P-7805u....Blackscreen system crashing when gaming

Hi gang,
I'm a noob to these forums but it seems like you guys are an active bunch that knows your stuff so I was hoping someone could provide some guidance.

I've had my P-7805u for about 1.5 years now and until recently it was an awesome machine. I play MMOs and really enjoyed the quality of the game experience.
Recently I've been experiencing problems with pretty much any game I run. I get a blackscreen with a complete system crash usually within 10-20 minutes of playtime, sometimes maybe an hour or so in but never longer than that.

I have come across a number of suggestions (driver and bios updates, disabling powermizer, turning down game settings) but nothing has made much of a difference. I'm beginning to think the vid card is just toast but I need an expert opinion first

Any thoughts on what the issue might be?
Any possible fixes?
Also, I live near Sacramento, CA so if anyone knows a good repair shop for stuff like this out in that neck of the woods, please let me know.
Thanks in advance.

 

Check your temps while gaming (CPUID, everest etc.), probable cause would be overheating due to accumulated dust within your system (quite common with a few year old system). One way to find out is to dismantle your system and clean up the fans of dust and replace your current thermal paste on GPU and CPU (and possibly on northbridge chipset as well if you are using thick paste such as ICD7) and see if the system still crashes.

 

I like Archawk's suggestion. Have you checked your temps? I also have a P-7805 and I also live near Sacramento but know of no other repair shops besides Fry's and Best Buy. They both carry Gateway and have had our system as a stock item in the past. I honestly don't have a high trust level for Best Buy and have never used Fry's service.

Do check your temps and see if they rise quite a bit. As a newbie, perhaps you're a bit intimidated by that but it's quite simple. Download HWMONITOR to your desktop and run it while you game. You can check the temps after awhile before you crash or after you crash you can boot it backup and HWMONITOR will still have your max temps saved. Let us know what they are.

 

i have a similar problem, when playing games, sometimes the screen goes black and the computer stops responding, usually happens with heavy graphic games, however my temps doesn't pass 78c, i can remember playing with themps around 85 without probs a half year ago before i cleaned and changed to icd7

 

Yeah. I started having the same problem. Temperature doesnt reach over 80C. Maybe it is voltage case if you OC`ed.

 

I have the same problem. My temps aren't high and it happens in pretty much any game I play.

 

When I`m under WindowsXP most of games crashes. Under Windows 7 there`s no problem.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gat...te-solution-nvlddmkm-video-crash-p-7805u.html

Try this thread and download the videocard bios. It worked wonders for me.

 

BEST THING TO DO, i did this and my temp rarely get 80C

 

Thanks for the suggestion.
I downloaded and ran HWMONITOR.
My GPU temp never got over 71 degrees while in game. In fact none of the temps ever spiked on me and I still got the crash.
The only thing that rose steadily was the "Current Capacity" reading under "Capacities" (measure in mWh). It rose steadily from around 72000mWh to around 74500 (Full Charge Capacity is 76845). Not sure what any of that means but that's around the point when it crashed - GPU temp was around 71 degrees at the time as well.
Core temps were pretty good, never fluctuating beyond 2-3 degrees.
Everything else was pretty much the same.
Any thoughts here?

 

Same here Forsaken. Exact same issue.
For the first year or so I had this laptop there were no issues at all. Then, just in the last 6+ months, I get these intermittent computer crashes. Wish I knew what was going on

 

actually i forgot to tell that i have a 7811fx, almost the same thing tho, think i fixed it now tho, i uninstalled all nvidia drivers, used driver cleaner, and then downloaded latest beta drivers from nvidia and did a clean install, havent crashed since then, 2 days counting, did some furmark testing and works

 

Nice.
Which beta drivers did you install?

 

I had the same problem as you guys (except it started from day 1 lol). It is not overheating, or driver problems, but the result of a crappy soldering job of the gpu on the motherboard.
You see, unlike desktops, most laptop gpu's don't use slots, instead they are soldered (attached) directly to the motherboard. Basically, if the solders are defected, when voltages reach a certain point (from what I remember), the screen will turn off and a hard restart is the only option. Unfortunately, there is no permanent or perfect fix for this. There are some remedies for this.

1) Rivatuner
a) Download and Install rivatuner : RivaTuner v2.24c download from Guru3D.com (If installation doesn't work download this file and put it in the same directory as the installer: Download RivaTuner x64 signed Drivers | techPowerUp
b) Run Rivatuner and click the power user tab
c) Then go to RivaTuner \ NVIDIA \ Overclocking and click the plus button
d) Go to "EnablePerfLevelForcing" and double click the grey box next to it and enter the value "1"
e) Then go to RiverTuner \ Overclocking \ Global and under there go to MaxClockLimit and change the value to at least 200 (I have an older p-6860fx so I'm not sure what clock speeds yours is but it should be enough, but if it is not, then raise this)
f) Go back to the main tab and click the arrow button all the way to the right of the words "ForceWare decteded" and click on the icon of a gpu (system settings a.k.a system tweaks menu)
g) Once there set the "Force Constant Performance Level" to performance 3d
h) Expectedly, the clocks should be way lower than it should be (it's because the gpu's have an "extra 3d" profile that rivatuner doesn't support) If you did step e and set up MaxClockLimit correctly, just raise up the values to your default clocks in gpu-z (you may need to raise MaxClockLimit if you can't go all the way)
i) Then just check the "Apply Overclocking at Windows Startup" and the startup settings should matchc the clocks you want
j) Restart computer

Result: You won't be getting anymore blackscreen crashes, but you will get nvlddmkm errors and crash to desktop instead and sometimes cause artifact and "blinking" in-game (basically it freezes, blacks out, and comes back, thankfully not too often). What we're really doing is undervolting the laptop, which will prevent the screen going black, but some games may be more unstable more frequently. So it's not really a "fix", but you can at least use your PC afterward w/out having to restart.

2) Put your motherboard in the oven.
This is only if your laptop is dying and should be last resort. It basically is supposed to Re-solder the gpu to the motherboard, but if it goes wrong, good-bye laptop!

In your case, just keep your laptop, and in one or two years get a nice desktop and a netbook if you can (that's what I'm planning at least)