it stemmed from my laptop not charging when both of the cores with fully loaded. The guy at AS ran a command in the terminal that whacks a core up to 100% - obviously because MBPs now operate on dual cores, drain the battery to under 90% (so that when you plug it in it will orange-light and charge), plug into mains, open 2 terminal tabs and enter the following into each:
open activity monitor and you'll see 2 copies of the process "yes" scaling your CPU up to ~100%. By the time those processes plateau, if your laptop is still charging then you're fine. The replacement they gave me passes the test in OSX and Windows (the Windows test is just playing HL2 for 30 minutes with all the settings maxxed!)
Code:
yes > /dev/nullopen activity monitor and you'll see 2 copies of the process "yes" scaling your CPU up to ~100%. By the time those processes plateau, if your laptop is still charging then you're fine. The replacement they gave me passes the test in OSX and Windows (the Windows test is just playing HL2 for 30 minutes with all the settings maxxed!)