Graphics card going out?

Today I started my m17xR3 and everything seemed normal until..

I tried to play Skyrim, and the game kept freezing the whole system (also cut out a voice chat I was on) and crashing with a black screen and some random grey squares all over it (didn't have time to take a picture), and then Windows comes back saying "AMD Display Driver has stopped responding and recovered", and this happened about 5 times, until I turned graphic settings to low, and it has fixed the crashing problem (for now).

After I'm done playing Skyrim, I browse the web and looking through google, notebookreview, I get random squares popping up on my screen (screenshots attached) and I am not sure what to do from here.

Thanks for any help on this mysterious problem!


EDIT: And it seems to be getting worse every minute, now it completely blocks my view of topics on this forum (see picture 5)

 

Do you know what your GPU temps are at when this happens?

Perhaps removing the AMD driver and running CC Cleaner and Driver Sweeper then doing a complete reinstall would help. On an old Toshiba I had a similar thing happened and it was a bad video card (killed it OCing it) but hopefully you'll get lucky and a clean driver install will fix it.

 

Try to access windows in safe mode (F8 at startup, just after POST). It does it the same? If not could be a software issue.

 

That looks to me like major artifacts indicative of a failing GPU. Those types of things generally happen when a vram module dies.

You could try running the Dell testing utility, I think you hit like F12 when you first turn it on and then select the diagnostic utility.

 

The temps are around 60°C - 65°C when I took the screenshots, and when the game crashed the temps were around 75°C - 78°C

No, this does not happen in safe mode.

I did the diagnostic testing, and it said the graphics card was OK, but while it was testing I could see bars going across the screen that had the same look the screenshots I have.

I will try this now, and see if this helps.


EDIT: I also have a friend with a Lenovo with Nvidia Optimus and he is also getting something similar to my problem: http://i.imgur.com/lFlhU.png and http://i.imgur.com/sQMpP.png

 

That does look like a video card going out. Is it under warranty? I had one do that before, ended up baking it and it's still running alright.

You could see if there's an updated vbios for it, I know the G73 used to have a grey screen error with the 5870. Sometimes it helped, sometimes not.

 

Could there be a program that causes this? My friend has a completely different GPU and gets almost the same problem. Or, could it really be both our graphics cards going out at the exact same time? And since my friend has Nvidia Optimus, would it be his Intel or Nvidia card that needs replacing?

 

Whenever something like this happens to me, my laptop goes from running perfectly to heavy issues from one day to the next. The very first thing I check for is a windows update. Most of the time it turns out windows downloaded an update and applied it before my previous shutdown. I usually just roll back to a previous restore point or uninstall the update and everything comes back to life..lol
and I manually download the update and apply it, usually for some reason I get corrupted update files with the automatic updates.
But it could also be a software conflict with another windows program you have installed recently or updated recently.
I also had this problem when I installed the killer wireless software for my wireless card. I ended up having to uninstall the video drivers, then install the atheros reference driver, then reinstall the video drivers to get everything working again.
Hope this helps

 

are you overclocking, this happened to me when I tried to overclock my 6990m (probably because it already runs very hot). Also a repasting may be neccessary.

 

Nothing has changed on my system for a couple days (last Windows Update was Friday, Internet Explorer Security update (KB2744842)) and nothing was wrong until Saturday around 5-6PM when Skyrim started crashing, then the artifacts started around 11PM - 12AM. I have also not installed or updated anything else.

No, I am not overclocking on my card. This is happening at stock clocks.

 

I just thought I'd put an update on what's happening.

Yesterday I called Alienware about this problem, and they agreed to replace the graphics card and motherboard.

And then a little after I called them about this, the problem got even worse (2 videos on YouTube) Video 1 and Video 2

I'm hoping for the best when the tech comes to replace them!