Clevo M860TU Overheat Damage. CPU or GPU?

Hi all,

It would appear that I have damaged my laptop from overheating due to gaming. I'm a little bit confused as to what component I have damaged however and I was wondering if maybe you guys could help me determine this and also tell me if it can be replaced?

The issues I am having is that while gaming, all of a sudden my PC freezes showing many coloured vertical lines, forcing me to shutdown manually. The resulting screen is shown here:

http://i.imgur.com/UFN34.jpg

and a video of it happening while playing CSGO is shown here.

overheat - YouTube

I was pretty sure from googling the issue that this is due to the video card overheating. I had been having overheating issues with the laptop for a while and very often the temps would be between 80-90 degrees C. I know I was stupid for not resolving the issue sooner. However what used to happen when the laptop overheated was that I noticed a significant drop in FPS in the game due to what I assume was the GPU (or CPU?) automatically underclocking to cool itself down. After a while then the FPS went back up until the temperature reached a certain point yet again.

Once again I realise how stupid I was for not dealing with the issue. Yesterday, I got the service manual and took apart the whole heat sink and cleaned it out properly. When playing CSGO now, like in the video, the CPU and GPU temps are only around 70 degrees C but yet the laptop still crashes in this manner even at these lower temps. Thus, I figured that that I had permanently damaged my GPU from constantly playing at high temps.

What is confusing me though is that when I use MSI Kombustor to carry out a GPU stress test, the temps were able to reach up to 96 degrees C without the PC crashing as shown here:

http://i.imgur.com/H6ope.jpg

This made me wonder if it was the CPU that was damaged and not the GPU (both used to hit 80-90 when gaming over the years). I decided to run a CPU stress test using EVEREST but this also hit very high temps (88 degrees C) without any crashing as shown here

http://i.imgur.com/4VzYl.png

In order to get the CPU to reach the high temps during the stress test I had to manually disable to fan. You can see in the bottom right of the last image that the GPU temperature (blue) is also in the 80’s. The temperature is black is the HDD temperature.

So could it be that it is not the GPU or CPU overheating? I’m pretty sure it is a temperature issue though as when I play on an external monitor, with my laptop on its side with a desk fan blowing max speed into it I don’t get the crash, as shown here:

http://i.imgur.com/UI16Q.jpg

The temperatures stay around 50 degrees C in this case. Could it possibly be the memory of the HDD overheating? Or is there a reason the temps could reach quite high in the stress tests and not shut down, but still shut down while gaming at lower temps? If I’m gonna replace something I want it to be the correct component!

Any help or advice would be greatly appreciated. Happy new year!

Mark

 

Hi Mark
im sorry to say that is a dying graphics card. what card have you got loaded 9800GT/GTS or a 260GTX
your the second one to pack up this week. milcs bought his m860tu the same time as me and his lasted til yesterday but mne packedup almost 2 years ago. luckily i was still covered by extended warraty so got it replaced the same day with a better 260gtx

you are lucky its letting you play as mine died almost 2 years ago. screen just froze so had to hard reboot and when i booted up again i got this below.
stressing it out wont help much but now its started going its sadly downhill from here.

you could try the oven trick to resurrect it.some reports have lasted a year but others only a few weeks.

The Oven Trick (repairing your broken video card with an oven) | Overclockers

http://forum.notebookreview.com/zep...znote-6224w-but-works-all-brands-modells.html

 

Hi MrDJ,

Thanks very much for the reply and for confirming that it is indeed the video card that is failing. I guess from your reply it looks like I had a good run, especially considering how much I overheated the card! It is the 9800M GTS. Is the 260gtx the best replacement I can get? I don't suppose you could help me with sourcing a replacement as I have no idea where to start?

Thanks again!

Mark

 

firstly who did you originally buy from and what part of the world are you from.
then we will try to advise on suppliers but its ot going to be an easy task as these cards are hard to come by now.

just looked at your previous posts and see you bought from overclockers uk.

you couldtry them to see if they can sorce a gpu Overclockers UK - Computer components, hardware & gaming PC

or check this company out in Birmingham clevoweb, the one stop source for all clevo and clevo brankded product spares and repairs

 

Thanks very much. I have emailed both those companies to see if they have a GTX 260M (this is my best bet yeah?) or any other compatible card. Hopefully I should be able to source one!

 

alsokeep an eye on the market place NBR Marketplace as quite a few have shown up on there over the last couple of years as people break up their old system to sell as parts.

 

If it'll make you feel better, I can confirm 100% that the temps you let your your card hit did not contribute to its failure.You're not even in the danger zone, which would be well over 100C for the G9x chips.

You didn't kill your card. The old 9800Ms are just guaranteed to die after this many years.

 

Thanks for the replies. I haven't received any response and the only cards I can find are on ebay. Would something like this do the job?

Nvidia GTX 260M 1GB For Dell M17X M15X Clevo MSI laptop VIDEO CARD MXM3.0B | eBay

edit: Ok, I've been reading up on mxm version and I'm not 100% sure which one I have. In the service manual it says this about the possible video cards that one could have in their m860tu.

http://i.imgur.com/QaNiN.png

Since I have the 9800M GTS, does that mean I can replace it with another MXM III card (like the one linked above) or is there more to it than that?

Thanks again.

 

That GTX 260M would work perfectly.

 

dont forget its been holiday times so the resellers have most probably been closed over the festive period.

hopefully all back to normal today.

 

Thanks again for the replies.

@MrDJ: I did get an email from Overclockers this morning saying that they don't have any laptop GPUs in stock.

I decided to open the laptop once again just to make sure that the ebay card would fit. Here is the image of the card from ebay

http://i.imgur.com/qfHR7.png

and here are photos of my 9800M GTS I just took.

http://i.imgur.com/cFQfX.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/FEEW3.jpg

While the layout of the cards seem identical, the slot seems to be different no? Is this definitely an MX3 type?

Here are a few images of the slot the card its into inside the laptop.

http://i.imgur.com/FW1Xf.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/2YK0P.jpg

and here is an image I took after slotting the card back in. It seems to fit well in the slot.

http://i.imgur.com/Ylg9G.jpg

I'm a little confused by this as I don't think that the new card would fit this slot? Could someone enlighten me?

As always your help is greatly appreciated!

Mark

 

will check when i get home as images blocked at work.

edit:

to be honest im not sure so id better let the experts answer this one.

 

That's my mistake. I'm really sorry for the confusion. That eBay GTX 260M is MXM 3.0, not MXM 2.1 type III or IV. It's been a while since I had my M860TU, and my mind is getting rusty.

What you need is an MXM 2.1 card, such as this 9800M GT. The seller claims it's brand new.

 

Yes unfortunately the 260m MXM II cards seem to be getting rarer these days.

MXM-upgrade.com have a few cards in their "bargain bin" that may be worth a look.

 

Sorry I was at a wedding the past few days. Thanks for all the replies. I'm pretty sure now of what I need. I emailed MXM-Upgrade a few days ago asking if they had anything suitable in stock but have yet to receive a reply. Does anyone know if they still operate? (site is down today).

The only card that I can see that's suitable is the 9800M GT that Kevin linked. Is this card a but expensive because of the rarity of the MXM 2.1 HE cards? I may have no other choice anyway. I'm gonna start a thread in the NBR marketplace to see if anyone's got anything suitable lying around. Thanks again for all the replies, and if you guys see anything that might work for me on your travels I'd be very thankful if you could let me know!

 

Hello
As MrDJ mentioned in a previous post, I am also looking for a similar GPU for my old M860TU! I have been looking around, but so far no luck...
If you have any updates and news regarding where to get hold of a gtx260m, let me know!
Cheers

 

You aren't limited to a GTX260M. I've recently had to replace the GPU in my M860TU and couldn't get hold of a GTX260M in MXM-III HE form factor. GTX280M modules come up on ebay every once in a while, but they tend to be priced pretty outrageously. Oddly, Quadro FX3700M modules, which are actually exactly the same as the GTX280M, are readily available and quite reasonably priced. Note that like the GTX280M, they do run noticeably hotter than the GTX260M. I found the best option was to edit the BIOS and undervolt and underclock the FX3700M until it was both completely stable under OCCT GPU test and the temperatures remained reasonable.

Here is the full article on upgrading the M860TU GPU to a Quadro FX3700M. It includes the settings to dial into NiBiTor when editing the BIOS that I found to run both cool and stable, with relatively minimal performance loss compared to stock settings.

 

Sorry to bump an old thread but I've just seen this post now. Thanks for the post. I did end up getting a Quadro FX3700M. I haven't touched the voltage of underclocked in any way and it has been running fine. In fact I find that it runs much cooler than my old 9800M did. The GPU temperature rarely goes above 75C. Now I am still only using a dual-core processor (I can't upgrade to quad core afaik, correct me someone if I'm wrong) so maybe that's it.

 

The CPU can be upgraded to a quad core, I did it. Works just fine.