Finding Out if my GPU is Failing

Hello everyone,
I'm having an issue with an old MSI GT725 which my younger brother uses for gaming. It has a q9000 cpu and a 4850m gpu and runs on Windows 7. The problem is that over the last couple of weeks when he starts a game he doesn't know when the computer is going to crash, so I joined here to see if the problem could be hardware or software related.

The crash itself is pretty easy to explain, it might be 30 seconds or even 5 minutes into a game when the screen will freeze and the computer has to be restarted by long pressing the power button. Not only does this happen during gameplay but it also happens when in selection screens in multiple games (even in games which don't tax the hardware). When doing some testing I also noticed that once in a while flash has a tendency to crash on multiple browsers and if another video is played after that happens there is a very high chance of the entire computer crashing.

I've tried removing and re-installing the latest drivers, installing older drivers, checked the temperatures to see if the gpu is getting too hot, re-installed the games, lowering resolution and quality settings and even trying to play on the guest account but the problem still persists.

I'm considering about creating a new partition and dual booting either windows or a linux distro like Ubuntu and running the game using Wine to confirm if it is indeed the gpu that is failing but I'd like to know everyone's opinion before I start that (because I really don't want to, to be honest).

Thanks for reading.

 

Have you tried opening the laptop and cleaning it from dust?
A very reasonable explanation for what's happening might be overheating... actually, its one of the most common causes of problems such as these on a laptop (short of the GPU going bad or the Windows partition becoming corrupted).

My recommendation would be to open the laptop manually and thoroughly clean it up (especially the area between the fan and the air vents).
Also, you might want to look into replacing the thermal paste on the CPU and GPU while you are at it.
That laptop seems to have easy access to the insides through simply removing the back panel.

Finally, you can also run Ccleaner for regular cleaning (and registry as well - its the only reliable program that cleans the registry of stray lines that might interfere with drivers, etc. without damaging Windows), and maybe run a quick scan with Malwarebytes (just to be on the safe side).

 

I actually didn't bother to look inside the laptop because my brother regularly cleans it but just to make sure I had a look and there seems to be no issues.

I've checked the temperatures using HWMonitor and the gpu never seems to go past the 75C (167F) mark when gaming or running stability tests so is there really a need to change thermal paste? Also I don't think it's a temperature problem because sometimes when a game has just started and the temperatures are in the high 50's (130's) a crash will still happen.

The laptop was initially scanned with Avira Anti Virus, and after your post Malwarebytes and CCleaner were run but the freezes still happen.

After posting I also tried reducing the clocks but again, no luck. I ran GPUTool and in the stability tests there were artifacts happening quite often at stock clocks (averaging every 10 seconds). Should I download Afterburner to try and change the voltage?

 

You could try with Afterburner of course to lower the voltage and of course lower your temperatures (that's always a good thing).

But... before you jump ahead to 'its the gpu', perhaps you might want to consider doing a clean Windows install.

Apart from that, I can also suggest a potential scan of the HDD with the manufacturers utility program to check for potential errors.

 

what sort of artifacts are you seeing on screen. various shapes or lines. lines can be the start of a dying graphics card but lets hope its not.
do as Deks said and run a scan of the hard drive for bad sectors. even 2 bad sectors can cause major problems.
you can download HD Tune from my sig below

 

When I meant artifacts I meant artifacts showed up when I ran the stability test that GPUTool has.

I also did an error scan in HDTune and all the blocks were green.

I've been dreading about doing a clean install mainly because I've never done one before and there's a lot of stuff on the hard drive.

 

all green is all good.

as long as youve got the driver disc and operating system disc and the licence key (either on the disc box,on base of lappy or under battery) its not a difficult thing to do. but it will wipe everything off the drive so if you have important files or folders on there its worth saving to an external drive beforehand.