3820tg Unusual Issue- missing GPU

I'm having a bit of an unusual issue.

My 5650 seems to have completely disappeared. It doesn't show up under the device manager even when I set the BIOS (stock v 1.19) to use only the discrete card. I've tried every manner of driver installation I can find/think of, and the problem persists even when I use the never-altered factory hard drive instead of the SSD I put in immediately after unboxing. This makes me think it's a hardware issue and not a software issue.

I've got a broken screen I'm dealing with, and today I was poking around with the Embedded Controller to achieve the "unsupported brightness" levels discussed here ( http://forum.notebookreview.com/acer/562576-acer-aspire-timelinex-3820tg-mods-tweaks-only.html ), relatively risk-free because I'm getting a new screen anyway. When I got no results, I read that there were different values set in the EC for the discrete and integrated graphics, so I went to switch to the 5650 to see what I could accomplish, when I first realized it was no longer there.

My current theories are, either I did something in the EC which would cause the discrete graphics card to no longer function, or, whatever caused my screen to break (trauma or otherwise, I don't know) also caused my GPU to fail. The break is on the leftmost quarter of the screen, if that's relevant.

Edit: Worth noting- When I set the BIOS to "DISCRETE", the display gets distorted/static-y from POST until Windows first loads.

Any thoughts?

 

Bump. I'm having no luck at all with this and can't figure out what could have caused this. The only time I've ever seen hardware "disappear" like this is when it's disabled in the BIOS, but that isn't the case here, as my BIOS are stock and I don't think that's even an option.

 

There was another person here on this forum who had ATI card dissapear. As far as I remember, there was no solution and he had to send it in for repair.

Have you tried to see if it works in other operating systems (boot from Ubuntu Live CD, type "lspci" in the Terminal and see if card is there)?

You said the screen is "staticy" when Graphics is set to "DISCRETE", do you actually see the ATI card in the Driver manager when it is in this mode?

I really doubt the problem is with Embedded Controller. Try resetting BIOS to defaults.. maybe re-flashing it?

 

I tried it in Ubuntu with no luck. BIOS defaults, also nothing.

I replaced the previously broken screen, which seems to have actually fixed the "static" I mentioned. Seems odd, but that points more towards a physical hardware issue to me, which is exactly what I didn't want.

I'll try re-flashing the BIOS next, but I'm no longer optimistic. Thanks a lot for the advice.

 

Sorry, I am just not sure what is happening. Are you telling me your computer does not see ATI card when in discrete mode? Can you provide the output of "lspci" command on Ubuntu when booted both from Discrete and then in Switchable?

Is the screen also "staticy" when connected to an external monitor? Maybe it is just your LCD cable that causes strange problems?

 

So have you found any solution?
It seems like i have the same issue.