Clevo P751 P751DM2-G: Main Screen Turn Black and Sometimes Magenta Lines

Hey there!

I have a Clevo P751 P751DM2-G with a NVIDIA® GeForce GTX 1060 (N17E-G1) 6GB GDDR5 Video RAM. And I am generally using 2 extra monitors.

I tried playing a couple of games and started noticing some things so I also tried a few benchmark applications.

While playing GPU intensive apps (games and benchmark apps) it seems that the main screen (laptop screen) starts to turn black for a few milliseconds and sometimes after a while it completely turns black. In the same time the 2 extra screens of the external monitors are completely fine.

When this happens and while I am in the game, I close the laptop lid thus going into sleep mode. When I turn it back on, I can see the game again.

And once in a while I can see some tearing on the lower part of the main screen with some magenta colors.

I just installed MSI Afterburner on it to monitor the temperature and it seems it usually is at 50 deg. Celsius but when I run a benchmark app like Heaven or Superposition, it goes all the way to 85 to 93. I am guessing this is not right, right?

I am gonna open it, clean the fans and replace the paste, but I am also curious what you think related to the problems I mentioned. Do you think it is not properly ventilated and this is how it behaves in those situations or do you think there is a problem with it?

Thank you for looking into this.

PS: I have a video with the recording of the screen via a smartphone where you can see the monitor going black. Unfortunately I couldn't catch the other problem with the magenta colors yet.

 

You can disable the hibernation function in the power settings and just play with the lid closed and use the 2 monitors instead.

50C is about average for idle temps (not gaming) Stressing the system will as intended hit your upper limits for thermals / limiting. It's hard to mitigate heat on most laptops regardless of your attempts with paste / fans / heat sink. A cooling pad with fans will help dissipate the heat a bit but nothing drastic.

This could be HW / Heat related as the temps go up the CPU/GPU slow down and you'll notice the artifacts between scenes. The magenta is most likely related to the slower refresh brought on by the throttling but, your fans / throttling should kick in before this starts to happen.

I've been repasting a lot over the last few months myself trying to find a good middle ground and landed most recently on Antec Formula X $12.99 / 4 Grams and it's holding its ground pretty well for transference from the chips to the heat sink. It does maintain high 80's for the most part while a game / load is placed on the system and then quickly recovers back down to ~60. I've tested out different products with varying results form fine for 2-3 days and then totally failing to transfer heat hitting idle temps ~100C+ or mediocre performance with 8.8 w/km pastes. My next option I was weighing was Noctua NT0H2 which is the same price but there was delayed shipping at the time I needed to replace the failed paste I had tried prior to Antec. The toss up between them was shipping. They're both about the same from the specs when it comes to transference and density.

The price / quantity is a good bargain since you can get a ton of uses out of it on a laptop setup. I've had it applied for 2-3 weeks now and it's been stable with a system uptime of 24/7. The past 5.5 days since last reboot the avg temp is sitting at 64 with a low of 42 and a max spike of 103. The point of the average temps is to get an idea of typical use vs optimal conditions like your boot / idle temps at startup from a cold boot. If it were a desktop where you had more control you could feasibly get those temps down 10-20C with proper cooling / surface area. My 8700K desktop sits at 90-100F (27-35C)with an air cooler w/ 2 fans on the tower but I also have 10 fans within the case pushing air around the whole system. I don't use it for gaming though but as my whole house router/switch/AP/NAS/DVR/FW/VPN and so on. When the DVR transcodes videos though to strip commercials it will kick up to ~135F but the fans whoosh all the hot air out and bring it right back down.

 

Update: In the meantime I changed the thermal paste and the problem persists. IMHO it is related to the GPU getting very hot. While playing a game the GPU temperature gets to 95-97 deg. Celsius and the screen starts to flicker and in the end it turns off completely. Other times it just stays at 95-97 deg and nothing happens.

The thing is I had a problem with my GPU an year ago. One day I was surfing the web with about 20-30 tabs open like I always do and when I opened another tab, the screen went dark. I restarted the laptop but the screen never turned on. I could hear the laptop booting though. I finally bought a new GPU (the one I am using right now). So now I am worried I might have problems with this one as well. The warranty will finish in a couple of weeks so I would need to make a decision asap. I have to add that while playing games I did not have similar problems with the older GPU (well, not until it just crashed).

So this is why I would like to find out if this behavior is normal.
Is it normal for the main screen to turn off if the GPU gets to hot while the other screens remain turned on?
Is this how a GPU normally behaves when it gets to hot? It just turns off? This is the security measure it takes in order to avoid meltdown?

I recorded a video for you to understand more clearly what is going on:

Thank you for looking into this, Tech Junky

I will do more tests while using a second monitor as my main screen to see if the GPU will turn that screen off instead.

And I will definitely look into your proposed solutions for cooling. Thank you so much!


PS: This is the post I made more than an year ago when the last GPU just gave up: http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...pu-unit-stopped-working.831855/#post-10988589

 

It's odd IMO but, the thermal paste and additional cooling measures should buy some time or resolve it as a band aid while putting a load on the GPU.

The aux monitors staying on though brings to question how they're connected whether the cables have adapters built into them or not or if it's through an external dock over USB as they sometimes have built in GPU's that get triggered over the USB connection.

If the warranty is about to run out though I would take advantage of it and get a replacement swapped out to see if it persists.

***every system is different in how it behaves***
Is it normal for the main screen to turn off if the GPU gets to hot while the other screens remain turned on?
see above

Is this how a GPU normally behaves when it gets to hot?
Depends on the OEM how they configure the safety measures; They have 2 options.... disable the GPU until it cools down or slow it down to reduce the temps

CPU's though tend to do the same but more emphasis on the slow down to bring the temps down provided there is some cooling happening. When I repasted one time I didn't reseat the fan cable enough and when I booted up to check the temps of the application the system shot up to 100 almost instantly and started beeping at me within a minute indicating an issue. Opened things up and checked the fan cable and pushed it some more and it clicked into place and the issue was resolved.

I've had the thought of replacing the heat sink fans but they're hard to find w/o the whole heat sink as one piece. With that in mind the fans do work and for upgrading to better designs they're all pretty much the same on the laptop side vs desktop options. By the time they decide to not work I'll probably be upgrading twice to newer systems.

 

I checked the warranty and it seems it was only for 6 months thus it expired. :/

Here is another demo where you can actually see the lines / patterns as well:

You can see in the background the temperature shown in real time in MSI Afterburner

Ah, it seems it is sufficient to just close the lid and open it again for the screen to turn on again. Whithout having to getting the laptop into sleep mode. Go figure!

The fans seem to work nicely. I can actually hear them ventilate more when the temperature gets higher.

I still don't know what the actual problem is. I am also thinking that maybe there is something wrong with the GPU to monitor connection considering the other 2 monitors stay on.

 

I had an even odder issue with Flash based pages and letting the screen time out to power off. When coming back the screen wouldn't come back on with a flash page being the front focus. I could get it to come back by doing an ctrl+tab to switch tabs or sometimes a ctrl+alt+del to bring up the windows options and close/open the screen.

To me that doesn't make much sense at all but, it's a quirk to deal with. I also had a power brick I got off Amazon that produced some interesting issues that would spontaneously reboot the system for some reason. All I could find in Event Manager was a kernel power code. At first I thought it was just windows update rebooting things even though it was disabled from doing that and then it got more frequent w/o any update prompts that led to digging into the issue with the logs and putting the old charger back into play. A couple of weeks with the old charger and it didn't occur any more.

I had been testing using a USB-PD setup with it though and that was stable unless putting a load on the system that exceeded 60W draw from the power source which required using a traditional brick to maintain/charge while in use.

So, back to your issue.... Everything ties into the DP system whether internal/external displays. Seeing as though the external displays don't have the issue but the internal panel does leads me to think it's either the eDP cable from the MOBO to the panel or the panel itself. After thinking back to some older iterations of monitors and funky colors it usually was an issue with the cabling not quite seated 100% or a defect in the cable itself. The problem with laptop panels it it's hard to have spares to test with to confirm it's one or the other.

 

To me it looks like its the cable connection to the lcd screen, if it was a bad gpu it should affect the external monitors aswell. Maybe a bad contact or the cable is bad. Try and see if you move the laptop screen up and down to reproduce the error.

 

Thank you, guys, for looking into this.

I will test this some more, but I put one of the external monitors as main display and retested and there are no errors anymore. I even got a bigger score on the Superposition Benchmark (7211 on external vs 6748 on internal screen).

It's definitely related to the connection between the GPU core and the internal display. But why does it behave only when I stress it? How is temperature related to this?

BTW, I remember I first saw the magenta patterns when Windows tried to forcefully install new updates a few months ago. Actually I had to roll back to previous version in order to have the laptop functional.

I will also look at the cabling inside the laptop to see if everything is fitted.

Let me know what you think about the last revelations.
Thank you!!

 

I do not understand this. What is an eDP? And MOBO (is it motherboard? )
And panel as in the screen?

 

Yes thats the cable from the panel aka screen and the edp socket (Embedded Display Port).

 

Hi folks!

It might be related to the aforementioned problems but now I have another one.

When I stress the laptop by quite a lot (intensive workload with the graphics and the fans are at full speed), the screen turns black and after less than a second, the laptop turns off.
I have to push the power button to turn it back on. This does not always happen, but it does happen quite a lot of times.

I have to mention the laptop battery gave up as well and I am thinking that maybe when I stress the laptop, it might need some extra power that might have been taken away from the battery. It sounds a bit weird, but I don't know...

Any ideas?

PS: The problem I mentioned in earlier posts are still there.

 

Poor VRM to thermal pad to heatsink contact or a failing power supply could do this.

 

I agree with Meaker on this one.

 

Thank you, guys! What does VRM stand for?

Do you think it's not related to the problems I stipulated in the first part of the comments with the VGA card or VGA related cabling?

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews/vrm-voltage-regulator-module-definition,5771.html

There you go, these days the single (most often) little rectangular chip near the inductors rather than pairs or fours per phase.

 

It seems it is related to the GPU getting very hot. At about 95 (!!) degrees Celsius this is what it does. The screen shuts down and after a second the whole laptop shuts down.

I was monitoring the GPU temperature via the Task Manager and actually once it almost went into shutdown. It just happened that I closed the app that was using the GPU just in time so the screen just turned off for less than a half a second before turning back on. When I looked at the temperature, it was the one I mentioned above.

I will try to put the laptop into a position that is proper for better ventilation. I might change the paste.. again. Maybe use a ventilation pad and clean the fans. I got some extra tips early on, but do you have any other ideas?


BTW, what is the temperature on your laptop on standby and while using it at its maximum?
Mine is from 54% to 95%.

And I am guessing 95% is not adequate for any GPU. What is the ideal top temperature for a GPU?

 

And quite interesting read about VRM, Meaker. Thank you so much! I will open the laptop up to see if all the components (incl. VRM) are properly connected to the heatsink.

 

You need to clean the heatsinks and do a fresh repaste at the same time.

 

Will do asap.

Thank you!!

 

Feel free to take pictures of how it looks inside, it's always good to have another pair of eyes to check everything looks ok.

 

I will do that today. And I'll definitely take some photos. Thank you!!

Another thing. I asked this before, but considering the recent discussions I will ask again. Sometimes when I open my laptop , so after a few hours of it being in hibernation, I get these lines. For example this morning when I opened the laptop I got this. I restarted the laptop 3 times and after the 4th time, it started without any lines.

Here is a demo:

Any suggestions?

 

Does it do it on external displays or just the internal?

 

It does that only on the main screen. Not at all on the secondary monitors. Considering it doing this from time to time when I start windows, I am guessing it is not related to the laptop being hot.


BTW I managed to open the laptop. Wow. What a mess. Full of dust. I cleaned it up, changed the paste and now the temp is somewhere around 53 to 60 degrees C. I didn't check yet what happens if I stress it. But definitely it is a lot better.

I will post some pics asap.

 

I would check the cable, but if it looks ok it could be the LCD itself.

 

But why would a few restarts fix the problem?!

 

Power cycling the unit so the control module sorts itself out or a weak solder joint thermal cycling.