Video Artifacts with 7970M

I just got my new 940XM and 7970M in the mail last week, and went about installing them this weekend. Everything went relatively well (I didn't break anything this time), but my laptop screen has a really strange sort of artifacting going on - it's like combining alternating vertical lines with 16-bit color. I don't think it was present the first time I powered it up with the card installed, but once it's been apparent ever since it made it to Windows the first time, and now it's apparent in Safe Mode and the BIOS as well. An external monitor (via VGA) is unaffected.

I've attached a photo of what it looks like (the blotches of discoloration are clouds, and the vertical banding is only visible up-close). Any thoughts would be much appreciated! (I've already re-installed drivers, restored BIOS defaults, reseated LCD-motherboard connections, etc...)

I also noticed that it ran really hot - 90°C in Skyrim. I think it might be partially due to my having bent one of the heatsink bracket arms in the process of getting the original C-clip off. Can anyone offer advice on this? Like if I should tighten it further, and, if so, how I know when to stop to avoid irreparable damage?

 

Sounds like LVDS cable is slightly unseated, try reseating it, it is the cable which runs from the screen to the motherboard. Happened to my R3 and reseating the cable worked fine.

 

I've tried reseating it at least five times now and it doesn't appear to have helped. I'm pretty sure that when I booted it up the first time with that card in it that the artifacts weren't present, and that they started once I logged on - is it possibly something with the vBIOS or the like?

 

It could be bios... Can you try an external monitor? Where did you order the card from?

Edit: sorry, didn't notice you said external monitor was unaffected. What if you change resolution? Does it continue? Also, can you check the cable the entire run? Is there any way it could have gotten dislodged from the panel or pinched?

 

Thanks for the replies! I've actually concluded that there's an issue with the new card - reinserting my 5870M in its place fixes it, everything else held constant (i.e., not touching the LCD cable between swapping them). It seems really odd to me, especially since it's only on the built-in display, but it happened again when I resinserted the new one. I also tried throwing a new vBIOS on the new card using ATI/AMD's Windows flash utility, but I always get an error about subsystem mismatching.

Any thoughts on what the actual problem with it might be?

 

You can force a flash with the -f command.

ATIFLASH -p 0 BIOS.rom -f

If it's just an issue with the internal display with one card but the external is fine then a bios issue is certainly possible.

 

Where did you purchase the card from? The Eurocom cards need a vbios flash if I'm not mistaken.

 

If you have already tried an external monitor and different drivers and the issue persists then yeah, the issue is the 7970m