. I would like to have this computer working, but don't need it. I know some people have repaired this by replacing the board or upgrading the internals with a 2012 Unibody MBP, but I don't know if it's worth doing. After some research, I think it's the graphics card that failed. Whenever I try to boot a fresh copy of OS X, the screen eventually becomes black and hangs there. I quickly bought another MBP (2015 15" fully loaded) and was able to transfer all of my documents to the new laptop. 3 years ago it started to shutdown frequently with no warning. It was great for the first 2 years of college. Over time, I upgraded to a 1TB SSD and 16GB of RAM.
#Macbook pro 2011 graphics card upgrade mac
The first mac I bought was a 2011 15" MBP.