Chosen Solution
I’ve looked at multiple sources on this site and others and am still confused. The C5960 capacitor failing was responsible for the issues in the 2010 model, but what about the 2011 model? Some resources say it is the same issue, while others say the issue is with the Radeon GPU itself and that changing the capacitor won’t fix the display issue (like in the Q&A here https://store.rossmanngroup.com/d3-c7771...). Can someone clarify whether I should switch out the capacitor on the 2011 (not 2010) model, or should I instead switch to the internal graphics (as seen here https://realmacmods.com/macbook-2011-rad...)? Thanks in advance!
I’m quite sure you will get different views here too ;) I’ve had around a fair number of i7 quadcore boards presenting the Gpu problems that plagued these Macs and for my experience, changing the tantalum caps on these boards never ever solved the problem. It might happen that while changing the caps with a hot air station the Gpu gets heated too and it might start working again for some time, but it’s temporary and a short lived fix and just happens as an unrelated side effect. I definitely share Rossman’s view, in my opinion, unless you replace the Gpu, the problem won’t get solved by other fixes in most cases.
