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    Installed new graphics card. What am I doing wrong?

    Discussion in 'Gaming (Software and Graphics Cards)' started by Selenium, Jun 11, 2011.

  1. Selenium

    Selenium Notebook Evangelist

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    First of all, it's refurbished, and my laptop is a Sager NP8660(Clevo M860TU). Running 64-bit Windows 7.

    Alienware M17 / M15X Nvidia 9800M GT2 512MB Video Card - eBay (item 160580458224 end time Jun-28-11 06:19:52 PDT)

    It's the same card that I had in there before, unless it some kind of revision as indicated by the "GT2." I took the bad card out, took it out of its harness thing, put the new card in, applied some thermal paste, and that's it. I've taken my card out and put it back in before, I don't think I missed a step there.

    But I'm getting the weird discoloration and "snow" at boot, and Windows is in the minimal graphics mode. Also, temps of the card aren't being detected by HWMonitor. I installed new drivers and everything. Maybe the card is just bad. In Device Manager it says "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems. (Code 43)" Another thing, when I try and launch the nVidia control panel I'm getting this: "You are not currently using a display attached to an NVIDIA GPU."

    Is there something I'm missing though? Thanks in advance for any tips.
     
  2. Meaker@Sager

    Meaker@Sager Company Representative

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    Sounds like a bad card to me.

    Drivers wont work on a dud card and only software rendering (CPU) will work.
     
  3. Selenium

    Selenium Notebook Evangelist

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    Thanks. Anyone else have any ideas?
     
  4. key001

    key001 Notebook Evangelist

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    Did you reinstall the driver and got an error 43 after rebooting? Or did you put the new card with the driver already present?
     
  5. Selenium

    Selenium Notebook Evangelist

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    New card with driver already present. It's the same exact card(pretty sure) so I didn't think it would matter. Once I saw that I was having issues I did update my drivers though. I'm getting the discoloration and snow before even getting into Windows though.
     
  6. Pitabred

    Pitabred Linux geek con rat flail!

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    Snow is almost always a symptom of a failing/failed card. That's similar to how the GPU in my glorious eMachine M6805 died. Sounds like whoever had it before it was "refurbished" overclocked it and burned it out. I'd work with the eBay seller for a replacement.
     
  7. Kingpinzero

    Kingpinzero ROUND ONE,FIGHT! You Win!

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    Artifacts are typical of bad VRAM. If that happens even in windows then most likely the card will crash when switching into the first 3d mode.

    I have my gt2 laying around and quite changed a few on my m860tu, I can assure you that noone gave me those problems.