If you ask most MacBook Pro owners about their experience with Cupertino’s flagship notebook, they’ll probably have nothing but good things to say. However, there’s a bunch of people on one thread in the official Apple forums that have been reporting issues with video on the Early 2011 MacBook Pro.

We could describe the issues to you, but we figure that these photos, posted by Apple forum user “johnsolo” earlier this morning, will paint the picture pretty clearly.

The culprit seems to be the early 2011 MacBook Pro’s AMD GPU, which allegedly overheats while the notebook is engaged in heavy duty, GPU-intensive tasks, like video editing, playing games or watching HD clips. The display begins to become distorted, and while a reboot could temporarily solve the problem, the issue almost always returns from the dead and persists until the display is put out of commission.

According to multiple forum users participating in the thread entitled “2011 MacBook Pro and Discrete Graphics Card,” those still covered under AppleCare were able to lug their afflicted MacBooks to a Genius Bar and drop them off to have the laptop’s logic board replaced. However, that process took weeks for some. Multiple people on this thread indicated that they’ve also been using British based bga_repairs, which appears to specialize in repairing Apple and Sony notebooks, as an alternative to AppleCare.

A fellow by the name of Raj Dsouza created a Change.org petition in an effort to bring attention to these issues with the early 2011 MacBook Pro. The petition is addressed Apple CEO Tim Cook and has 302 signatures as of this writing, though we wouldn’t be surprised if that number spiked shortly.

It’ll be interesting to see what, if anything, Apple will do if these problems continue to persist.

What do you think? Sound off in the comments below.