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1.8GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 (Turbo Boost up to 2.8GHz) with 3MB shared L3 cache

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Crash with glitching screen

Hi all,

I turn myself to you as a last resort for an annoying issue with my Mid-2012 Macbook Air. Recently my Macbook started crashing at random intervals.

The symptoms are always nearly the same: computer freezes, screen has these glitching squares and the computer restarts after a few seconds. To me this seems like a crash, but since it happened both under small and high workloads, regardless of the application I was using,

I started to keep a log. I was not able to find any way to predict when the computer would crash. The battery level didn’t make a difference, the workload neither, the angle of the screen (I though maybe a bad connection with the GPU) made no difference either.

Extra remarks: The crashes seem to happen at shorter intervals as time goes by. Sometimes there is a distortion of the audio as the crash occurs (a loud crackling noise), but this happens only one out of ten times.

Because I want to continue using my MacBook, which for the rest functions absolutely fine and fits my needs, I was hoping to get some insight from you. Thank you in advance!

Things I tried so far:

  • I replaced the battery with a fresh one two weeks ago, this made no difference to the problem.
  • I reset the PRAM and SMC, no difference
  • I updated the computer, no difference
  • I have Windows installed on my PC and the crashes happen there, too.
  • Wiped the computer clean and reinstalled everything using Time Machine, no difference.
  • …

Attached you will find a picture of the screen after a crash.

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Sadly, your logic board has a problem. This series uses an intergraded graphics engine within the CPU chip. This graphics engine uses the system memory for video memory.

What I’m suspecting is one of the memory chips has a bad connection so it corrupts the video signal being stored within it as well as the OS. Looking at the crash report will likely list a memory address of the fail point.

Its likely easier to just replace the logic board MacBook Air 13" Mid 2012 Logic Board Replacement . You’ll find the boards listed in the guide.

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Apple says it's a hardware failure, which is actually a plausible explanation.

But... this crash never, never happens, under Windows which I use often and for a very long time.
The crash also occurs sporadically with a freshly installed Mojave, and with Catalina as well.
But this crash also never occurs with an OCLP-patched Ventura.

Could it be that the standard Mojave/Catalina video driver is a bit sensitive when deviating from tolerances?
...and another video driver is less critical?

Then OCLP and newer versions of macOS might be the answer.

Anyway, it works for me !.

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OpenCore Legacy Patcher - OCLP doesn’t alter the OS’s drivers it’s an OS shim service which wires the calls to the needed counterpart in the newer OS and the given Legacy hardware.

The problem here is as Apple tweaks things with their updates things get messy! As now the complexity of all of the different older systems and the different newer Mac OSs make things tough to nail down edge cases.

I gave up trying to make it work as my 2012 15” MacBook Pro I just couldn’t deal with it for what I wanted. I had to completely wipe the drive and rebuild sticking with Catalina.

With Apples move to their own SoC’s M1 and onwards the OS will loose its Intel support likely in the next few OS’s. So you will need to consider needing to move onward to an M series system if you want to run the latest apps. Or just stay with a stable release and don’t apply updates as risky as that is. For me my Mac Pro system is fully air gapped with only Bluetooth enabled for my keyboard and other input devices.

As far as MS Windows, they stick with the published APIs Apple supplies so their risks are different! Apple uses unpublished APIs to get the most out of the hardware over competing OSs!

But your issues are very different from the OPs!

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