P170EM 7970m possibly dead?

Today I got a blue screen with an atikmdag.sys error while gaming. After restarting, I kept getting the same blue screen error so I go into safe mode and use the AMD clean up utility to remove the driver, run driversweeper to clean up which allows the laptop to boot windows normally. But whenever I reinstall any AMD drivers (I tried various catalyst drivers from 13.4 - 15.7) I would get the same blue screen. On one occasion the computer got a bsod while installing the amd driver (when the screen first went dark on driver install).

The weird issue is that even the Intel HD 4000 graphics driver will not run after installing properly and restarting. I tried a few of them (2932, 2963, 3165, 4276) and none of them will open the control panel (GfxUIEx.exe). The brightness settings on the laptop aren't available either and dxdiag gives blanks or n/a for all the fields. If anyone has any ideas please let me know, I feel like I've tried everything I could think of.

The exact error is:
*** STOP: 0x0000007E (more addresses here)
*** atikmdag.sys - address FFFFF8800586D61E base at FFFFF8800582D000

In the event viewer there is a warning that says:
The driver \Driver\vga failed to load for the device PCI\VEN_1002&DEV_6800&SUBSYS_71021558&REV_00\4&3005a70f&0&0008.

 

Unfortunately it might be. I had a similar issue, not exactly the same though, not long ago, about 2 months. I've seen several more threads about faulty 7970m as well, might be its average lifetime cycle. I have a P150EM with a (dead) 7970m.
If this is the case, you have to uninstall your drivers for both cards and disable installing native Windows drivers by adjusting policies (you may have to google it). Disabling automatic driver installation is vital.
Then you can proceed by just installing your Intel drivers and leaving your 7970m be.
Now, if your card is not dead and this is somehow a driver issue, you can retry your 7970m drivers intallation. Then, if it fails again, repeat above steps until Windows loads in normal mode and check your HDD and RAM for errors.
If everything is fine with your HDD and RAM, you may want to either RMA your card (if it is still possible, these models are ~3 years old) or try baking your GPU. Be extremely careful though. For me it helped for ~2 weeks then I had to rebake it twice (after another 2 weeks and the third rebake it stopped working completely).

 

If your card is so toast that you have to bake it, you're likely MUCH better off buying a new card. It's scary how many 7970ms are dying these days, especially now that they are pretty much out of warranty.

 

True, another solution, obviously, is to replace the card. I, personally, am going for a new rig as soon as I have enough money, but it's absolutely possible to install a 980m, for example, as a replacement for the 7970m. Beastly thing that is going to last another 2-3 years on high-ultra settings and it's even cooler than 7970m. Mine was running at temps well above 80 degrees and this is probably the reason why 7970m's die a lot.

 

back in the day a 980 when it first came out officially wouldnt work.

amazing what a bit of tweeking by those that know what they are doing when it comes to bios (Prema is the boss ) then anything is possible.

not cheap though > http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...0m-980m-kits-for-p150em-p170em-p370em.770757/

 

Not cheap no, though the 970M costs a lot less.

 

So I finally fixed the issue. After doing a full re-installation of of windows I got the graphics to all work again, so I'm pretty sure that it was an Intel HD graphics driver issue at this point.

Two reasons, the first is that I never did a driver sweep for the Intel graphics (the driver sweeper didn't have that as an option) and second, an issue with that would cause an issue with the amd card as well....but its weird that the bsod error only pointed at amd.

 

There is a chance the intel chip was passing garbage information to the dedicated GPU.