MSI GT72VR no display on internal screen

Hi guys,
I'm trying to troubleshoot a MSI GT72VR that works perfectly but not on the internal screen through edp.
already done:
- swap the screen
- try another edp cable

Does anyone have the GT72VR (MS-1785) schematics? Or at least a copy of the page with the link between the MXM port and the edp connector?

Thanks a lot

 

I have a disassembly guide. But no schematics. I can't seem to upload it because its larger then 2mb.

 

Hi mate,
thanks for helping. I PM'd you my email if you can send me the disassembly guide.
But actually I need the schematics to troubleshoot the parts that prevent the internal screen from working.

 

Greetings,

Is there any chance you have made any progress in this issue? I am new to these forums but in lurking around a bit it appears there are many here with a fair amount of knowledge. I see you have the GT72VR listed under sold devices, but I will share my story in the hopes that someone may have some info that may help me out. My own GT72VR-7RE is a Dragon Edition and I have no plans to ever sell it. It was the first new laptop I bought in like 15 years, plus I just love dragons ...... so I am not ready to give up on this one yet.

I have babied this machine from the first day, only gamed on it rarely and only in full cooler boost when I did. Hell I opened it up and did a full repaste with Mastergel Maker the day I got it. 2 years ago repasted again with Grizzly Kryonaut and fresh thermal pads. Never had a single problem with it until about 6 months ago. Then suddenly I started getting odd glitches - just quick little random color artifacts, nothing huge but definitely worrying. Then one day just a couple weeks later the internal display was just gone. The machine was still booting just fine, could punch in my pin and was greeted with the normal windows sounds at login. Tried connecting external to both Display Port and HDMI - same results.
I pulled it all apart and inspected everything, including every last microscopic component. I could find no obvious issues anywhere. It would act no different if I reassembled everything and left the MXM card out completely and that is really irritating - the lack of having any integrated graphics at all was one of the reasons I bought this model. I never considered I would have an issue like this - without any kind of beep codes like a desktop machine I could only guess at the possible cause. Seemed likely to be the card but I came no closer to finding any schematics anywhere than you did but I did find that my card did not warm up at all when the the machine was powered up. The prices people are asking for MXM cards is just crazy, it was looking like throw $600+ into a card or into a motherboard and hope I made the right choice.

Finally one day I got lucky and managed to snag a used MXM1070 on eBay for a somewhat reasonable cost of just over $300. Well, as you may guess when I got that card and installed it I still had no damn video on the internal panel, or in an external monitor at all. This card though was heating up like you would expect a good card to do. WTF, right?? This new card was a little beat up - it was filthy and it looked like at some point someone had covered even the memory in heatsink compound. I started looking at it in detail and I found it was missing 3 component - one tiny 3pin chip, still not sure if it is a transistor some kind of diode, and 2 capacitors. These were obviously knocked off physically, there is no sign of heating like someone had intentionally removed with soldering iron or hotair. The eBay seller of course claimed I must have done this until I looked real close at the pics posted in the auction listing which showed the same damage. Still he was adamant the card was tested prior to sale - he showed a bunch of benchmarks as proof - of course none of those would show the serial number - from what I learned that is only on the sticker and you can't find it with software at all. Finally he allowed the return, but I wanted to take advantage of having a second card before I sent it back.
What I found caused me to decide to keep this card, but it's still really damn strange. So forgive the huge background leading up to this cause here is where things are really strange. I remembered that I had a USB graphics card - one of the cheap little Sewell cards that I had used on a work PC a few years back - I had an 8500GT at the time with 2 monitors and used this USB card just to get a third one connected.
So I put my original 1070 back in and booted up, then connected this USB card and sure enough Win10 installed the driver and up popped my desktop for the first time in quite a long while! Wish I had thought of this sooner. When I checked device manager there was nothing listed in display adapters other than the Sewell, no trace of my original 1070 being connected at all. Then I put the bay card in and booted up again. This time it was showing a "Microsoft Basic Display adapter", that took me by surprise. I tried to install several different versions of nVidia drivers and all of them reported no compatible hardware installed. I tried DCH and standard old school but none would install. Then I tried something that used to work many years ago under windows 98 - I forced it to an old nVidia driver and that actually worked! It was odd though, GeForce Experience told me it was outdated driver but I still couldn't get the latest to install properly. I had mismatched components - like main driver was OK but no gamestream support, no ansel support etc.
Finally I extracted the latest driver and used the same forcing trick but pointing to that and I am finally back to full support and fully installed latest driver. ..... But - I still do not get anything on the internal panel at all - DisplayPort and HDMI work fine, and according to the drivers the internal panel should be there. I changed to duplicate rather than extend so I don't have a whole screen that I can't see but I wont be able to rest until I figure out just WTF is still wrong. I tried turning gsync off but I have heard that this could still be part of the problem. The only other thing I have found is that my original MXM1070 is marked Ver 1.2 while the eBay one is marked Ver; 1.0 - oh and the ebay card has an SLI connector on it while my original does not.

So I am thinking I will probably attempt to replace the 3 tiny missing components on the eBay card with the ones from mine - all that looks to be the same. I can see a couple caps missing not a huge deal but the 3pin chip - I don't know, it's only markings are "TD -". I have above average soldering skill but I don't have much experience with things this small and I hate to think how pissed I will be at myself if I brick the eBay card. So ............... huge mess. If anyone is still reading this far into it I would be interested in any suggestions you may have.
Also one other thing - now that I can get into my BIOS settings again I am considering trying to turn on the integrated graphics. Has anyone ever tried that?? I have seen some talk of people wanting to attempt to turn off iGPU but I think that was a Dell and the consensus was NOT to try that. Has anyone ever tried to enable iGPU in one of the MSI dGPU-only machines? The setting is right there in the hidden BIOS options, but again I don't want to brick this laptop (but it's just sitting here mocking me, daring me to try - wont be able to hold out forever .....).

-If you made it this far - thanks for reading this mad rant and please let me know what you think of this mess.

 

Maybe this 1070m ver 1.0 came from vortex machine (sli - 2nd card), and you have to flash the 1070m ver 1.2 vbios to get this card to work properly.
From what I remember vbios of 1070m had g-sync and non-gsync versions, this may also affect the compatibilityof the card.
I think GT72VR is castrated from hardware so i guess you'll not get any benefits from "switching on igpu" in bios. It may cause another problem, so is the risk worth it?
Hope you will find a solution, GL!

 

Thanks for the reply, it is much appreciated.
It is very interesting to me that my OEM card has all the solder pads for an SLI connector but just doesn't have the connector in place, so you may be onto something there. I wouldn't expect to see vbios differences in desktop SLI of course, but I have zero experience with SLI in laptops. This is the only MXM equipped mobile I have ever had. There is no vbios posted for this model on MSI support but I'll poke around into some of the Titans with SLI 1070s and see if I can gain some insight there.
Wish I could dump the vbios off the old card - maybe some kind soul here with a GT72VR-7RE may step up with a dump from their card. I would probably go ahead on flash it just so see what happens. I have thought about getting my original card repaired, but I an MSI service center would probably rape me on the cost. Eurocom looks to be the best place to buy a card, they seem to know these machines well, but damn $817 for for a mxm1070???

I agree switching on the igpu is risky as hell. Before I thought of the USB vid card this machine was basically a paperweight and honestly with it wasn't much better. There is no way of even getting into the bios that way. Would a bios reset revert even hidden settings I wonder? I'm struggling with my inner hacker that's screaming "try it!". So far I have been able to resist but I don't know how long I can hold out.

MSI website says gsync option is variable, I'm pretty sure my laptop has it, but specs on the box only say 120Hz wideview. This whole thing just annoys me, I always treated that laptop like it was my own child. The fact that the card quit on me so abruptly really sucks. I picked up a GS63 Stealth cheap on ebay just so I have something portable. I stayed away from stealth at the time I bought the gt72vr really only because I expected it to last a whole lot longer. The gt72 sitting next to the gs63 is a shocking comparison. The gt72 is twice as fast, but I really like this gs63 a lot. It's a great little machine.

-Thanks!