8800m GTX black screen problem?

Hey all!

I have a problem with my clevo m570ru. I wasnt sure in which forum section to post this, as I dont know if its a specific problem to this machine or not.

My 8800m GTX died about a month ago. I was lucky, the notebook was still covered by warranty (barely), so I had the card replaced, and everything seemed fine again. The only thing I noticed was that the GPU temps were quite a bit higher than normal (maybe 10 C higher on average) - I guessed this was because they probably used too much thermal paste when they exchanged the GPU.

Now, since about 2 weeks I had the following problem:
Upon wake-up from hibernation, windows (vista 32 bit) boots and I enter my password in the welcome screen. When I press login, the screen turns black, without a cursor. Its not "off" but black, turning the screen on and off doesnt help, switching through monitors (Fn - F7) doesnt help, have to hard reboot. No error messages. Sometimes upon wakeup, the screen only turns black after around 2 minutes. Or when I open some application, however it doesnt seemt to matter which application.
The problem is the same when waking from sleep.
When rebooting, often I get the problem the first "try", but after one hard reboot the notebook seems to run stable. Graphics intensive games etc, all no problem, and it will run until I turn it off again.

What I have tried:
Change graphics drivers (multiple times)
roll back using system restore
turn off my processor undervolting
virus-scan
disable all sorts of unnecessary start up programs

Might seem like this is a software problem... BUT:
on one of the crashes, after I hard-rebooted, I saw graphical glitches in the bios when it was starting up again. These were small dots, looked like snow on a TV, but not nearly as much.. just a small amount of "noise".
so far this happened only that time, and didnt have any other effects, but I am worried now ^^

I have: Vista 32 home Sp2

thanks for any help!

 

hi and welcome to nbr
firstly which graphics card have you got now and which drivers have you tried.
also can you post your temperatures after about an hour using HW Monitor.
my temperatures are below just for comparison.
my 9800GT died roughly a month ago and was replaced under warranty with a 260GTX and ive had no problems.

also who was your reseller and have you contacted their support yet.

also add yourself to this poll please http://forum.notebookreview.com/sager-clevo/573250-dead-graphics-cards.html

 

Hey, thanks for your answer.
They replaced the broken 8800m GTX with another 8800m GTX. The reseller is "Rock performance notebooks" (UK) rock :: Welcome :: Ultimate performance gaming laptops and notebooks
I have contacted them again, and they want me to send the notebook in for repairs again. I would rather first try to understand the problem better, as I need the notebook right now, and I dont actually live in the UK (last time it took 1.5 months to send it, repair and get it back)

The drivers I have tried:
189.46 (current)
270.61
270.51
267.76
After installing newer drivers (267-270), I tried to put an old driver on it (189), but the problem persists.

I used GPU-z to monitor temperatures.
after 1 hour idle/ web browsing, avg temp: 53C, max: 56 C
after 1 hour oblivion: avg temp 75 C, max temp 86 C.

this is all at standard fan settings, not forcing fans to be 100% all the time, also not forcing them to be more quiet.

What other information is needed for anyone to maybe form a conclusion, or suggest a cause for the black screen problem?

Thanks for the help!

 

for our older cards i can highly recommend 186.81 which i have found to be the best in the last 3 years from nvidia.

 

next I am going to try to re-apply AS-5 to the GPU. maybe there is way too much thermal paste on, hence 10 C higher temperatures.

Could this have anything to do with the black screen problem when waking from sleep/hibernation?
at this time the GPU is still very cool right?

 

Did you tell your reseller about it? They can either give you a upgrade or fix it. Usually you get 90 days extra after they replace a part, even if the warranty is already over.

 

yes, sending it back again will be my last option, but I need it until mid may minimum

 

I guess while your waiting you can tell your re-seller about the problem....

 

yes ofc also did that, I was told I would be contacted
They will try to figure it out I guess, the idea was just to see if maybe its a problem someone here has come across before or knows about ^^

 

leaving the notebook on after one of these black screen crashes causesit to eventually reboot - error dump file created:

On Sat 30/04/2011 22:37:12 GMT your computer crashed
crash dump file: C:\Windows\Minidump\Mini050111-01.dmp
This was probably caused by the following module: hal.dll (hal+0x69DD)
Bugcheck code: 0x124 (0x0, 0xFFFFFFFF8A3A0020, 0xFFFFFFFFB2000040, 0x800)
Error: WHEA_UNCORRECTABLE_ERROR
file path: C:\Windows\system32\hal.dll
product: Microsoft® Windows® Operating System
company: Microsoft Corporation
description: Hardware Abstraction Layer DLL
Bug check description: This bug check indicates that a fatal hardware error has occurred. This bug check uses the error data that is provided by the Windows Hardware Error Architecture (WHEA).
This is likely to be caused by a hardware problem problem. This problem might be caused by a thermal issue.
The crash took place in a standard Microsoft module. Your system configuration may be incorrect. Possibly this problem is caused by another driver on your system which cannot be identified at this time.

not good.. guess ill have to send it in again

 

It’s always nice to have a spare hard drive lying around, so you can test to see if it really is hardware related or driver related. If you have a spare hard drive, just do a complete windows install to see if the problem exist after you install all the drivers. If everything is fine on the backup hard drive, then you have a driver/hardware conflict going on with your computer that is related to the data on the old hard drive and you need to reinstall the operating system. If the problem persists with the backup hard drive, then and only then should you send your notebook back for repairs (Of course that is coming from someone who hates to work on computers that doesn't have a fault). Sometimes these problems are an easy fix. Always do a search on the error code/message you receive, and sometimes if not most of the time it will give you a remedy.

 

thank you for the advice! it got my hopes up
everything was fine until installing the service packs (1 and 2). after that I had crashes after startup, and during anything which uses the GPU again (even watching youtube)
this was using completely standard drivers, and wasnt fixed by updating to the newest nvidia either. would it be safe to say its something hardware related?

 

If you don't completely remove the drivers, you will never know. That is why it is best to do a complete install of windows and or just do a system restore. If that fails, then most likely it's a hardware failure somewhere.

 

just so odd that there is never any error message or anything. I have not been able to reproduce the error minidump with the hal.dll error... will probably be difficult to find the part thats broken :-/