Acer 7720g graphics problem Nvidia 8400m gs

Hi everyone, i was wondering if anyone could help me. I recently purchased an acer 7720g laptop (vista 32bit) second hand. I was told it had a hardware problem and on investigation i believe the graphics card has failed. i have used driver sweeper to remove the drivers and i've tried reinstalling them from the acer website. Next i tried the laptop2go drivers with the modified inf and that didn't work either. Also tried the acer eRecovery software to roll it back to the original driver and still no luck.

Every time i try any of the drivers the system crashes after a few seconds and the only way i can get it working again is to remove the drivers and use the standard vga adapter. Is there anything else i can try and get the card working?

If indeed the card has failed which i have heard is quite common i have noticed that it may be possible to install a new card. I have seen a nvidia 9300m gs for sale and i believe it should be compatible.

Has anyone done this upgrade? and will i need to do anything like update bios etc? I am fairly confident with the hardware side of the upgrade as i have replaced a pc motherboard before so i can apply thermal paste etc. Just not so sure about the drivers and vbios side of things.

Thanks

Mike.

 

hi
I have experienced the very same problem on my AS 5520G with 8600M GS which I replaced with 9650M GT. It is definitely up to the faulty GPU which should be replace.
You may consult the thread form link below and find a proper solution:

http://forum.notebookreview.com/acer/396320-acer-mxm-models-cards.html


Cheers

 

Yeah i already had a quick look on there thanks. I guess i will just have to buy the card and hope it works. That mxm thread says that some 7720g laptops come with the 9300m gs so hopefully it will work.

Just checked and realised that the 9300m gs is 256mb. Some people on ebay are listing it as 512mb. May have to look for another card. I would like 512mb but i don't want to spend too much.

 

I think what you want is a faster cards not more memory.
9300 is a very weak card and quite frankly it wouldn't matter if it had 128MB RAM- it's still too slow to make any reasonable use of more memory.

 

Would you suggest getting a DDR3 card with less memory over a DDR2 card with more memory? I'm not really a heavy gamer but i would like to play the occasional game like RTS games. Not really into the latest FPS games so i don't need top performance. Just looking to get a card that will be compatible with my laptop and will last me a few years.

 

Yes definitely DDR3 with less memory will be faster.
That said I would recommend you look at something like nVidia 9600M GT if it's within your budget. It was a decent mid-range card when it hit the market- now it's getting a bit slow but a whole lot faster than 9300 which was a low-end card from the very beginning.
Just to give you a taste (based on notebookcheck):

World in Conflict (high)
9600M GT (DDR3) 24fps
9300M GS 6fps

Supreme Commander (high)
9600M GT (DDR3) 20fps
9600M GT (DDR2) 14fps
9300M GS 6fps

 

Thanks for that, i had already had a look at the different 9 series cards after it was mentioned about getting ddr3 and i decided to try and get the 9600m gs. I am going to try and get a second hand one as it is a bit pricey for me new as i only paid £120 for the rest of the laptop second hand.

 

Bought a 9600m gt off ebay. Removed old card. Cleaned up the new one and applied arctic mx-4 thermal paste. Re-attached heatsink. Put the cover back on. Tried to power on and it will not power on or even display a power light.

I removed the card and ran it without a card and after several seconds of holding the power button it powered on and ran with a white screen.

Is it a bad graphics card or did i miss something somewhere? I removed all the old drivers with driver sweeper in safe mode prior to removing the card. Did i need to do anything with bios? Could it not be powering on because its looking for the old card?

I want to make sure its definately a faulty card and not me as i bought it second hand and i don't want to get into a messy dispute over it.

Cheers

Mike

Just another point, i have re-installed by old card with new thermal paste and it turns back on but with a black screen. Is there any way i can even get a display back on? The drives and fans all sound like they are running, just no display.

 

check that card is firmly plugged in (just had a bad experience with sodimm DDR3 ram modules).

Not sure about the BIOS - it could be expecting the old card.

You should see picture and even enter BIOS with the working card so the drivers and windows are not important at this point.

If you plug in your old card and nothing happens, it could be that it completely died or it is also not plugged in firmly. Now as I remember MXM has holes for screws that fasten the heatsink. If all that screws and heatsink easily "clicks in" then you got it right.

I hope 8xxx, 93xx and 96xx series are all supported on your notebook?

 

The connection appears to be fine. All the heatsink screws click in and the two screws holding the card screw down properly. I will try and upload a picture. I think my old card has gone completely by the looks of it and i'm starting to think the new one i bought is bad.

As far as compatibility goes the acer 7720g comes with 8 and 9 series nvidia mxm cards and on the mxm list on this website it lists it as being compatible. I believe there was a thread on here where someone upgraded the 7720g to the 9600m gt, i've had a look at that thread but they didn't seem to have a problem.

 

Here are some images i've taken.

 

A few procedural recommendations:

1. Get monitor you can use with the DVI and HDMI ports. Try starting it up plugged into to one.

2. that looks like an MSI card... find a tutorial on nvidia vBIOS flashing, and try to backup your vBIOS with the nvflash -b command. Keep in mind the BIOS must be set up to boot from the USB drive so this might not be easy.

3. Maybe take some pics of the card with the heatsink off. the starred out board ID (180-10616-****-A03) can also sometimes mean the card is an engineering sample. In this case at least you would for sure be able to return the card, as engineering samples are illegal for sale.

4. Check all the other hardware. RAM is easy, take one stick out at a time. CPU not so much but at least all T series socket P cpus will work except for t9400 t9550, t9600, t9800, and t9900. The only reason a laptop sometimes turns on and sometimes does not at all other than something more mechanical is base level hardware failure.

 

Thanks for the information. I will get a shot of the card later as i have taken it back out now. I think the rest of the hardware is fine as the computer loads and runs without the card, it even starts up windows as i can hear the startup sounds, just without the graphics card the screen is white. I think i can get access to a monitor so i will try connecting it to that. It looks very much like im going to have to try and get this card refunded.

The person i bought it off said it came out of their laptop that had problems with the charger etc. They said they know it works because they played bf2 on it running off battery. I'm now wondering if the reason it didn't work was because the card failed and stopped it turning on.

Basically my laptop boots without a card and with a card its dead. I have installed it correctly as i have installed graphics card and cpus before and it has worked fine. So what i want to know is is there anything else other than the graphics card is dead that will stop it turning on at all. People seem to be suggesting that the bios/vbios/drivers doesn't matter until you get to windows etc and that if the card is working it should at least begin to boot.