Given a free 07 MBP 3,1 15 inch what now? Sell or repair?

Question

My question on the last line...background first.
Have been given a MBP 07, A1226 ..one fo the Nvidia 8600GT ones
It had ben in a cupboard for 3-5  years  ..dead.   108 cycles onteh battery from new.
It had been dropped
Graphics glitch ...wold boot to apple logo with marks around it and then a message behind that was barely readable.
Booted instantly from 10.8.4 USB instal stick.  and all went well.
For two days then back to weird graphics issue.
At this point I had not heard of the Nvidia issue..never having owned a MacBook the issue had passed me by..I assumed the drop and the dent below the CD drive were the issue..maybe they are and this is not the Nvidia issue ?
google brought the Nvidia issue and the 'bake the logic board' / reflow trick to my attention.
Nothing to loose..so   8 minutes at 200deg C and all good.
Untill some Terminal "yes device null" threads to get the thing hot   ..fans speeding up   ..CPU die temps (istat menu) showing constant 94 deg C.
All good then weird graphics again...keyboard and mouse frozen...hard power button Press and hodl to shut down.
re booted again perfectly
So bearing all the above in mind, it was a free machine, what should I do with it?
1).  Buy new 'Repaired " logic board from ebay or similar and hoep the new board does not still have the Nvidia issue.
2.)  Sell it for spares for ?  what would I get $200 ?if lucky I guess  and put that money with money i would spend on new logic board/ RAM/SSD and buy a better 'different ' machine.?  It wil be for the GF for Notes/pages/E-mail and facbook.no games heavy graphics or any processor intensive apps.
Scanning ebay shows many Airs selling for what it would cost to potentially fix this  and add ram and ssd.
Interested to see what others think

Answer 1

LowLuster wrote:
Not worth the effort to fix even for free. System will eventuall fail again because all logic boards from that model year series will eventually fail for the same reason, GPU failure. Apple and NVidia never FIXED the issue. They just replaced the board with the same exact model GPU for a relitively short period of time, 4 years from date of purchase which has now ended.
Well if it was for free it has to be worth it  even if it only lasted a year or so.
Interesting to know that they replaced it with exact same model with same problem.  I had been lead to believe that the fix was a differrent Nvida chip that although had the smae model number, was a good fix.as the 'new' chip wasa a different batch number.  I understood tht the fault was not a design fault, but a batch fault.....dodgy silicon wafe or similar on a certain production run of the grpahicd ships.
Yes, I did read that the free replacement had ended, so was not expecting a free fix, From what I had read it was a Serial Number thing and some were not affected, by that batch of dodgy chips and some were,  and it took some hardware test at an Apple store to determine if it was an affected model or not.
Would not dump it at a "recycling ' centre...I'd rather sell it off for spare. Already have had an offer from a friend for the battery and the screen.  But while it works will keep it and the GF can use it.  Her Pages work instanly goes up to iCloud...so even if it does die..not an issue
OGELTHORPE wrote:
Neil Paisnel wrote:
Do you know  if the Apple Store has a specific hardware testing 'device' or if it is just diagnostic software or checking of serial numbers etc ?
They do have their own equipment and software.  If resellers are privy to that, I do not know.
On a feeling of pure and futile optisim, I phoned up the iQ reseller and spoke to someone, who as expected would not put me though to someone on the tech side, and who did not know anything about this issue.
I asked about the hardware testing and she assured me. that "yes, they coudl do it"  .  I did not actually believe she even knew what I meant about the Nvidia graphis issue.
So in I went, spoke to one  of the lads, and told him it was an old machine, what I expected the problem was and could they confirm this or not.  I was happy to pay for the repair or the parts if a fix was available. 
He took it to the tech guys in the back, to see if ut could be checked with the 'app" ...but no..The app apparrently is hosted on the Apple servers, and is not available for download, and no they coudl not test it to find out if it was an affected model and there was No way they woudl ever be able to find out.
I find it quite comical that people can now call someting that 6 years old 'Vintage" 
No more than I expected anyway so nothign lost and getting out the house was no inconvienence, but it does rather back up what I had read recently about Apple stores,associated re-sellers and Mac users , that they are happy to believe that, and I quote from another site that I can't find now;  "They are happy to believe that their Apple Macs run on Pixie dust and purple elephant dung"
The general reliability of OS-X  means that to most users they don't need to know, but it si a bit poor that the store reps are the same
OGELTHORPE wrote:
Unfortunately don't support us here in Jersey...part of UK  ..as far as they are concerned we don't exist.
Perhaps you should do what the Scots are doing, set up your own parliament and threaten secession. 
Ciao.
Apple don't believe we exist as part of the UK, with UK system postcodes and phone numbers, even less chance if we were independant.  But considering that 80% of the islands population is now English and not local, true Jersey family, that woudl never happen.