MacBook Pro Freezing with Multiple Displays

Question

Hi guys,
I've been having a bit of an issue with my MacBook Pro and its handling of multiple displays. I recently bought a third-party adapter off Amazon (that was highly rated and Prime eligible, so it wasn't some completely unknown, 1 dollar adapter). I'm driving two displays: a 1600x900 display over HDMI, and a 1920x1080 display over DVI via the aforementioned adapter.
Whenever I use the adapter with any of these displays, I get intermittent freezes. The computer will freeze for about 10 seconds every so often, and everything besides audio will halt. Audio continues to play back just fine, just any animations/video will freeze. If I have the iTunes visualizer up, it'll freeze. If I have a video up, same thing.
I initially thought it was the adapter, but upon taking it to another retina MacBook Pro (15"), it works just fine, no freezes. Furthermore, if I do something as nuts as taking said adapter, and throwing an HDMI-to-DVI adapter onto the Thunderbolt-to-DVI adapter, the freezes magically go away. Not sure what's making that work, but its impractical since I already have an HDMI port on my MBP.
Here's a list of what I've tried to suss out the problem:
1. Reset SMC. No dice.
2. Zapped PRAM. No dice.
3. Watched Activity Monitor and Console when freeze occurs. Nothing out of the ordinary appears.
4. Swapped display configurations around. Not much changed.
5. Tried seeing if the freezes persist in safe boot: Yes, they do.
6. Tried seeing if the freezes persist in recovery: Yes, they do.
7. Tried combining the two adapter I have on hand (DVI-HDMI and TB-DVI) and running one display over HDMI from the combined adapter: Freezes have gone away for whatever reason.
Anyone have any idea what might be going on? If there's any conclusion I can draw from this, it's that either pure DVI output is broken on my machine, or somehow it's still the adapter I bought causing the freezes. I'm not sure what to do, and while I want to take this machine into the Genius Bar and let them poke at it, trying to reproduce this problem might be really hard in that environment. :/

Answer 1

Hello, exactly the same as mine (MBP early '08) now after nearly 3 year, confronted with the same.
Unfortunately, my first MBP late '07 went through the same problem (no flickering the screen just freeze out of nothing, and 2 logic board, memory replacment didn't help, maybe even 3 logic boards - it's a while ;)) Anyway I got this as replacement. And it just worked fine until yesterday.
Bad now, my AppleCare startet with the first MBP and so its not longer valid. Have my Genius appointment on Saturday and hope it will not be to frustrating.
As 3 years ago I have been reading through the forums and later followd partly these Nvidia discussion, seems to me there is more behind and the root cause never was found. And since Apple has changed the model entirely, I guess rc will never be found.
I will let you know the outcome of the talk on Saturday.