My GTX 560m has disappeared! - Was locking up and bluescreened beforehand

My GTX 560m in my alienware m17x r3 has completely dissapared from the system, its not in device manager, more nvidia control panel won't open, won't come up in GPU-Z, switcheable graphic button does nothing. Just before this happened I was simply playing music and using the internet when it bluescreened. After rebooting I try to load up a game, it was running really slow, so I had a look around and realised it had gone. This isn't the first time this has happened, last time I got it back after rebooting the laptop several times, but this time I can't get it back the same way. The card had been very weird in general recently, for example the only game I have installed on here at the minute (F1 2010) keeps locking up/jolting/freezing after I have been playing it for 20 mins or so. I'm not sure what's happening here, but I'm hoping that the video card can't surely be dieing on me already (the video card in my m1730 had very similar symptoms before packing up), but this is less than a month old. I will get on to dell, but just wondering what could be causing this or if anyone else has experienced similar issues? Thanks.

EDIT: If you go into the BIOS it just has "not detected" under "discrete gfx"
Also I can't find a way of contacting Dell without using the premium cost phone number! I remember on an old laptop I used to be able to use online chat with them, but it says that only available for business users, which I'm not.

 

I do believe the GPU is dead. You can try to reset the BIOS by pulling that coin battery out for about 10min and plugging it back in. It'll keep beeping after booting so simply restart the system. The BIOS will be reset and hopefully your GPU will show. If not, you're out of luck, like me, who had a 6870M become "not detected" but an old 5850M would show ATI GFX in BIOS. Best of Luck.

 

thanks for the reply, yeah thats what I feared, it's just too similar to what the symptoms were when my m1730's gpu died. But this alienware is only 3 weeks old and I have only played the odd game on it, its a bit worrying that it'd die this soon. Dell don't make contacting them easy either lol!

 

try reseating the card, then doing a power drain with the cmos battery out.

 

Thanks I will give that a try. I have also gotta say I'm appawled with how bad tech support just was. I eventually got through to them and I had to keep explaining that the nvidia card is broken, but the intel one is working, he didn't understand and then was like "so your intel graphics card is working", i replied yes, he then said "well laptops only have one graphics card, not two, so I don't see what the the problem is". SERIOUSLY!? He then put me on hold for ages, to transfer me to another department and then he came back on just to say, sorry the other department is closed and I need to phone back tomorrow.

 

Yeah they'll do that to you. I'm lucky cause I have a guy in the Executive department and I basically made up an excuse that the phone tech is being odd/no time for it/I'm in a rush and they expressed a 6870M over. All through email too so I can't complain lol. Just keep trying, you'll get a competent tech eventually.

 

ahh right, I'm going to ring them back tomorrow now anyway so they will definately all be open. I just tried removing the gpu and cmos battery etc as you both described above. After rebooting I had a black screen and then it started beeping at me - 5 beeps, pause, 5 beeps etc. I then had to hard power it down, started it up again, black screen again, but then it turned itself off and on again and I had picture back, but no nvidia graphics , it's definately a dead card! Do you know if this is a common fault like it was with the xps m1710 and m1730 with gpu's failing all the time (I owned both, my last two laptops, but neither of mine died as quick as this!)?

 

I do have a theory that it has a lot to do with the BIOS suddenly not detecting a GPU and it basically burns itself to death. Mine was not detected and the GPU fan would not run even though the GPU was burning hot. I freaked out and shut the system down. After installing the 5850M (which isn't even compatible) the GPU fan at least was spinning at a respectable idle speed.

Maybe we both just had bad GPUs, who knows, just know that Dell will fix it for you so worry not.

 

its funny you say that becuase in the first few days of owning this laptop, it was quite loud when gaming, however since its been silent in games and I remember thinking how great that was that it can play games so well, yet be quiet at the same time and the laptop was getting SO hot the odd few times I felt it, I dunno why it didn't click that the fans weren't running, but it's clearly burnt itself out. Thinking about this now, why didn't that click, I always monitored temps on my previous laptops, but I guess they were out of warranty so I was more worried if they were to break.

 

For me it was with BIOS A05. I have since then updated to BIOS A08. Which one are you running? I haven't installed the new card yet but will in a few hours and will post back results.

 

I'm running A08, one of the first things I did when I got the laptop was to update to the latest bios. Good luck with your install.

 

Thanks, hope you get situation sorted out asap.

 

I'll report back on here too when its sorted, thanks for your continued help, really appreciate it.

 

Installed my new GPU and everything is working great. Looks like it was just a bad GPU.

 

Glad to hear so, my 560 has appeared again this morning out of nowhere lol, guna run some games on it soon and see how it holds up the next few days and monitor those fans!

 

It went again, a technician is coming monday to replace the graphics card, motherboard and gpu heatsink.