m18x r2 Black Screen when gaming gtx 675m sli

Hello!!

A few says back i started to play crisis 3 on my m18x r2 with two gtx 675m in sli mode . after 40 min aprox the screen turned black . i restarted the machine , checked device manager to see if any of the cards died but everything was fine. now every time i play a game the computer crashes after 5 minutes aproximately forcing me to hard reset. i decided to turn off sli and i was able to play wihout a crash . Any tip or advice on what may be causing the black screen?

 

1 card is done for most likely!

 

@TomJGX By card 1 you mean the secondary? Could be sli cable?

 

yes i mean the secondary card. next step could be change secondary gpu to primary mxm slot and test it on single card mode . maybe ill do it on weekend , right now im very tired . if can play without any crash then it should be the sli cable , psu or motherboard issue , im hoping is the gpu because sli cables are so difficult to find these days (specially for m18x r2) and mental effort involved in replacing the motherboard makes me want to cry not to mention spending around 350$ . but i dont think is the main board because other than gaming the system is 100% stable doing ordinary stuff and gaming with the primary card

 

Have you been monitoring the heat on the 2nd card while playing?

Could just be a re-pasting issue.

 

It's the secondary GPU probably.. I'm hoping that it's a bad SLI cable for your sakes... It's not a Mobo issue for sure... the 675M is just a 580M in disguise so yeah, POS...

 

probably dead card, more likely secondary in your case. As Tom said, the 675M is really a rebadge of the 580M, which was a POS card to begin with. Notorious failure rates.

 

Ugh, I'm just starting to get this on my R2 too. Same gfx cards. What's best to check temperatures of the cards please? I used to use afterburner but haven't reinstalled it since last wipe and rebuild. It seems to happen randomly in Fallout 4 for me.

 

NVIDIA digital genocide drivers may be killing them. Maybe they decided you need to spend money on an upgrade and they're using drivers to help you make a decision to spend money on something newer since you got to use those GPUs "long enough" in their minds.

 

sad but true , you can expect anything from nvidia nowadays

 

Well, it seems one of my cards died. She started to work fine with only the one plugged in, but now I get 8 beeps of joy on startup. If I flex the screen around a bit, or strip the machine down so the LCD is just lying on the desk with the laptop's innards open to the air, she works fine. I have assumed I have a dodgy LVDS cable, and have ordered a spare. I think it will be a couple of months and I will replace both cards anyway with 780's.

 

I have a spare cable to sell to you if you haven't bought one already.

 

Sorry, only just seen the reply. The replacement cable arrived and it is no better unfortunately. I'm not sure what to try next, other than contacting Dell support and shipping her back for repairs there

 

Could be worth getting upgraded cards at this point. Bit costly but theres a custom bios and workaround for the throttling issue as well.

 

That's pretty much my next stop. Although I've been running Windows 10 for a month or two, I was getting the black screen effect under the original Win7 install too. I don't think I can stretch to 980's as yet, so will keep an eye out for a pair of 780's.