I done screwed up...

So a couple of years ago, I bought a beautiful MSI GT73VR Titan. She was big, bold and beautiful.

Life was good, until last summer, when I forgot about her and left her in the trunk of my car for 3 days. In the blazing hot Houston summer time.

I went to boot her up the other day, and everything worked fairly well, until I tried to load a game. At which point I was politely informed (she's always polite to me) that she was unable to locate either of the NVIDIA graphics cards.

I figure that the heat may have melted the solder, or something similar...

My question to you guys is, should I accept that I'm a complete ^&*$@(g moron and have bricked a rather wonderful machine, send her to MSI (the warranty's long expired), or try to fix myself (if that's even possible?)

In hope,
Stupid in Texas.

 

Melted the solder? IMO, it's is unlikely. Lead-free solder's melting point is usually around ~400F (near the infamous ~451F ignition point of paper). A CPU/GPU can easily reach 90C under load, which is ~200F - hotter than the interior of a car under the summer heat.

I'd guess heat expansion of the chassis may have pulled loose some internal cables and ribbons (under regular load, only a part of the laptop is hot). It's a really bad guess, though.

 

Unless you didn't boot it in all that time since the trunk I doubt that's the cause of the problem.

 

Yeah, I haven't used it between last summer and now. Any diagnostics I can run to try to find out exactly how much damage I've done?

 

What is the laptop able to do first of all , to give us more info.

 

The first thing i'd check is the battery, make sure its not expanded because of the heat. If it looks any different to normal, i'd stop using it.

It is unlikely that both the GPUs failed at the same time

 

You should have at least 3 years of warranty. Please contact support and see what you have left, also if possible, provide your receipt to them to update the record on the system properly.

 

I'd say it's more likely that something bounced itself free while driving than being fried to death. All components that are much more susceptible to being fried seem to work ok since you can still boot it and use it. The gpu is pretty solid, it's on an mxm slot rather than soldered. Given you say you are out of warranty (and even if you still had some you can do this without voiding it) I would go ahead and open the laptop, inspect for damage (especially the battery as mentioned), reseat the gpu(s) and repaste, reassemble and see what happens. Given you say it is an older laptop it's probably due for repaste anyway so you literally have nothing to lose. ^^ Just be careful with it and don't break anything and all will be good. If that does not help and you cannot see the gpus even in device manager at all, then I would think of contacting MSI. Good luck!

 

THe only thing i can think of that is actually affected might be the battery, the other components might just need to be reconnected.

 

The only thing that probably can't withstand that sort of heat is the HDD/SDD imo. I would try to reinstall everything from scratch, make sure you download all the drivers beforehand and install the intel graphic drivers before the nvidia ones. Also, pre-install the hard disk control driver, intel rapid storage before installing the actual operating system. One other thing would be to use a set of older graphic drivers, as sometimes the newer ones stop supporting older graphic chips. Last thing i can think of is humidity and moisture, since these chips are designed to withstand up to 90 degrees Celsius which is well over 200 Fahrenheit.