NW9440 video crashing issue.

Good Morning,

I have a question that may have been answered here, but I haven't been able to find it.

I have an HP NW9440, 2gb memory, 256mb NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500m, Windows XP SP2 patched to latest release. Current BIOS, Firmware and video drivers.

I'm running the applications in 1680x1050 widescreen resolution.

I have running several games and graphic intensive programs from an Seagat eSATA drive.

What happens is that the screen will go out. Complete loss of video while using these applications, (City of Heroes, Vanguard, EQII, and a couple of Video display and review programs for CCTV video). This could happen within 20 minutes or a few hours. I've updated everything that I could possible think of, and still it's not fixed the problem.

I believe it could be the Vid Processor overheating and shutting down, or a bad "spot" in the video memory, but I'm not sure. I've contacted HP and they are going to be replacing the motherboard, hopefully today.

Anyone have any ideas? Has anyone run into this before and solved it?

Thanks muchly.

(This is also posted in the gaming section)

 

Only now did I see this message.

By now, you have probably found out that there has been a strange overheating issue with several NW9440 (HP and other forums have several notes on it). The fan on mine died, and it has now gone back for a third time - the replacement fan they installed appears to be the right part number, but does not rev-up anywhere near as high as the original fan did under high GPU load.

There is also a separate issue with the NW9440 crashing while displaying certain colors on an external DVI screen - but it appears to be a different problem - which also causes overheating of the GPU.

I would say that if you can run the ATiTool's moving 3D "cube" (version 0.26 or above) on an NW9440 (AC power) and your GPU doesn't overheat and crash the computer after 5 minutes, your computer should probably be OK. Mine was before the fan died (GPU core temperature didn't get much higher than about 85 C while displaying the 3D image). After they returned, the temperature climbed all the way to 104-105 C, at which point the computer simply switches off without warning. To look at all the temperature sensors, Speedfan is a good utility.

It looks like the NW9440 is going to be phased out by HP soon - the NW8440 already was. I hope the newer 17" model - 8710w - does not suffer from the same type of problems. Looks like it has several updates on the nw9440 (like HDMI) and it uses the 1600M NVidia GPU.

CG