HP Envy 15t bad GFX card

I bought a HP Envy 15t with discrete HD5830 for 400~ and my intent was to give to a friend of mine as a gift so he can play some video games with us, right now he has a Core i3 Laptop with integrated HD3000 graphics, picked up the laptop from Craigslist checked it out everything seemed fine. It powered on, nothing wrong with the screen or windows etc. I take it home and try to play a game on it and it just freaks out. Playing Company of Heroes I will get graphical hiccups and glitching, while playing Company of Heroes 2 causes Blue blocks to appear on the screen and it took forever to load. I whole heartly believe the GPU is near death. The temperatures are fine around 60C when playing the games so I know it's now a temp problem, i updated to the latest 13.x AMD drivers as well.

My big question is can i change out the graphics card? I've seen other verison of the Envy with HD 5850/70 and the newer ones has the HD 7750m would be possible to switch or should i just chuck the laptop back on CL and sell it "as-is"

 

I think HP doesnt use MXM slots, most likely proprietary, or soldered into the mobo, and yeah it seems like you have a faulty graphics card, no wonder why he was trying to sell it. Probably faulty VRAM. ask for a refund, but chances are you probably can't get one. It would probably cost a good chunk of money to get it repaired anyways given if its soldered into the mobo then you have to do a motherboard replacement. Sorry bud, but it looks like you're out 400 dollars, you could probably sell it as is for 200 or so, but next time you buy a pc, ask them to run a benchmark to see if everything is alright beforehand.

 

its soldered, and have you tried to wipe clean the drivers?

 

Yes, I have the same model. It doesn't appear to be soldered, but it is permanently affixed with some kind of red adhesive stuff. The only way to replace your graphics card would be to replace the entire motherboard. There is no MXM connector.

if the latest AMD driver is causing problems, perhaps try rolling back to an earlier driver?

I've been using Catalyst 13.2 for several months with no problems.

 

the red thing is the solder

 

Ahh, I see, thanks for clarifying!

 

Its worth a shot to do a system restore to factory defaults or clean windows install just to see if it makes any difference. Also try out other games, maybe some older ones to see if its driver related or actually a failed graphics card.