Busted graphics card?

I have an Asus m50sv-a1 that I bought back in 2008, It worked great up till today when the screen flickered then froze. When I restarted I was greeted by a single horizontal line, then a double windows loading screen. When it gets to the login bit then the screen goes white with a bunch of one pixel wide vertical lines. I am able to restart in safe mode, and it sort of works but has a doubled up screen. Based on this I'm guessing that the graphics card burned out.




Now the graphics card in this model is a 9500M GS. It is my understanding that this bit should be replaceable. Would it be enough that I ordered another 9500M GS off the internet? Or have they done something stupid with locking cards to specific machines?

Any help is appreciated.

-H2

 

Try it on an external monitor to be sure it's not the LCD, but it does sound like a dying video card.

ASUS cards use a proprietary layout. Here is a search on ebay for example:
asus m50 9500m | eBay

I'm not sure if you can use a G50V 9700M GT or G50Vt 9800M GS as an upgrade, you could take a good look at the cards and decide for yourself. The G71 and G72 cards will not fit.

 

Also, does anyone know if this model has integrated graphics that could be enabled, and if so how I would go about doing this?

 

No integrated graphics.

 

you could try a reflow of the gpu. Basically you remove the board from the system and find the GPU chip in the board. Typically it is easy to find since it will say nVidia on the chip. Anyways get a heat gun and just blast the gpu with heat for a bit. Put the laptop back together and it might work. Basically what happens over time is that the solder melts and breaks connections from the heat generated by the gpu. The heat will "reflow" the solder and make the connections again. This is the same problem as the xbox 360 RROD. That is why the towel trick works (although you are pretty much killing every other component by doing it). The hp dv9000 series made this fix famous