M860TU - Graphics Card Dead?

I've had my M860TU for about 1.5 years now, tonight the display on my laptop went out, external monitor as well.


I can turn it on and hear windows load, but the screen is blank with a bunch of white vertical lines to the right side, and the external monitor is acting as if it is not plugged into anything.

Help please.

9800GT Card

 

did u try fn plus F7?

 

That's definitely not it.

 

Have you tried removing the card, cleaning, re-seating?
Maybe even the oven-baking method if nothing else helps...

 

Yeah, I removed it, cleaned some dust out. What is reseating and oven-baking?

 

Re-seating=just placing back.
Oven-baking method is the way to go if nothing helps, kinda the last resort (may others correct me if I'm wrong here), you can put the card in the oven (350-400F) for about 10 min, I'm sure you can google for more precise instructions as I never tried it myself.

 

Hm, no one else has had this happen?

I'm dissapointed with Sager, never buying one again.

 

Don't rush to such conclusions, there's nothing wrong with Sager/Clevo, the cards are dying fast, that's all, you have to really be careful constantly monitoring your temps, changing thermal pads etc...
High-end gaming systems are tricky pets. Don't worry, if it's just a card, you can find one on Ebay or buy from a reseller for under 400$.

 

The laptop was no where near hot when it died, that's why I'm confused.

 

Did you try an external monitor, just to test if the GPU is really dead?

 

Yeah I run dual display, the external picks up nothing now.

 

Could be a dead capacitor.

Or maybe just some solder has cracked.

 

Well the graphics card still gets warm after the fact, so it's still working in that aspect...

I didn't spy any cracked solder...

 

How much would it cost to replace the graphics card?

I was unable to find much about it with a google search.

 

9800M GT are expensive. Look for GTX 260M from RJtech.com.

 

Damn, that thing is $390.

Now... if my graphics card was dead would my computer boot up?

Cuz I can definitely turn my computer on and hear windows load, then login blindly, theres just no picture/display and the laptop monitor is black with some lines to the right side, and if I plugged an external monitor in, the external monitor would act as if it wasn't plugged into anything.

 

Depends on what kind of dead. In your case, your computer can still POST and operate, though blind. But to me, if you can't recover from the eternal black screen, it's dead.

 

If I took it into Bestbuy or Fry's would they be able to tell me what's wrong or is that a waste of time?

 

It's a waste of time.

 

What am I gonna do...

 

Borrow a cheap mxm GPU like a 3650 and test if that makes it work.

 

UPDATE:

I opened up the graphics card and scraped off the GPU heatsink, then put it back together, turned it on, still wasn't working, left it on for a few hours, rebooted it, and now it works...

However without the heatsink compound it heats up pretty fast, so I'm not using it until I put in new heatsink compound material.

Does anyone know where I can buy this material?

 

Anywhere. 10char

 

You need thermal paste.
Any computer shop should have it.