M860TU Graphics Card dead??

Hi,

I bought my M860TU a few years ago and put in a quadcore cpu, everything worked very smooth until yesterday. i did some research and found this forum dedicaded to Clevo machines. so i'm looking for help!

here's the story. i output the video through DVI port to a 1080p monitor for half a year now with only smalls problems. the problems were one time when i powered it, on the screen went gradually to white and freezed, the other time I powered it on and there was only the blue power light on and the fan running (the screen wasnt even lit), could it be i pushed the power button too short??.anyways the above two problems were simply solved through force shutdown and reboot.

but yesterdays when i was watching youtube full screen, just as the video switched to 1080p automatically the image stuttered and there popped up the message "NVidia display driver stopped responding and has recovered". i was able to continue for 5 minutes and when i tried to watch the same video again, this time the image got frozen with some colorful line shadows(not too many just a couple) of what was previously being displayed and the sound stuttered with monoton frequencies. i had to force shut down and reboot and as it went into the windows logon screen there was again this colorful zigzag line shadow and the machine rebooted automatically with only the blue power light and fan running and the screen wasnt lit. my 1080p monitor acted as if it wasnt plugged into anything.

i know i got a problem so i unplugged every peripheral and tried to boot with only the battery and its the same old blue power light with fan running. i then tried hitting F2 to get into BIOS but as the screen wasnt lit i wasnt able to see anything, after a couple of tries to hit F2, I got these loud beeps and it booted into windows!! so the final state was when i powered it on, i got 5 loud beeps and after typing in the password i was able to log into windows with the usual windows 7 startup sound and then by hitting the Windowskey+Left+Enter i was able to shut down! of course i did the above "blindly" as the screen wasnt lit THE WHOLE TIME and thus i wasnt able to seen anything.

can you please help me diagnose? any solutions or suggestions? i'm guessing its the video card, would removing, cleaning and reinstalling the card possibly help or is the card dead? thanks a lot!

 

welcome
firstly what video card have you got.
the lines down the screen does sound like its sadly dying. are they anything like the pic attached.

once the card has died the only way to resolve this is either buy another clevo (not dell) card 9800gt/260gtx which are very hard to find or try the baking method but you have to make sure the gpu is totally dead as baking a partly working card will knacker it.

all the baking method does is slowly melts the solder contacts so they reconnect. this can vary from a couple of weeks repair to over 2 years repair that has been reported on here.

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

this was my 9800GT after 2 years so you are very lucky yours has lasted unless its a 260gtx and mine is still going strong.

 

thanks for the info MrDJ,

my card is GTX 260m. the screen turned white once and it was completely white, no stripes like the pic that you attached. and the problem was solved simply with a reboot.

what appeared on the screen yesterday was more like artefacts of the original image, like say a double colorful outline of a random object of the image content. it wasnt that the whole image was blurred, it

was just some lines and curves there. i was pretty shocked i didnt take any pictures.

how can i make sure the card is completely dead? now i can still log into windows. is this a sign that the card is not yet totally dead? but the screen wasnt lit during the whole time, that is no splash screen when i power it on.

should i just log into windows and let it run for a couple of hours? i thought i read somewhere this method brought the card back.

 

also is there an integrated graphics chip on the motherboard? so that i'll remove the card and boot to see if anything appears

 

actually thats a very good question. i dont think it has intel graphics but when ive deleted the nvidia drivers in the past it still shows the image but much larger so there is some sort of graphics working in the background unless its still using the nvidia card.

have you got an external monitor you could try to see if it has the same effect on that screen. if it does then it is most prob the gpu.
befor you try that you could try updating the driver all though im not sure how much difference the new drivers are for older cards. i swore by 186.81 as being the best nvidia had ever released.

im sorry to say i have no idea what else to try. hopefully some of the experts will see your post and be able to give a better idea than me.

edit

just to add, ive just remembered i did have a totally white screen and everything froze up on me. turned out to be i had 2 bad sectors on my hard drive and that totally buggered everything up. one minute windows would load fine and then as soon as i clicked on a desktop icon everything would freeze. system restore done nothing and the only way around it was a new hard drive.
is yours still the original drive?

 

yes its the original drive, thought i guess its not a drive problem. and i cannot recreate the problem as there is no video output now.
so baking is the last resort? i saw people with problems like in the picture you attached(which means theres still video output) bake and succeeded. but my screen cant be even lit!

 

bump for help. i searched for card but it seems to be very difficult to get a new one, so do i have to abandon the laptop altogether when baking fails?

 

so there is nothing also showing on an external monitor as well. you did switch the screens using Fn + F7

only other thing it could be is the ribbon cable to the screen but if it defo doesnt work on an external its sadly the gpu.

you could try looking on the market place here as they sometimes have cards available NBR Marketplace

 

If the card is truly dead (that is, no chance of baking it back to life), you'll have to replace it with another Clevo 260M (or whatever else may be compatible). From what has been outlined thus far, it seems to have all the makings of a card that has kicked the bucket.