Lenovo Y500 SLI video hardware error

Guys I have a very serious issue with my Y500 GT 650M SLI system. I can't play games at all because my system will lock up as soon as I enter the game, requiring a hard reset. My Windows Action Center is filled with Video Hardware Error reports. Is this because of a bad video card or is it a driver/software issue? I am on a clean install of Windows 8 Pro and have already tried the 314.22 WHQL and 320.00 BETA drivers. Nothing is overclocked. This is unbelievably frustrating as it is my second Y500 unit and I still cannot use it properly.

 

:cry: Second Y500 and this one is acting up? That is terrible! I hope someone can help you. I am googling this for you.

 

Look at this ginormous thread on the Lenovo forums: GPU problems Lenovo IdeaPad y500 - gt 650 SLI - Lenovo Community

There have been a million issues with this machine and still no official statement or fix from Lenovo.

 

If this happens to my 750M's I'm going to be mad

 

i think it's time to put that one key recovery to use.

 

Not a chance; I already deleted that partition. The bloatware was causing me major issues. This is a clean Windows 8 Pro installation on a reformatted hard drive. I'm pretty worried because my research says that this is video card TDR error. You usually only see that on dying graphics cards and the last time I experienced this was on a GeForce 8000 series that was ready to kick the bucket.

 

One key isn't that bad

 

Oh sorry for that octiceps. I think you still have warranty
Give it to service center.they can repair or replace ur thing. hope it will recover soon

Sent from my Nexus 4 using Tapatalk 2

 

Well I disabled SLI and everything is fine. But I paid for SLI dammit and I expect to be able to use it. One more clean install and if that doesn't fix it Lenovo is going to feel the full force of my wrath. Over 2 months from the date of purchase and still can't use this machine without problems...

 

Maybe it's something related to your "clean" install of Win 8.

 

Nah I doubt it. Over the years, I've gotten very good at doing lean, mean, and clean Windows installations and tweaking the OS for maximum performance and stability. The clean install to remove factory bloatware is the first thing I do on any OEM machine and I honestly believe that it has saved me a lot of trouble down the road.

Since I started this thread I have been able to cure most of my game crashing problems through specific workarounds. SLI seems very finicky on this system so doing certain things like changing the video settings too many times or running Fraps in the background will crash some games and I have stopped doing that. Other games and benchmarks never crash at all so issues seem to occur on a per-application basis. I'm almost certain the root cause of the crashing is in the Nvidia graphics driver since Event Viewer points to nvlddmkm as the faulting module for every single one of these crashes. The first driver I installed was 320.00 BETA and it had game-breaking issues much worse than the ones I'm currently experiencing so I ditched it in favor of 314.22 WHQL. I didn't bother to completely clean out the remnants of 320.00 before I installed 314.22 so what may be happening is that remaining driver residue from 320.00 are being problematic. In any case, I will definitely do a clean install of the next WHQL drivers that are released and see what happens. I initially suspected a faulty graphics card or two but now that I got my game crashing stabilized I am running a healthy 1125/2250 overclock and it is working fine in every game and benchmark I've run so far.