LCD Screen Flicker in Games - Asus G51J

I had several vertical lines on my LCD, so I opted for a replacement LCD. I ordered a screen, changed it myself, and was quite pleased when the vertical lines were gone.

Unfortunately, now with the new screen, whenever I'm in a game (such as Mechwarrior Online) the screen tends to randomly flicker grey and black. If it gets really bad, the entire laptop will crash with a colourful display (starts blue, then flickers until it's all green and almost looks like a floral pattern).

Strangely, not all games do it. Civilization 4 flickers only a little, Starcraft 2 no problem at all. I tried playing in Windowed mode and the flickering extends beyond the game window and into the background (so maybe a hardware problem?).

I've tried re-installing the graphics card drivers, changing the resolution, various settings in the games, but to no avail.

Any suggestions?

Laptop in question: Asus G51J, i7, GTX 260M, Windows 7, 2 SSDs, 8GB RAM

Thanks!

 

What kind of temperatures is your GPU reaching? Are you overclocked? Is there anything of interest in Event Viewer?

Does the entire laptop lock up, or is it just the screen? You could test this by playing on an external monitor, and seeing if the crashes persist.

 

Thanks for responding, since my original post I've gathered some more information.

I'll look into the temperatures thing later tonight. With respect to overclocking I've never done such things with this laptop other than what's available in "Power4Gear" (I think it's an ASUS program that came with the laptop).

And yes, it is the whole computer that locks up. I get a nasty sound in the speakers, and in one case (with the external monitor) I actually had to pull the battery to make it reset properly. The crashes tend to happen faster and more severely when plugged into an external monitor.

But again, the weirdest part (and why I increasingly think I must have damaged the hardware somehow when I swapped the LCD) is that everything runs smoothly and perfectly on high demand games/programs such as Starcraft 2.

For sake of curiosity, a friend suggested running benchmarks provided by Farcry 2 since it allows different DirectX settings. I ran the benchmark repeatedly under DirectX10 with no problems whatsoever. Ran the benchmark on DirectX9 and the flickering came back. Oddly, the flickering would persist but the laptop would not crash, but once plugged into an external monitor and it will crash rather consistently.

Not exactly sure how DirectX9 is crashing my computer, so I tried uninstalling/reinstalling DirectX, DirectX9 alone, DirectX11 alone (not sure if I did those two properly?) and perhaps most notably a fresh, clean reformat of my entire system.

Edit: Oh, also I put the old LCD back in but unfortunately not only did the solid red line come back, but it made no difference to the flickering or crashing.

 

You reformatted and the problem persists? That definitely sounds like a hardware issue. Try running a DX11 benchmark (Heaven, for example), and monitor your temperatures.

I doubt this has anything to do with your LCD, as I can see no way that that would cause the entire PC to crash -- at worst, the LCD itself would freeze/crash.