If original will be very close to end of life with sourcing a known good one problematic. To be brutally honest the 2011 15' & 17' MBP's are at a high risk of failure due to general ageing and the poor design/manufacture of the Radeon dGPU.

I know it's still 100% stock with no reworking of the Logic Board/dGPU, which in general only results in faster repeat failure of the Radeon dGPU. So I know all the aspects of the MBP's history. I bought my 2011 new, it then passed around the family before returning with endless SW issues. I still have a 2011 15' MBP, although it runs well for it's age you have to jump through some hoops to deal with the high potential for dGPU failure. Logic board is not original, so I suspect that somebody has tried to fix this in the past, and like many of these, the issue returns. Have to tell the customer tomorrow that his 'pawn-shop special' is not worth much - unless you want a new hobby. Set up a new system on a 2.5-inch SSD, from a different Mac, then installed the built-up SSD in the 2011. Then boot again, when it may suddenly fill the screen with blue dots, which requires a force shut down.

I have to let it cool down for several hours. It gets REALLY hot, suddenly goes into a boot loop, then reboots very slow. I've been working with a Late 2011, 15-inch for the last couple of days. I think 300€ is a lot of money for a 2011, that STILL is highly likely to be affected by 'radeongate' (Look it up!) (That's the main difference, other than the speed, I'm not getting drawn into a discussion about which is 'better', just that the 2.5 Ghz was a custom configuration.) The 2.4Ghz i7 has 6 MB of 元 cache, the 2.5 Ghz i7 comes with 8MB of 元 cache.

Apple macbook pro 2011 review