M17x Replaced video card (upgrade) not detected

Ok first off sorry if this is somewhere else on the forums but I couldn't find it and im a bit pressed for time and needing more direct help. my system was bought end of November 2012, out of warranty almost a year now so I cant get dells help (I already tried, I couldn't buy the part from them and I cant part with my system for any extended period of time) which attempting to get their help took over an hour, 3 calls and at least 10 transfers.

system is/was an m17x r4 with a 675m

you can skip the problem if you think you can help me directly without needing back info.

my problem was this, last Thursday (8/28), I started up a game, shortly after starting the game my system bluescreened with an NVidia error, attempted to reset the display driver failed warning. upon booting up my system was in 640x480, I assumed driver failed massively. I uninstalled all the drivers and then checked in the device manager and noticed the device was not even listed, infact not even my intel graphics was listed. I reinstalled the intel graphics, rebooted and checked the bios, the bios said the discreet graphics was not detected. I turned off my system and proceeded to take out the graphics card. once I had the graphics card out I noticed one of the capacitors had exploded on the underside. this tells me that the card is completely fried.

now what I need help with is this. I purchased off ebay a used 680m that said it was for alienware, clevo, msi. once it arrived today I went through the process of transferring the heatsink and installing the card into my system. once it was installed I booted and checked the bios, the bios still says no graphics installed. I booted into windows and tried to see if the card was detected in device manager or with gpu-z and neither show the card.

I have heard that there might be a video bios that is needed when you do after market upgrades as well as posts saying you might need an unlocked bios. I have tried to see if I could find an unlocked bios that is not from techinferno (since I am unwilling to pay or wait how ever many days it takes for me to do "5 quality posts" when I have little desire to go to their forums) and was unable to find any directly off and that is to say I don't even know if an unlocked bios might be able to help in any way.

long story short I need help trying to get a 680m to be recognized by my m17x r4 which previously had a 675m which blew out a capacitor. is this a sign my motherboard is screwed? or am I overlooking something and I need to install a different bios and how would I go about doing this?

I am currently running bios A12.

any help is greatly appreciated

 

Hi, it does sound like the MB or something else got fried at the same time. I assume it works fine without the GPU in at all? The bios mods are needed to fix an optimus switching issue and for an R4/680m it's not needed so no need to check all that stuff out.

I take it the intel gpu shows and works fine? I'm thinking something in the MB circuitry that provides the PCie power?

Sorry, sounds like a bunch more money to find out for sure, but the 680m is usually a great upgrade for this machine...

Edit: re-reading, are you sure it's not a 120hz 3d model?

 

That's what I'm afraid of. I don't really want to have to spend more to find out if I was sold a dead card. Yes the Intel graphics works fine. If I show hidden devices in device manager I see two Intel HD 4000 and one of them being not connected. If an unlocked bios isn't going to possibly help and it might be more damage then I don't know how to check. The only other laptop card I have is a 260m from my r1 and I doubt I can stick that in this machine to test.

 

I'm certain a bios or software fix is not going to help . It could possibly be a faulty replacement but I've not seen any 680m's go bad (yet) and the 675m is simply the 580m with a new name - and is basically a terrible card! Around one to two of them a week failing just in these forums ATM

The 260m will not work perfectly without the bios mod (since it's not an OEM config) but it should be visible - the driver will fail to install unless you get a replacement .inf file, I use laptopvideo2go. LaptopVideo2Go: Drivers

That's pretty much all you can do without a major tear down...

 

Well I might try it but best option I guess is to do a teardown and hope its not the motherboard. If its a dead card I can try to get my money back but if its not I'm out a lot I don't have

 

Sucks I'm afraid. The 260m might be the best first start, even if you don't do anything else it should still show up in the bios and device manager.

Good luck.

 

OK well I'll try that first. We even certain its compatible? I thought the 260m was like mxm 2.1 or something and I'm not seeing anything about backward compatibility

 

That won't be an issue. The MXM slot will drop down to match. It's upwards that can be an issue - although I have never seen it

 

OK I just wanted to say thanks for your advice and help, testing with the 260m did show up in the unlocked bios as nvidia gfx and since the 680m still does not show I have to contactthe seller and complain they sold a dead device

 

Good news (sort of!), glad I could help. If you're sticking with the 680m I recommend you install the latest bios from dell - no need to have options that could mess the machine up exposed if you don't need them, you do want everything at default with a supported card .
Let me know how it goes,

 

That's great to hear, at least you could make sure it wasn´t the motherboard.

 

Yes I have begun contacting the seller about the problem and getting this resolved. I decided to take my heat sink off the card and lightly cleaned off the still soft thermal compound when I noticed that there were capacitors that were broken off of the top of the chip. The seller did clean the old thermal compound off the chip and must have damaged it then. Hopefully the seller will not make a big deal out of having me ship it back due to cost of shipping and I can purchase one somewhere else.