p750dm-g with 980m freezes when nvidia driver is installed

new laptop just a few months old.

out of the blue was working on it other day and it froze up. had not installed anything recently. was just typing a letter in word and it froze. after much testing and trials its basically once the nvidia driver is installed it causes system to freeze

have reinstalled windows 10 64bit multiple times (my older version and even the latest AU version). have installed 5 different nvidia drivers (from the latest and going back to last year).

computer runs fine in safe mode. runs fine without the driver installed. install the nvidia driver and pc freezes. boot into safe mode uninstall nvidia driver, runs fine again.

possible this brand new 980m is bad? something in driver i can maybe turn off/on that may fix this? TIA

 

Your GPU is dead. Proof is without the driver it runs fine which in turn runs the GPU in the lowest clock speeds. Please RMA your taptop

 

What's the vBIOS revision? (You can see it in GPU-Z)

 

k thx much for the quick confirmation


gpu-z shows ms basic display adapter, then a few lines under has bios version 84.04.67.00.0E

 

What does it do when it "freezes"? Typically, if it's VRel instability I'd expect it to simply reboot instead of freeze.

If it just goes to a black screen, flashing led + fans on that's either temperature or power delivery failure. If it's temps it could simply be that the GPU is not pasted and attached to the heatsink correctly.

 

screen "freezes". upon booting up if i let it sit at login it will freeze or i quickly type in password it will show desktop and freeze. mouse stops moving screen is frozen.

no blinking lights. sometimes reboots but most of times just sits there frozen. if i boot up with no nvidia driver installed it will run fine. locks up in the middle of installing driver every time, soon as the screen changes to the higher res.

 

You may want to look at my thread about modded drivers to see if you can get around this issue.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/thr...i-get-microsoft-basic-display-adapter.794588/

 

If a modded driver does not work then it would certainly point to a hardware issue.

 

That's an old vBIOS. Can you get your hands on the later 84.06.8c.00.31 version?

 

have no idea how to get any bios for this laptop with none on clevo website.

though would it even matter? putting pc back to exactly the day i got it with the exact same drivers causes it to freeze unfortunately

 

If it is an old vBIOS it won't play nice and it will be unstable with newer GeFarts drivers. Depending on whether you have G-Sync or not...

Non-G: https://biosmods.wordpress.com/gtx9/

G-sync: https://biosmods.wordpress.com/gtx9-g/

If that resolves your issues, please be sure to let @Prema know you appreciate everything by clicking on this link.

 

Not sure a vbios will solve this one, it sounds like the card itself is failing if manufacturer drivers cause a crash.

 

Definite possibility the GPU has expired. If the vBIOS change does not help or makes it worse, then it probably is time to replace it.

 

GPU is dead as I mentioned in the first post in this thread Since it works fine when no driver is installed thus the GPU clock speeds when no drivers are installed are at minimal but the moment he installs the drivers and the GPU clock speeds bump up, he gets those freezes. One shouldn't need to install a modded driver on these machines for normal usage scenarios nor an updated VBIOS as the stock one while not the best, should work fine in normal situations.

 

Probably so... very likely so. It probably won't help. I just think it would be worth investigating first. The vBIOS costs nothing to try, and that's much cheaper than a new GPU if it corrects the problem.

 

Agreed, try the vBIOS before ruling out the card.. NVIDIA did do some messy stuff after the 359.06 drivers which made old vBIOS's not work.. If it still doesn't work after this, new GPU time!

 

I have the exact same issue with my P750DM-G (w/ GTX980m, Win10Pro). Have gone a few months without a crash, but then absentmindedly updated my nVidia drivers a few days ago. Now there's been 2 freezes within the past 2 days, with nothing to provoke them (i.e., not launching an app, nothing overclocked, etc.). Has anyone tried the Prema vBIOS ( @hodorific)? The site warns soldered GPUs need not apply...I think that's a boilerplate statement, and that it's safe to say all P750DM-Gs have non-soldered GPUs, right? (I'm feeling lazy and don't want to open it up / tear it down ). I've contacted the company that built my unit (mythlogic.com) to see if they know more, and am awaiting their answer / advice, but figured I'd check here in the meantime.

 

Try cleaning out the old drivers with DDU and use this driver mod from @j95. Be sure to follow the instructions carefully.

https://www.techinferno.com/index.p...ort-modded-inf/&do=findComment&comment=150633

 

Thank you for the info and link, Mr. Fox! It hasn't frozen again, so I'm back at those notorious crossroads, where I question whether it's better to leave well enough alone and deal with an occasional freeze or two here and there, or stir the pot and muck things up a bit, in the hopes of being better off, the same, or ... maybe even worse (knowing my PC skills...plus, I need to re-read that techinferno link a few times and digest it first!)

I think I'll wait for the next freeze, when I lose some progress on something important, so that it lights a fire under me, and I say 'the heck with this' and just go for it.

Thanks again...

-JB

 

It's nice to take a disk image every so often when things are running perfectly so you have a restore point to jump back to if needed.

 

Great advice...thanks for the reminder to have a backup plan...literally.

 

And be sure to test your backup drives occasionally, nothing is more irritating than plugging into your external backup to get your image and it having a problem too.

 

So I'm nearly certain now that nVidia is behind all of the freezing and lockups. For the longest time I was sure there was a manufacturing defect or that it was something hardware related (my Dell's GPU crapped out on me, so I am wary about these things). There have been AT LEAST 3 driver updates since my last postings here. The first one seemed to have fixed and resolved the issues; with the second one, it was back to a periodic (and inconvenient) freeze; and now the latest one seems to have resolved the issues again. I guess I need to reassess my philosophy about always installing the latest drivers...or maybe just familiarize myself with the process of rolling back to an earlier version. Hope this helps someone.

 

I would say this. Testing and rolling back, if needed, may be faster and certainly more conclusive than researching each driver release.

 

Exactly. When is still on warranty. Pls contact with your retailer and send gpu to service.

CEG-Hardcorecustom 》Fastest Gaming Clevo Notebooks & High-End Mobile Workstations 《

 

I seriously have the same problem and i feel like calling whether NVIDIA or ASUS just to curse em out considering how expensive their **** are with poor manufacturing. Anyway the only difference is im using Asus Rog G752 and i tried following the link that worked for the other dude but expect the link was poor in explanation and also the vBios was for Clevo build only so...any help please?