Alienware GPU Broke?

[JoeF1]

Hi guys, hope you can help.

A friend has asked me to look at his M17X-R2 which has the Dual Mobility HD4870 Card installed. Whats happening is that everytime he boots into windows he gets a blue screen like this:

Spoiler

It only does this is normal windows, in safe mode it's fine (guessing its using on board gfx?) also when he plugs it into his TV via HDMI there is no BSOD.

Doing some googling etc people with the same issue have said it to be drivers so i got him to download the most up to date CCC and try again. Again it BSOD's on him.

Could the GPU be done in? Don't want to suggest this for him to waste his money if i have missed something.

Also with it listing twice, is this a dual chip or actually 2 cards?

Spoiler

Sorry for the naiveness never had to look at a laptop with a dedicated gfx card before.

 

[garyfl]

I had an alienware at one point, but i dont think i can help. Although, have you tried flashing the latest bios ? that can help.

 

[DJ_Bucho]

If you boot into Safe Mode, can you uninstalled/remove the GPU, and then try booting into windows normally. If that works you can then re-install the GPU from within windows

 

[233]

as above download something like display driver uninstaller and reinstall the drivers with a clean slate.

hopefully that should cure your problem

 

[leigh_boy]

what are the temps like? i have the r7 i think but has an nvidia 660

 

[MagicBoy]

We'd need access to the memory dump file to work out the sequence of events that's causing it.

Could be one of umpteen things - a hardware fault, conflict with another driver ... possibly lots of other things. I've seen Intel SATA and WiFi drivers cause this before for example.

 

[JoeF1]

If you boot into Safe Mode, can you uninstalled/remove the GPU, and then try booting into windows normally. If that works you can then re-install the GPU from within windows

This is what we have already done. Once uninstalling it doesn't bluescreen until we reinstall the drivers. He has the beta drivers currently installed which is doing the same thing.

as above download something like display driver uninstaller and reinstall the drivers with a clean slate.

hopefully that should cure your problem

Oh, i didn't realise windows kept hold of some of the driver upon uninstalling? I will get him to download and give this ago now. Then reinstall the upto date CCC software. Will report back

We'd need access to the memory dump file to work out the sequence of events that's causing it.

Could be one of umpteen things - a hardware fault, conflict with another driver ... possibly lots of other things. I've seen Intel SATA and WiFi drivers cause this before for example.

Hey, if it Bluescreens again i will get him to email me the mem dump file.

Thanks guys.

 

[ALXAndy]

If it's working without the driver, but bombing with the driver that usually suggests a hardware fault. Sounds like the solder has gone.

 

[Akagi]

It could be the above, I had an HD5870 go out in this way. Would BSOD with drivers and was fine without drivers. No amount of re-flowing fixed it sadly

 

[MagicBoy]

It wouldn't surprise me. The 6750 in my 2011 MacBook Pro went the same way. Repeatedly. That tended to display artifacts at the boot screen when it had gone though. No idea on BSODs as it ran OS X, although it would kernel panic which is similar.