Overheating issue or something worse?

Hi everyone,

New to this site and this is my first Macbook Pro.

Over the last few days, when the laptop has been running for a few hours, the dashboard graphics corrupt and shortly after, the system will lock up.

From my limited knowledge, I'd suggest it's symptoms of an overheating GPU, but I don't know enough to say for sure.

The laptop is only 6 months old, so I can go back to Apple to ask for help, but wanted your opinions on the matter!

This is what the dash ends up looking like:

Pic 1

Pic 2

Any ideas?

Thanks is advance!

My dock looked like that before my GPU completely overheated. It only happened to me once and not repeatedly, so Apple wouldn't fix it because they couldn't replicate the problem.

However, if yours is doing this every time your computer is on for a couple of hours then I would take it to Apple and have them fix it. What are you running when this happens? Are you doing anything that requires heavy use of the GPU? If you aren't and it's still locking up then I would back up the system and then take it to Apple without any second thoughts.