Odd P170SM-A artifact issue

So I was wondering about this, I've had a guy over and wanted an upgrade of the graphicscard, however there seemed to be some really weird issue going on with some artifacts. When doing 3Dmark2011 bechmark, everytime on loading screen the MSI afterburner number would artifact and the screen would become really weird, however when going to the actual benchmark, everything was absolutely fine.

It seems every time intel graphics was used, the screen would artifact, everytime the dGPU would be used, it would be fine, this was also only happening if both intel and the NVIDIA card would be used at the same time, meaning if intel only ran on youtube etc. there would be nothing.

I swapped the CPU out to ensure it's not the CPU and swapped RAM, so confirmed it's not the ram either. The guy upgraded from Windows 8 to 10, so my belief is, that's it's probably some really messed up driver / windows crap going on, however I would want to know, if it's not a software based problem, what could cause this? Thus far it seems like some really terrible optimus issue.

 

Artifacts oftentimes point to bad video memory. Since Optimus can't be toggled (no option for MSHYBRID or DISCRETE) on the SM-As, what exactly do you mean by:

 

When you use 3dmark 2011 for instance it switches from dGPU to iGPU. When it does the benchmark there is nothing, however when it's in the loading screen aka when it turns the dGPU off and intel graphics take over, it artifacts.

I had the same idea, but that would mean the RAM is bad, which apparently isn¨t the case since iGPU's use the RAM as the vRAM.

 

Weird. It being driver-related seems unlikely, but it's worth clean-installing/updating the NVidia driver, at least. I'd update the Intel Graphics driver, also, if it's not already (do this before the NVidia one).

Also unlikely to be related, but which BIOS & vBIOS versions are on the machine?

 

Both are stock Bios and vbios. Also same issues on original dgpu which was the furnace 880m card. So its not hardware nor vbios or bios related. And it cant be the monitor due to the fact that u can force it in any way optimus is used.

 

I was on spot.

Upgrading from Windows 8 to Windows 10 caused this on a driver level. Likely some conflict between optimus and MSHybrid. I assume it somehow didn't disable optimus when opgrading to W10 and hence causing these funny glitches with MSHybrid.

After clean install of Windows 10, everything worked flawlessly.

 

It can cause some odd issues doing the upgrade, i'm not surprised either that was the cause.