card faulty or just incorrect thermal pad setup?

hi, I have a problem with gpu installation on a p150em, i can't get it working properly, it either;
(now changed mobo because it was faulty, gpu would crash on installing, this no longer occurs.
no artifacts on booting or 2d apps / desktop, fan stays quiet, just can't do anything which requires the nvidia gpu.

shows abnormal temp / 3d programs show artifact all over the screen

or

loud fan on boot and no picture

or

lowish temp + artifacts in 3d apps

it's doing my head in, i put the pads in the location(s) posted by a memember of the forum, however it results in the ram not making contact with the heatsink, can someone please tell me the exact thickness of thermal pads i need for my heatsink & a gtx 675mx?

i don't have the original pads to compare as it's a refurb laptop that i had to source parts for to fix up.

 

For pads I tend to buy a pack of 0.5mm and 1mm and then eyeball the fit (stacking where needed) For the thicker pads I tend to stick with the stock ones.

 

managed to get a used gpu heatsink still with original pads on off ebay and now the temps look fine but the card still artifacts when i start a game, must be faulty, will be returning.

guess that's what you get for buying used...

 

It can happen, sometimes the temperatures and knocking endured during shipping can be the straw that breaks the camel's back.

 

Think the seller sold it to me knowing it was faulty as paypal have already given me my money back and i don't have to return it, just for the hell of it, i've just baked it in the oven as i just remembered you could do that with faulty cards.

will test it when it's cooled down, it survived the bake, no burnt bits.

 

Actually the vram doesn't need any cooling, I think the reason people have thermal pads is so that the vRAM chips can take some of the heat and therefore spread the heat while cooling down the heatsink and the GPU with that method. This is also the reason why graphics cards do not have any cooling pads underneath it, despite having vRam chips down there as well.

I assume your card is not new right?
Can you describe the artifacts you're getting?
Are they lines?
Blocks?
Shapes?
Color shift?

 

lines and shapes is the artifacts, flickering all over the screen but only if i start a game, 3dmark 06 doesn't even load it just says some d3d error after a black screen. latest 3dmark just quits with unknown error, doesn't display anything 3d.

i have a cream coloured pad on the gray chips, blue on the outside edge and blue on the top ram, nothing on the otherside. tried a xbracket with the ram sink to cover the back chips ,made no difference.

baking also didn't do anything.

yeah the card wasn't new, just waiting for pp refund to clear so i buy something new or from a trustworthy seller...

btw the card idles around 53*c.

 

Do you have a possibility to make a photo of the artifacts?

 

the card was definitely buggered, baked it a few more times but it still artifacted like mad and no 3d games / apps worked.

got my money back

i purchased a gtx 770m that was listed as untested and when it arrived, first try, yep dead, not detected at all, not in bios or in device manager, so i baked it and then installed it again and it lives! i only purchased a possibly faulty one as i don't like spending hundreds on a gpu when desktop ones are so cheap. always looking out for cheap laptop gpus....

project complete.

chassis - P150EM

keyboard - P150EM

motherboard - P151SM-A
+ msata board from P170HM (in hdd compartment)
+ audio/usb board from P170HM

small chassis mod to use battery bay as housing for 240gb ssd, routed sata data & power cables through side of hdd compartment into battery bay, taped over battery connector (faulty laptop didn't come with a battery)
using as portable desktop at home so need for battery

taped over dvi hole on back of chassis

2tb hdd in optical bay

old 3rd laptop is now a 4th gen

 

Baking is usually a temporary solution, hopefully it holds out for you

 

Pretty sure the card will last max 2-3 weeks when he plays games on it every day.

 

It depends on what the original issue was.

 

seems fine so far, was completely dead when i first tried it, just showed as N/A in bios and in windows it wasn't even detected.

one bake and it worked straight away, bios showed GTX 770M plus vbios info.

previous owner just listed it as untested from toshiba laptop that wouldn't power on.

done testings and all seems good, temps etc. binned the other card as it was a lost cause, was beyond repair, my guess the previous owner damaged it somehow.

it even artifacted on the spinning nvidia logo in the cpl

tried;
flashing vbios to msi, clevo that i got off the web
tried x bracket on back which covered one vram strip
tried x bracket on back with covered both vram strips
tried various drivers
tried underclocking

gave up when nothing worked

3rd card / times the charm.

1st gpu was the one that came with the laptop, gtx 675m, would bsod when drivers were installing, had a bit of damage to the gold contacts, so not repairable.

 

i will add a photo of my case mod this morning.

 

You mean the mxm contact was damaged on the old card? The pins in the socket do tend to leave marks.

 

attached is photo of case mod. (sorry about quality, using phone atm as camera broke)
had to saw a bit off the sata connectors to get them both in the sata port but once in, worked like a charm.


and yes, the contacts on the 675m were damaged, had a little black mark.
no damage on the 675mx but i reckon the previous owner stressed it too much somehow.

 

wait what?`hahahahaha
that looks hilarious. I've seen people replacing their CD drives with caddies and selfmade stuff with a harddrive, but the battery slot is new

 

believe it or not, the ssd is quite snug and i only had to saw out a tiny bit of case plastic to thread the cables through, i'm not leaving it explosed though as i purchased some used base covers for a p170hm and will cut them to shape to make a proper cover, bit tape and some sawing and it should look quite nice.

changing the motherboard future proofed it for a few years, specs i have for now are good enough for me.

 

small update, card still going

i've also done another project, purchased a pretty damaged lifebook p1630 for less than £40, had to replace the screen because it had a pressure mark, the touch screen sucked as it added a grain effect to what's on screen so i carefully removed it and left the white frame in it's place, not a fan of touch screen anyway...

i upgraded the wifi, the ram was already max 2gb ddr2, i purchased a micro sata to msata adapter to add in a 512gb ssd, added a mini pcie card that feeds two additional usb 2.0 ports through the chassis hole where the modem was, replaced broken power socket (loose but worked), replaced lid and keyboard surround, replaced kb as it was damaged and some keys didn't work, because i didn't want to spend loads i managed to get a german qwertz kb off ebay with the pointer, many replacements didn't have a pointer and were too expensive..i replaced all the german keys with the uk ones from the damaged keyboard but had to leave the qwertz layout in place, only one thing wrong, owner had got gum or something under the H key so i can to carefully remove it with tweezers....

windows 8 is the highest it can run with all features, for some reason on 10 the intel ogl drivers don't work, in aida64 it only lists opengl 1.0 as the max.

was a pain to get hd video playback working because of the 4500MHD gpu, 8.15.10.2993 was the highest driver it would accept, anything else, even with inf mod just caused a black screen, bsod or reboot.
720p runs fine but anything higher would stutter even if downscaled, didn't like the evr renderer or lav, many h264 videos did not run in dxva2, however they do when using the mpc dxva decoder! i decided to try madvr and for some reason it plays 1080p videos downscaled smoothly, yet the windows evr won't...wtf?

finally i added some 0.5mm copper shims to the gpu and cpu as upon investigating, the crappy think heat sink (if you can call it that) doesn't make full contact with the chips, as when i removed the heat sink after applying thermal compound it's only slightly compressed but now it's fully squished. shall report back on temps..

 

Lol, I had fun doing a similar thing, only it was about 10 years older if not more than that machine (P3 700mhz era).

 

last old laptop i messed with was a dell 5100 but it sucked, cpu was way too slow even though it was 3ghz.
plus it got reallllly hot.

 

Yeah the IPC on the P4 sucked.