Hey guys, been reading this thread for a while, I thought I’d also share my experiences and some things that have helped me in somewhat mitigating this annoyance.. I’ve got a D300 machine here (got it somewhere at the end of 2014 or beginning of 2015). I think it’s always had the issue, but I didn’t pick up on it being a possible GPU issue till much later.
It’s the same as everyone is describing here: screen freezes, music keeps playing, beachball appears etc..
One thing I found peculiar, even before knowing about the GPU issues: I have a dual screen setup (Apple thunderbolt display and some crappy old monitor connected with an Apple thunderbolt to VGA dongle thing) and since the start it would always randomly select either one as the primary monitor when booting.. Sometimes it would be okay for a while, but most of the time it would put the login screen on my secondary monitor and only after login would it change back to the Thunderbolt display.. Not the worst thing in the world, but in hindsight I'm thinking this is probably related to some GPU nonsense?
That being said, since updating to High Sierra a few weeks ago it's been selecting the right monitor at boot every time! *knock on wood*
My workflow consists mostly of music production, so I'm almost always working in Logic X. The pattern I've found (even though some of the freezes still seem completely random and unrelated..) is that with Logic open and Chrome with a bunch of tabs open (also tabs with youtube vids), and possibly Skype open in the past, would cause the most freezes, usually about 3 a day.. I long suspected Skype, so I hardly use it anymore.. But even without it I still had very frequent freezes. But then I stumbled upon something.. I was digging in Chrome's settings and found an option to disable hardware acceleration. Ever since disabling that, the amount of freezes has greatly reduced for me. I on average now run anywhere from 2 to 4 weeks without a freeze. I don't use Safari a whole lot and I know there's no such option there, so I can't really comment on that.
The weird thing is.. When I'm actually using my mac for graphics intensive tasks, like working in After Affects and Photoshop, it almost never freezes.
Another thing: since updating to High Sierra, whenever there's a freeze, unplugging my Thunderbolt display and plugging in back in will cause it to reboot and give an error log. This imo is a little improvement over having to do hard shutdowns every time. Also this allows me to send all the error reports to Apple.
I do get some minor graphical glitches in general since updating to High Sierra (I came from El Capitan), nothing major, just like a small bar across the screen for a split second.. Although this does worry me somewhat..
There's another thing I'm wondering.. Have any of you guys had any luck with eGPU's to stop the freezes?
I don't have Apple care, my D300 doesn't fall under the replacement program, I need this machine for my work so I don't want to have to drop it at the Apple store for longer periods of time etc.. Also considering that even if you get the repair done, it doesn't guarantee that the issues will be solved.. I don't have the money, or want to buy an iMac Pro. This machine works great apart from the GPU issues. So spending a few hundred bucks on an eGPU setup doesn't seem like a terrible idea to me. I would just like to know if anyone has had success with this approach?