Chosen Solution
For the past year I’ve been dealing with an issue that has afflicted two separate, 15”, Mid-2012 MBP’s. Same behavior in both machines, however the newer-to-me machine experiences them less. Reason for persisting: I’m a photographer and require a strong machine. While not the fastest available, the current 9,1 MBP I’m using has proven to be a workhorse (2.6Ghz i7, 16GB RAM, dual graphics cards - NVIDIA GeForce GT 650M 1024 MB + Intel HD Graphics 4000 1536 MB, Samsung EVO 850 + Crucial CT 750MX for storage) and I’d like my next upgrade to be to the newest MBP once they fix the overheating issues. Issue TLDR: Randomized kernel panics are occuring in both machines. In machine mentioned above, I thought there was something physically wrong the logic board as they would occur more while the laptop was actually on my lap / being moved around. Lately, I’ve been using the the machine in a stable environment and panics persist, though, less frequently of late. Find detailed info about the issues here in Tracing Possible Causes of RAM Kernel Panics: 2 Machines, Same Problem. So… I’m looking for those of you who consider yourselves experts on this generation of MBP. I’ve heard varying theories from bad RAM (I’ve swapped between 8 modules, same behavior), to a loose RAM module, to SSD issues (Disk Warrior run on both drives regularly), to this era of MBP having known, bad logic boards. If you care to weigh in, please do so. Thank you!
I see @danj and I have already answer several questions on this machine. First thing I would do is run a good “Paid For” anti-virus like Symantec Endpoint protection. While Apple products have the reputation of not having viruses, that was during Steve Jobs time. Apple has become a much greater target in the Tim Cook era. About 70% of the machines I get in now are infected. Please confirm that your are just running Sierra and not High Sierra.
@globalksp - Don’t get me wrong here I like Disk Warrior but I wouldn’t use it on a SSD and more so if you have High Sierra which upgrades your SSD to APFS! As it won’t deal with the new file system correctly. As I stated before you really need to get Samsungs Magician software running on a bootable Linux drive. So you can let their diagnostics run on the drive. Given what you are doing (and what I’m doing on a 17” MBP 2011) editing photos. You do need to be careful on how full the boot drive is. Make sure you have about 1/3 free. Frankly, I would just go with a bigger SSD than what you have. I have a 1 TB Samsung alone in my 17” its faster access than the smaller units. Even with 16 GB of RAM you can run into issues! I do recommend you install a memory monitoring app like Memory Clean 2 which I personally use! It allows you to free up memory which is still held open by the app. This can be an issue if you are working on multiple images at once so what happens is once your RAM is locked up the system then needs to go to your drive for virtual RAM. Then this is where things can get out of hand as now you have blocks in RAM other blocks on the drive (VRAM) and the system losses it! Bang a crash and it looks like a RAM issue but it’s not really! It’s a RAM addressing error to the VRAM. That’s why you need to focus on the SSD making sure the bad blocks have been written out using the Samsung Magician software. You don’t need a new logic board but! You likely need to clean it of dust build up in the fans and heatsink fins as well as clean and refresh the CPU & GPU thermal paste.
