M17x r3: 6970m dead?

Okay so I have owned my r3 since march 2011, its been through quite a bit of travel to several countries, and it has gone strong the entire time minus a few blemishes here and there.

Recently I have had it set up as a dedicated big screen laptop to watch tv/movies with. It hasnt been used to play anything more intensive than civ occasionally, and has been turned off when not in use.

It has had quite a few problems from being bogged down with loads of software and no reformat for about 2 years, so the other day when I had to pack my stuff up to move back to the US, I decided since I would be stuck with the r3 for a while that I might as well reformat it and start fresh.

So I did a full wipe and fresh install of w7, everything was going good getting all of the drivers etc installed until I installed CCC, once I rebooted with the dgpu using its proper driver, the laptop lasted about 2 minutes in windows before black screening.

I've tried just about everything from reformatting again, using the oldest dell drivers I could find for my card, to pulling out the gpu and cleaning/reapplying new thermal paste. I get the same result every time, I reboot and the pc will run in windows anywhere from 30 seconds to 5 minutes before blackscreening.

Using HWinfo64 I have the fans running full speed, and the temps are steady around 50c at the time of crashing.

It should be of note that the pc runs absolutely fine when using the integrated gpu.

I also had an issue about 2 years ago where some of my ram slots stopped working, the sticks were fine however I can only run a single stick of ram now as it wont pick the rest of them up.

I updated to A12 this morning from dell website, I see a ton of new features but i have not tweaked anything yet, still having the same issue.


Any assistance that would save me from spending 1k on a new laptop would be greatly appreciated. Thanks guys.

 

Yup, your graphics card is dead. You do not have to spend 1000$, just buy a nvidia GTX 680M. Wouldn't really replace it with another 6970M or 7970M

 

If I may jump in here Arseasin, I'm also experiencing the same exact issue. I've had mine since 2012 and my 6970M is about dead. So all we need to do is get one of this, and it will fit just fine? Just want to make sure before I purchase one, they are still can of pricey.

https://www.google.com/shopping/pro...bKp2McCFUZ1HgodAv0FUQ&ei=yefmVa7PEsbqeYL6l4gF

Thank you in advance.

 

That's very expensive for a GTX 680M. You can purchase a GTX 970M for less than that. Here is a well priced GTX 780M:
http://www.ebay.com/itm/CLEVO-Nvidi...are-laptops-/121747929431?hash=item1c58bdf957