Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

rampancy

macrumors 6502a
Original poster
Jul 22, 2002
744
1,004
So I picked up a cheap Mid-2012 MacBook Air 5,2/A1466 with a working battery and an SSD in good shape, with a display hinge that was a tad loose. That was all fine. But I later discovered subtle, but very noticeable flickering with the display, where the brightness would modulate up and down in horizontal waves rippling up and down the screen. It comes and goes randomly, sometimes when I open/shut the display, sometimes not. There's no sign of lines or screen corruption that I'd associate with GPU failure.

My question is how can I differentiate this being a backlight issue, vs. a motherboard issue?

I thought it was just a matter of replacing either a faulty display backlight or backlight cable (I was planning on buying a replacement displacement assembly to fix this), but apparently there's also motherboard-level components that also could be the culprit. I really don't want to go to the trouble of buying a replacement display assembly on eBay, only to have it not fix the problem.
 
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.