P775DM3 problem, black screen after installing gpu drivers.

I have a pretty serious issue with my laptop. I already bought a new one half a year ago and this one has just been sitting on a desk. However a 6700k with a 1070 is still reasonably powerful so it's a shame not being able to use it.

The problem is the screen doesn't work, nor do any external screens. Ok so the laptop must be broken right?
Well, if I connect it to an external display and reinstall windows it does work until I install the nvidia GPU drivers. As soon as I install the nvidia drivers the screen goes black permanently The GPU doesn't seem to be broken, I tried playing some Civilization 6 before installing the nVidia drivers and it worked fine, even if I had no drivers installed (well nothing recent, maybe windows installed something on it's own).

If you go into device manager and check the display adapter it does recognize it as a GTX 1070. It says the driver date is something from 2017. As soon as I install any more recent drivers the screen goes black and the display can't get a signal from any of the ports.

I actually removed the built in display cause I thought it was broken (and it's easier to use the laptop in front of a monitor if there is no laptop screen in the way), but it was probably this same issue that stopped it from working. I suppose I'll just have to reinstall windows yet again and not install any GPU drivers.

 

Remove the currently installed drivers with the latest version of DDU and try installing the latest drivers from Nvidia

 

Civ 6 might have been software rendering. I'd guess dead GPU.

 

Seems like it

 

you can try this case: remove cmos battery 5 minutes then plug it again.

 

I haven't really done much with the PC since I posted this question. However I just tried starting up Euro Truck Simulator 2 and it seemed to run pretty smoothly as well (old game of course). I guess it might be using the integrated GPU that the CPU has. I didn't even know the 6700k had an integrated GPU but seems it does.

 

It does, but software rendering does not use the IGP, it uses the CPU. I think your GPU is simply partially dead and an area of the core is just a bit broken so it can't use the full feature set.

 

The P7xx and P8xx don't have power lanes to the integrated gpu so you don't have it running. It's disabled via hardware

 

CPU rendering would render the image on the CPU processor itself and then just use the GPU as a dumb display output.

 

Well if the integrated GPU is disabled it must be the GPU that still works in some capacity. Which is probably better. Even a crippled 1070 is probably faster than the intel integrated GPU. I don't think its CPU rendering cause I didn't notice any slowdown, it felt perfectly smooth. I don't think the the CPU would manage to render it that fast. Probably would get single digit framerate. Both Civ 6 and Euro Truck Simulator 2 ran smoothly, probably close to 60fps at least.

 

I made one final attempt to install the nvidia drivers. Ran DDU in safe mode and downloaded some older drivers from last year but same result. So I reinstalled windows yet again to get rid of the drivers, cause I don't know of any way to get back to safe mode outside of Windows.

I then tried running Heaven Benchmark just to test how the PC performs with no nVidia drivers installed. Got 115 FPS and a score of 2891 using the "extreme" profile. Min FPS 9.2, Max FPS 247.7. Seems decent for not having any nVidia drivers installed.

 

Can you take a printscreen of you graphic card properties? I'm pretty sure you got some drivers installed. You should install sledgehammer to disable windows update and then run ddu and install the drivers..
Windows is installing drivers automatically, I'm pretty sure. You wouldn't get anywhere near that performance without nvidia drivers

 

Takes too much time to take screenshots and upload them. However I ran hwinfo64 and it does give a driver number, the way they are usually named by nVidia. 382.05. Which is from May 2017. So not the most recent. If windows ever decides to install anything more recent I guess the laptop will become unusable.

You can't open the nVidia control panel however, and MSI afterburner doesn't recognize the driver either. So not possible to tweak any settings. I wonder if I could download these same drivers and that might enable the control panel.

 

The driver is available via windows update. It's installed automatically by windows as soon as you reboot from safe mode, which gets us to the conclusion that yes your gpu is fine but you might need a driver mod to install the latest drivers from Nvidia itself.

Grab the hardware ID and use nvcleanstall to add the hardware ID to the drivers and test it. Your gpu runs fine with a very old driver but you should see improvements with the latest drivers, just need to mod the driver to install it.

BTW taking a printscreen and posting to www.imgur.com and grabbing its link isn't that hard lol

 

The last time I tried reinstalling drivers I booted in safe mode and used DDU. Then restarted, still in safe mode and reinstalled newer drivers while in safe mode (which I'm not sure is the proper way of doing things). I don't think there was any possiblity for windows to reinstall the drivers that time.
I haven't tried any drivers that are from before nVidia enabled raytracing for non RTX cards so I donno if that could have something to do with it. Maybe something is broken in the GPU that doesn't allow raytracing from bein enabled.

 

If you are really paranoid you could take an image backup before installing them.

 

Well probably my final update. So while windows does install some drivers by default, MSI afterburner doesn't work, nVidia control panel doesn't work.
So I decided to download the drivers windows installs by default 382.05, use DDU and then reinstall the default drivers hoping it would make MSI afterburner and nVidia control panel work again at least. And that worked, MSI afterburner and nVidia control panel works again. 382.05 is the only driver I've installed that has not caused the display to fail. I tried the most recent drivers as well as, 399.xx, 419.xx, 446.xx none of them worked on this PC. 399 drivers even caused the PC to be stuck in a boot loop crashing over and over till it recovered the last working windows install. (tried installing 399.xx twice after using DDU, but same result).

I don't know how that nvcleanstall program works so I haven't tried that. But considering how the computer behaves when installing these other drivers (especially 399 which causes it to crash when booting) I figure something is probably broken anyway. I have two newer PCs so I won't bother waste any more time on installing drivers on this one, at least it works. Maybe some performance loss from using old drivers but that's fine.

 

Nvcleaninstall deconstructs the package and lets you choose what to install.