M17x r3 Graphics problem

My dilema as follows

m17x r3 14 months old mint condition did not take out extended warranty and what happens, i have a graphic card failure.

i have the integrated graphics and also an ati hd6970m card, and this is the card i belive has died on me. Yesterday 1/11/12 my display started flickering, i rebooted and all seemed ok later on the screen went off again, at this point i began to think Mmmmm maybe a bit of mal aware or corrupt file. scanned the drives and everything was fine, decided to look in device manager and i had an exclamation mark againt the ati card so i thought i'd re-install the drivers and this is where my nightmare began. i ended up formatting the laptop and after 3 attempts i was still not able to install the drivers needed for the ati card so i got the wifes laptop out and done some reading etc went into the bios and disabled the integrated card and tried to boot the laptop up, big mistake black screen and 8 beeps.......found a thread about un bricking my laptop by flashing the bios from a usb stick, this worked for me and i am now running on the intel card only. i stripped the ati card out of the laptop and cleaned it all uo and re-sat it etc still its not working, at one point the card was seen by device manager but it had been disabled as there was a problem with it.
i am now kind of out of ideas as to what to next and thought i would come here and see if anyone else coulf fire some thoughts my way.

my options :-

do i buy another card from dell or somewhere else?

do i try to get dell to sort this out by going down the sale of goods act where an item has to last a reasonable length of time?

do i claim on my home insurance?

do i sell it as it is?

many thanks

 

I would say that the best thing to do would be to test a different video card on it.

 

Not so easy to do without access to another card

Sent from my GT-I9100 using Tapatalk

 

Yup, I know but it is a lot better to get one from a friend than buying a new one for troubleshooting.

 

I think this thread might be helpful, it appears using an older Dell official driver the sli was supported and recognized. Older driver but better than not working.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/ali...regarding-driver-modded-inf-m17x-r2-680m.html

 

well that went ok, yesterday i got in touch with dell, i got through to their tech department where someone proceeded to connect to my laptop anr attempt to install drivers, they also ran 3dmark and gpu-z during this time there were numerous crashes. The call ended with the technician booking me in for a home visit this wednesday coming where a new graphic card will be provided and fitted free of charge.

i proceeded to do a clean install and have installed everything except the ati 6970m drivers, my laptop has not crashed once. needless to say i will be installing the driver tuesday night before the guy arrives.

am guessing that aside from dells warranty if you add optional extra parts they must have their own individual warranty.

 

What did you tell them for them to substitude it for free?
I have the same problem only my 6970m keeps kicking out. And, for example, when the desktop backround changes my screen gets full of black lines wich gradually diminish. This happens some other times too. I am running the driver from the dell website. my bios is A12.

 

i told them the truth, the lappy is 14mth old they connected me to the out of warranty tech guys, during the call he did mention something about the warranty on my graphic card but i could not make out fully what he said (indian) he asked what i used my lappy for i told him the truth i play 1 game eve online and the rest is just general everyday stuff, i told him the card has never been overclocked, which it has'nt.

 

Please let us know how it goes after the replacement.

 

Hope that fixes the issue for ya.

 

well card has been running fine however i decided to clean everything up and do a fresh install, machine is running as sweet as can be, i have started to monitor temps it seems to linger round the 61 degree mark so i have got into the habit of using hwinfo64 and manually spin the fans up to an almost inaudible level this in turn knocks the temp down to 38 which am very happy with, i have tweaked the fan settings in the bios but they don't seem to respond as quickly as they do when i use hwinfo

now i am just debating about updating my bios it is currently on the unlocked a08 bios i have the unlocked a12 bios but am not sure if i want to flash, i have a crucial m4 ssd drive in there and i heard there maybe some issues.

 

There is a sata fix unlocked a12 bios around here somewhere