bricked my M18x R2

As the title says all started after I tried some moderate overclocking with EVGA PrecisionX 16. The card didn't throttle and the performance was great.Then I turned off the laptop and I opened it to apply Coollaboratory Liquid Ultra on my single 980m because I had high temps (up to 90C under load). So I applied very tiny amount of this and very carefully . Outside the chip (on the perimeter) was a protective silicone with a black sticker on top and it was impossible to make any short circuit there if it could spill. So I installed back the gpu and I tried to power on the laptop but I got (if I remember correctly) 8 beeps. I removed the gpu and the laptop worked ok with the intel hd. Then I immediately started cleaning the gpu with isopropyl alcohol and a clean paintbrush. I even checked the gpu on my microscope to see if there are any signs of liquid ultra left anywhere on the board but didnt find something. I install again the gpu after cleaning but I was still getting the 8 beeps. I tried my old 7970m and it booted but forgot to check on bios that time if it was still using the intel hd and not the amd gpu. The things made worse when I decided to install the 980m on the secondary slot and the 7970m on the primary slot , because I was thinking to try flashing again the 980m vbios under windows... from that time when I was trying to power on the laptop I was selecting in bios the PEG option and after restart it was reverting back to intel hd. After a lot of tries I removed both gpus completly and now still geting the 8 beeps without any GPU!!!!
I also tried , clear cmos, blind flashing with the usb stick on esata port but still geting the 8 beeps with black screen . (I think I am getting at first 5 beeps after clearing cmos and then 8 beeps on the second try) I hope I didnt fried all my gpus, my motherboad and my cpu!!!!!!! That will cost me a lot of money!
any ideas guys? do you think the motherboad died or the gpus also??

 

Seems like dead gpu's to me :/

 

Evga precision broke it. Theres an issue with it that bricks the lcd by messing with the EDID. Your gonna need someone to either reflash the EDID on the monitor or replace the monitor. Either way you need to pull the boot drive and reformat it afterwards as if you boot with EVGA installed itll brick again.

 

if the Evga precision broke the edid how it booted up fine with intel HD the first time? Do you know what is the procedure to reflash the edid? Can I connect the screen to another laptop and flash it?

 

Have a look in this thread which is dedicated to the subject, you should be able to find some info in there.
http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...illing-alienware-and-clevo-lcd-panels.779449/

 

I have a friend with an msi gt70 who can swap the LCDs to check if my m18x boots with another screen and also to be able to reflash the EDID on the msi laptop but I cant find the files I need for reflashing the EDID. Anyone has links for this?

edit: I found the instructions in this post http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...lienware-and-clevo-lcd-panels.779449/page-150

but where can I download the EDID for M18X R2 screen?

 

@sazistas when you disassembled the computer did you remove the cmos battery? If you did that would have reset the pure uefi settings to legacy causing the 8 beep code. I have also had the 5 beep code when clearing the cmos or doing a power drain.

I'm not convinced that the EDID is corrupted just yet as things were still working with integrated graphics and possibly also with the 7970m after the first 8 beep code occurred. I could be wrong, but...

This is what I would do:
1) Remove all dedicated graphics cards, the battery, cmos battery and AC power cable.
2) Hold the power button for 30 seconds to do a power drain.
3) Re-connect AC power and the cmos battery and hold FN when starting the laptop until you get in to diagnostics.
4) Run the diagnostics and see if there are any issues.
5) If there are no issues restart and enable pure uefi booting in the bios, save settings and shut down.
6) Reinstall 980m and hopefully everything works ok

 

@Mr. Fox

 

It is already included in the zip file with the Linux tools provided by @t456 ...look for the SEC5448 EDID.

 

This has just happened to me with my AW18 with 780Ms. Flashed a new vbios to allow OC, worked flawlessly. Ran an in-game bench mark for The Division, noticeable improvement. Was looking over gpu-z and noticed SLi wasn't enabled. So, I ticked the option on EVGA precision 16 to start up with windows, enabled SLi and rebooted.

8 beeps of "fun."

Edit: The bench was performed post vbios rebooting.

 

Finally my laptop is alive again. I connected the 17 inch screen from the msi and it booted without any beeps!!! Then I reflashed the screen using linux with hot swap (I read about this method from a Mr Fox post). After flashing I shut down the laptop and it was normally working again with its own screen like nothing happened!! I couldn't be happier! thanks to all for your help to bring my laptop back to life

 

A 17" screen works in the m18x R2? What model number was it. I wonder if the m18xr2 can handle a 4k screen.

 

Not unless it has an additional 4-lane eDP connector, aside from its 2-channel LVDS port. For one, the only 17.3" 4k is eDP and although LVDS can support 4k, this requires about 2x 40 or 50-pins and no laptop ever featured that, only a few desktop monitors did. Also may have a hard time fitting a 23.8" in an 18.4" display lid (looks like a great, value-for-money monitor, btw).