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    Strange Video Card Behavior – LCD is Blank

    Discussion in 'Alienware 17 and M17x' started by rsgeiger, Nov 11, 2010.

  1. rsgeiger

    rsgeiger Notebook Evangelist

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    Hello Gurus,

    Ok, this is what happened to me, but first a little background info. I have Crossfire 5870s, both are A00 cards, does not have the new bios and has the original Dell video driver. Until this time I’ve had no problems, so that’s why I haven’t upgraded anything.

    Now onto my story: Last night I was getting terrible performance in a game (Divinity II, new version), so for the first time I disabled Crossfire. Everything went fine and the game ran much better. At the end of the play session I wanted to leave my computer on to download updates overnight, and I do this by closing the lid to turn the lamps off. As you can guess, under the power profile closing the lid is set to “Do nothing”.

    However, after opening the lid the screen came back without desktop icons, but a desktop. I moved the mouse around but couldn’t find it. My guess is it was some sort of extended mode. After opening and closing the lid 2 more times I tried to use the FN+F6 hotkey to switch around the video output. We’ll this turned off the LCD completely, but I could hear that windows was still running. Resetting the computer did nothing: The computer was somehow outputting to a fake LCD.

    In the morning I connected it to an external monitor. This made the computer default to 1280x1040 for both monitor and LCD. Now I could open up Catalyst control center and sure enough, it read two laptop LCDs and the external monitor.

    So I changed the settings to just use the correct laptop LCD. However, when I unplugged the monitor again it reverted back to outputting to the false LCD, giving me a black screen once more.

    The only way to get the laptop to output on its own was to put it back into Crossfire mode again. This is all well and good but when I go back to single card mode I’m sure I’ll get that false LCD again.

    Bottom line: Does anyone have any way to universally reset the display profiles without requiring a reinstallation of the video driver or BIOS update? Maybe some registry setting, or a setting in the Catalyst Control center itself? :confused:

    Thanks for all your input!
     
    rsgeiger, Nov 11, 2010
    #1