Malibal Lotus P150HM - Graphics Card Problem (AMD 6990m)

Hi,

I bought a P150HM laptop from Malibal in Aug 2011. Its been a fantastic machine up till now but yesterday it suddenly came up with a weird problem.

The Malibal laptop was turned on but with its lid closed as I was using my office laptop at that time. After finishing my office work, I opened the lid on my malibal but the screen never turned back on. The laptop seemed to be responsive otherwise. So I powered it off through the power button and turned it on again hoping that the problem would be gone. But this time, after loading the windows all I got was a blank screen instead of the logon screen. It never went past it. I waited for a few minutes and tried again and the same thing re-occurred. I also noticed that there was blue flicker at the top right corner of the screen (for 1 sec). After trying 4-5 times, I thought that maybe my Windows installation had gone kaput (something similar happened on an older laptop 1-2 years ago due to windows getting corrupted). I then restarted the laptop in safe mode and it loaded everything normally. I tried a bunch of things to repair windows, its system files, restore and reg entries but nothing worked.

My next thoughts went to a driver conflict. But I hadn't installed anything new recently so the possibility was remote but I tried updating the drivers anyways. By instinct the first driver I tried updating was the graphics. I uninstalled the current driver (in safe mode) and restarted the machine. Lo and behold, it showed the logon screen and I was able log-in. I thought that updating my graphics drivers will solve the issue. So I updated the laptop with the latest AMD drivers and restarted but again I wasn't able to get to the logon screen. Again, through safe mode I uninstalled the drivers and again I was able to get to the logon screen in a normal startup. So now I know there is something wrong with the graphics card.

I then tried cleaning the air-vents and the fans in the hope that the card might just be over heating. After finishing, I powered it on again, installed the graphics drivers and restarted. This time I got to the logon screen WITH the drivers installed. I was ecstatic. But right away I noticed a sort of a lag and knew something wasn't right. Just to test my hunch, I tried to play an HD-rip movie and bam the screen went dull white and became non responsive. I restarted it again and now again I am not getting to the logon screen.

Has anyone else faced this? Is the graphics card fried? Is there anything else I should try?

PS: I am using Windows 7 64-bit.


*UPDATE* 15th May

The card was replaced through RMA by Malibal. But the replacement card died again within a month that too without any heavy load.

Malibal is offering to replace the 6990m with a 675m free of cost or with a new 7970m at $200 extra.

Do you guys think I should go with the 7970m upgrade? Is it a good price? Also, is it facing the same issues that 6990m did? Or should I wait till the next batch of cards come along?

 

I would say the GPU is dead/dying, we've seen that before from the 6990m's you can try the oven trick if you want (reflow), but yea you're looking at a new GPU.

 

Well the laptop is still under warranty (bought 2 years parts warranty) but the problem is that I do not live in the US so do not want to ship it unless I really have to. But judging by what you just said, I guess I do not have any choice.

 

Can Malibal ship you the part and let you replace it yourself?

 

Yikes, I am a fairly new member here, but all i seem to have seen in the past few weeks are threads about 6990m dying.

To OP, sorry dude, hope you can get it fixed quickly

Has AMD made any comments about this? I know NBR is a small portion of the overall user base (and a much more vocal portion at that), but it seems like an awful lot of cards are all dying at the same time.

 

Don't know. I have raised a ticket with them.

I wouldn't be comfortable replacing it myself anyways. But its one of the options I guess.

 

I wasn't aware of that! All these 6990m dying at the same time? Hmm..suspicious.

 

de ja vu comes to mind, ahh the memorys of all the 9800GT's dying within 2 years.

that does sound strange though as it works in safe mode. have you noticed any vertical lines on your screen at all. also when was the last time you cleaned the vents and fans out and also do you monitor your temperatures (loads of free software in my sig below).

a couple of them problems could also be something to do with the hard drive. which one you got? is there anyway to take the hard drive out of your work lappy and try it in your clevo just in case its a number of things caused by heat.
then report back.

 

All these 6990m dying at the same time, very suspicious... just hoping that mine doesn't die too

 

After reading your post I powered my lappy on and was able to login to windows successfully. And for the first time I saw horizontal black lines on the screen. I took a screen shot and tried to save it but the screen went blank again. I restarted it and then took a picture of the screen through my cell phone camera. Here it is:



As for your other questions, I have a 500 GB Seagate Momentus 7200 RPM disk and it seems to work normally. I cannot use my work lappy's hard drive as it is encrypted.

I clean the vents usually once in 2-3 months and monitor my temps with HWINFO. They all seemed to be in range. The maximum the temp went to was 92 once (for a short while, it was hot day!) but usually hovered around 85-86C while I was gaming. The idle temps are usually around 46C.

 

This is the same issue other people reported with their 6990M - its caused by solder faling on VRAM chips due to overheat.
There is no temp sensor on these chips, so you won't see how hot they get, and solder fails due to heating/cooling contract/expand cycles. Reflowing fixes it, but unless cooling is fixed too ( or reflowing not done properly), its could be only temporarily.

 

interesting as not seen horizontal lines like that before. normally from top to bottom like below.

if it is a dying gpu then you could follow these baking steps

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

 

Whether line is horizontal, vertical or "colour blocks" simply depends on GPU brand and what address/data lines lose connection.

 

These lines are the first time I am seeing them too!

I will try the baking method if all else fails. Right now I am in contact with Malibal exploring my options.

Thanks for the help!!

 

You always learn something new!

 

OP updated with the latest status. The replacement card died too.

 

no way! sorry to hear that.
did you get the same sort of problems as you had before.

i would defo get onto support today.

 

I have been in touch with Malibal. They offered a replacement. I don't know what else I can get.

This time I have these big vertical lines on the screen each around 1-2 inches wide!

After the RMA I also got power problems that I never had before.

RMA is such a pain as I am not in the US. I want them to look over the laptop for the power problems as well else I would have just tried getting the card shipped.

 

Make sure you outline that for them so they know. Whenever you file a case, it helps to be as specific as possible. Good luck with everything!

 

Oh they do know about it. They have been asking me to do things like reseating RAM, drain residual current and other bunch of things to get it resolved but nothing has worked so far.

 

Also, wanted to know about my query in the OP. Repeating it here:

*UPDATE* 15th May

The card was replaced through RMA by Malibal. But the replacement card died again within a month that too without any heavy load.

Malibal is offering to replace the 6990m with a 675m free of cost or with a new 7970m at $200 extra.

Do you guys think I should go with the 7970m upgrade? Is it a good price? Also, is it facing the same issues that 6990m did? Or should I wait till the next batch of cards come along?

 

go for 7970m or 780m if available

 

7970M is the way i'd go between your choices. They are still around $400 or more new so $200 is a good price.
There havent been many reports of failure from it, but the 6990M worked great up until around the 1yr mark we started seeing reports of some dying.
You could wait until the next gen GPU's are released but I wouldn't expect the same price on them, they'll probably run just a bit more.

 

I heard there are some issues with the HDMI out for the 7970m card. Have they been resolved? I use HDMI frequently to connect to my TV and I don't want to lose that option. And what about Enduro? Is it working OK?

I haven't been following the graphics scene recently so no idea about the issues the users are facing.

 

HDMI and other external video output sources are actually routed to the Intel chip. Enduro has improved quite a bit over the last year; it may suffer in some cases, though generally speaking, it has come a long way.

 

no intel gpu - no switchable graphics - no enduro on the p150hm

unfortunately tho, the hdmi issue hasnt been fixed on the hm series with the 7970m. would u be able to switch to dvi maybe? cuz for 200 bucks the 7970m is a steal and 50% faster than a 675m/6990m.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

 

That too.

 

Not sure if I have a DVI port in my TV or not. Need to check. Never used DVI before.

Does DVI support audio?

 

DVI doesn't support audio - it's video only. I think our laptops came with dvi-vga adapter and there's usually a vga port available in most TVs.

Now - are you just routing the audio to the TV? (if so, a cheapo 3.5mm to RCA will suffice) Otherwise if you are routing the audio to an amp - I'd suggest using the optical jack available and getting an optical audio cable for the best quality audio.

 

True, although there are additional adapters that provide an audio signal between HDMI to DVI. DVI connectors on modern video cards have become increasingly capable of taking advantage of the video card's inherent audio output (per HDMI features) as well.

 

Either the output can't give audio (DVI) or the device can't recieve it (DVI) so there would not be much point of an HDMI + audio solution as you may as well take it from your audio ports since you need a second cable regardless.