P170HM GPU upgrade, not booting for blind flash?

Hi,

My trusty old Clevo P170HM's 6970m finally gave up the ghost (or started ghosting a lot, either way, it's fried). After reading a few of the threads on here, I managed to get myself a nice shiney 7970m v1.2 G2, and made a nice bootable USB drive with the vBIOS on as per the excellent guides. Tested my boot, shut down, swapped out the GPUs, put the USB drive in and...nothing.

The machine starts, but then does nothing! The USB drive light is on (the light on the USB drive that is), and the fans start...but that's it. It's like it's hung; even Caps-Lock isn't responding. I've tried pretty much everything I can think of (ranging from removing all hard drives to creating a boot DOS hard drive!), but no success.

Is this a common problem? My machine EC/BIOSes are the last (latest?) Clevo versions (as per the old Clevo BIOS thread) or is this looking like the card is pre-fried?

Any help/suggestions appreciated!

 

Jupp, it's the same old problem with all P170HM's I encountered so far, including my one!
Had exactly the same symptoms and coukdn't get rid of it, no matter what I tried. If you're sporting a LG panel you most probably need a special EDID firmware to be flashed for your panel.

I ended up in buying a GTX 680m (Clevo) which worked right out of the box, though you have to tweak the .inf file of the graphics driver.

 

Thank for the reply! The display is the Hannstar that shipped with the P170HM. I've also tried it with an AUO B173HW01 v5 with the same results. Mind you, that's no guarantee of anything...even on the 6760m I get really weird results with that panel (corrupted screen on boot, okay in BIOS and at Windows logon, then corrupt after signing on!)

Really not having much luck with laptops at the moment! Probably time to look at investing in something newer...

 

That would be the best idea! Even the 7970m or GTX 680m is mediocre at best when playing actual games. And the latter still is too costly.

Getting something with a GTX 1060 or 1070 would be the best bang for the bucks.

 

I'm not really wanting it for games; it's more a work laptop and it does its job - but looking on eBay and comparing the existing GPU with the 7970m I realised the prices were the same, so thought I'd go for the newer GPU!

Ah well...P775DM3-G here I come... Just the excuse I needed!!! :-D