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    M17x R3/GTX675M - Video Card Problem

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by souleh, Oct 6, 2015.

  1. souleh

    souleh Notebook Enthusiast

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    Greetings fellow Alienware owners.

    Sorry to bother you guys, but I recently had a problem with my machine and I'm kinda struggling to figure out a solution.

    A couple of nights ago my M17x R3 crashed, the screen went black, but no BSOD was produced by the system, althrough THERE IS memory dump file. The dump file, using WhoCrashed, said there was a TDR VIDEO ERROR (or something like that. I'm at work now and can't access the proper file). Now it's where it gets funky. While I was examining the crash, the system crashed again, same as before. Basically, I'm stuck in a boot-log in-crash loop. Sometimes I don't even manage to log into windows.

    I've tried to run the built in system diagnostics, and it crashed during the diagnostics aswell. Crashed also in recovery mode. So I've tried re-seating the card.
    After I've re-seated the card, I tried running again the system diagnostics and everythign went through, and the disgnositcs said there was no error whatsoever. So I thought that re-seating the card did the trick.

    Wrong. A couple of minutes after logging into windows it crashed again. After various tries, the system, post-crash, beeped 6 times. Tried booting up again, 6 beeps. I went to check the code and seems it's related to a video card failure. The thing that puzzles me is that sometimes I get the beeps, sometimes I don't.

    Anyway, since I still have my old GTX560M (obviously the GTX 675M is a custom install, with modified BIOS, drivers and everything), I'll probably switch back to that and see if everything works fine.

    Beside seeking some advice about the situation, just in case I'm missing something, I wanted to ask, do any of you people know any European reseller for AW/Dell video cards? Or, will Dell sell the spare card? All I'm finding on the net are US resellers, and that's kinda not affordable (price+customs is going to be kind of crazy).
    The other question is, if I manage by any chance to find a laptop video card (let's say, for the sake of it, another GTX 675M), is it just plug and play or do I need to flash Dell's VBIOS first?

    Sorry for the wall of text and thanks for the help, system specs as follows.

    Core i7-2760QM @ 2.40GHz
    2GB GDDR5 nVidia GeForce GTX 675M
    16GB Corsair Vengeance @ 1600 MHz
    17.3" LED 60Hz 1600 x 900 Display
    Curcial m4 SSD 256GB
    750GB 7200RPM HDD
    Killer Wireless-N 1103
    Windows 7 Home Premium x64
    Modified A012 BIOS
     
    souleh, Oct 6, 2015
    #1