MacBook Pro 2017 – Why Is It Crashing?

macbook pro

My MacBook Pro 2017 under heavy loads (gaming, rendering videos in Camtasia, recording screen casts with OBS, etc.).

Here's a video of it

It keeps crashing and it gives me what I call the screen of black death from Apple:

enter image description here.

Or my games will simply shut down when playing in Windows 10

I notice when it crashes when I run OBS, the cores and other areas don't seem to be overheated the instant it crashes.

When I bought this PC I was able to render video and play games with no problem, even at the same time…but after about 4 months it's now crashing whenever you put any intensive load on it period.

I've also heard a weird buzzing noise as if a robot were to die when it crashes sometimes. That noise doesn't happen often but has when it crashes in Windows.

It's crashing in both windows 10 and OS X High Sierra, doesn't matter. I've dual booted it with bootcamp.

Already ran a diagnostic (where you reboot, press D and whatever) and also they ran a light diagnostics test in the Apple store. They said next step is for me to have to bring it in for a few days, where they run a heavy diagnostics on it for 5 hours.

Also opened the bottom and took a can duster and cleaned out the fans and vents.

This sucks cause I'm a programmer and it sucks because I just paid 4k for this fing laptop. My Macbook 20-15 started to do this last year in fact! And that's why I bought this one! It's weird, my macbook 2015 isn't crashing anymore after turning it on after about a year, my kids are playing minecraft on it just fine but about 6 months ago that PC was crashing all the time even after I had reinstalled OS X. I don't know, I give up.

So is this normal? I've seen it spike even over 200 degrees on the cores and I'm not even doing any rendering or gaming right now in OS X. I'm just doing Chrome granted I have a lot of tabs open but no hard core streaming, rendering, or playing games.

Here's what that looks like:

enter image description here

Don't know if this is typical but I see 210 threads for kernal_task:
enter image description here

Best Answer

Troubleshooting is a process of elimination and usually requires some patience, so taking up the Apple Store offer may be a good way to proceed. However, before doing that there's a few more troubleshooting steps you can take.

To start with I would boot your Mac into Safe Mode and determine if it still displays this behaviour.

Boot into Safe Mode

Follow these steps to boot your Mac into Safe Mode:

  1. Fully shut down your MacBook Pro
  2. Restart your MacBook Pro
  3. Immediately press the Shift key and keep it down
  4. Let go of the Shift key when you see the login window (NOTE: If you have FileVault enabled you may need to log in twice).
  5. Take a note of what happens (i.e. does it still crash etc while in Safe Mode)
  6. Exit Safe Mode by restarting your Mac as normal
  7. Test again to see if it still crashes when booted normally

If you find that the problem still exists in Safe Mode, you can also try resetting the System Management Controller to see what difference, if any, that makes.

Reset the SMC

To reset the SMC, follow these steps:

  1. Shut down your MacBook Pro
  2. For 10 seconds, press and hold at the same time the shiftcontroloption keys (on the left side of the built-in keyboard) and the power button
  3. After 10 seconds let go of all keys and the power button
  4. Turn your MacBook Pro back on with the power button

After your MBP reboots, test to see if you can still get your temps to spike over 200 degrees etc (however, see my note on temperature below).

A note on temperature

Finally, MBP models usually range from about 40ºC (104ºF) to 100ºC (212ºF) depending on whether the CPU is idle or under load. CPU temps (just like ambient temperatures) typically have a bearing on GPU temps too, especially within the extremely confined spaces of a MacBook Pro.

If you'd like, you can refer to the Intel Mac Temperature Database to see the various temperature ranges reported by users. You can also filter the list by model etc.

UPDATE

Now that you've updated your question a few times and have uploaded the YouTube video, I feel taking it into the Apple Store to look at is the best way to go. The main reasons for this are:

  • Having problems in both Safe Mode and while booted normally is a strong indicator to some sort of hardware issue
  • Likewise, having problems when booted into either macOS or Windows 10 is also indicative that this is OS independent (and therefore most likely a hardware issue)
  • The various display glitches apparent in your YouTube video stringly imply a GPU and/or Logic Board problem

All of the above would require a visit to Apple. Obviously, prior to doing so, make sure you have a current backup of all your data.

If you did want to try one more thing prior to visting Apple, that would be doing a full fresh installation of macOS (to the earliest version that shipped with your MBP - you can do this by using the shiftoptioncommandR keyboard shortcut to reinstall the macOS that came with your Mac) and testing to see whether you have any issues prior to installing anything else. If not, go about installing OBS and see if that runs okay. If so, then go about creating your BootCamp Windows installation to see if that causes a problem.

However, if it was me, I'd plan for the visit to Apple. That is, do your backup, make alternative arrangements for a few days, and get Apple to do a full hardware diagnostic.

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