Screen artifacts

I've just done a clean update to 11.10 ATI drivers, rebooting several times in the process, and everything went smoothly. Then, I shut down, took out the battery, did a power drain, then cleaned out the vents for my GPUs. I then put everything back in, then turned it on, and left the room. Upon coming back, I saw that the keyboard had lit up, but the screen hadn't. There wasn't an error code being displayed or anything, so i shut it down, then turned it on again. When it came back on, there were red artifacts around the windows logo, and now in windows, the whites seem to be kind of swimming. Basically, everything looks a bit off. Does anyone have any idea what I might have done to cause this in my cleaning or how it may be fixed?

 

Reseat the GPUs. Also try running the laptop with just one GPU. Could be a badly seated card or CF cable. Hopefully it is something simple.

 

Thanks, trying it now, will update soon.

UPDATE: Okay, it has POSTed fine, lit up, peripherals have powered on, but the screen remains black. Have I balls'd it up further? What I don't know whether or not to be concerned about is that there is still no error codes displayed with the lock keys. When I tried starting it without the power cord in, it beeped as usual, leading me to belive its something with the screen/card connection, though what I have no idea. I hope I get this sorted soon, have a LAN party of sorts to go to on Sunday XD. I may end up sleeping on it, and trying it with a level head tomorrow afternoon...

UPDATE 2: I've just had a thought: this is very similar to the issues I had the last time I took it apart. I was replacing my 720 with a 920, and the LCD cable was very difficult to reconnect. All in all, I took it apart 3 times trying to get it set properly. I remember that this most recent time, cleaning, I was thinking about that event while staring right at the cable, directly beneath my working environment. I may very well have bumped it out of position. I will investigate this tomorrow afternoon, and post back an update.

 

Connecting those LCD cables is really an SOB sometimes, but you'll usually get some kind of error that tells you what's going on. The last time I had a straight black screen with nothing else whatsoever going on was when my slave card had completely crapped the bed. Ran on just the master and the computer booted. Hence the reason I am running the single 5870M in my sig.

 

UPDATE 2: I've had to put this one at the top because I can't scroll down this box on my iPod, nor can I give rep. I guess I'll give rep when I get this brick on again.

I've disconnected the CF cable, yet the same thing happens. Do I need to physically remove the slave card, or does this mean something is wrong with the master card, be it seated improperly or completely borked?

As a side question, is the performance on a single card still respectable? If it is indeed the case that I am left with one, I would like to know the hit I'll take in performance.

UPDATE: Just adding some additional info, just reset the CMOS to no avail. I didn't mention before that the ALIENWARE on the front lights up, but the alienhead on the back does not. It keeps making beeps and clicks as if it were just starting up, I'm going to let it sit awhile, see if that does anything. Hope to hear some more advice, you've been very helpful, Turbod. +Rep

 

BIG development, I just turned it on to No operating system found. I then restarted, saw the alienware splashscreen for the first time in 2 days, jammed F2 and set my hardrives to RAID. Then, I saved and exited. Next startup, Alienware splashscreen, Windows splashscreen, then login, all without artifacts of any sort. I put in my password, hit enter, then the screen went off. Subsequent attempts to turn it on have yielded nothing. I will again reset the CMOS and see what happens. Next post I will hopefully be making from my precious!

UPDATE: MY PRECIOUS. IT WORKS. Although GPU-Z is giving me Crossfire: Disabled and CCC under hardware has "Primary Adapter" and "Disabled Adapter", Device manager is giving me both cards, both working. I don't know. I'll probably make a new thread about this, because my issue has changed. Thank you immensely for guiding me partially through this Turbod, you're about the only reason I didn't have a heart attack. +REP for reals this time.