M18X-R2 Intermittant 8-beeps

After a few teething problems back in 2013 my beast has ran smoothly ever since.

Until now that is. Getting intermittant 8-beeps on cold boot, however most of the time when booting I'm met with a blank screen, some HDD activity (as indicated by blinking light) but no display. I can usually bring the system back by removing the battery, and draining the system of power (pressing power button with the battery disconnected). This however requires a LOT of tries, and more often than not the system will black out just before bringing up the logon screen (Win10).

I understand diagnosing an 8-beep can be troublesome from all I've read/searched. However, I've been unable to determine if plugging in an external monitor will work. I don't have one with compatible sockets, but could get hold of to try this when it happens.

Any tips ? It may be time to let go of it, but in all honesty I cannot find any laptop out there that will replace an SLI 18" system

 

are those 8 short beeps? or 1 long 7 short beeps?

8 Beeps usually indicate LCD panel error, while 1 long 7 short beeps indicate broken GPU. Could you remove ur main GPU and swap it with ur 2nd GPU, while running single GPU to deduce if it's your primary GPU that fails.

 

it's definitely 8 consecutive beeps - when it botheres to beep at all.

I'll definitely give your suggestion a go, however I'm getting no indications its GPU related through furmark and general SLI usage when it first does boot into Windows

 

Make sure you don't have nonturbo flex support enabled in the BIOS....