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XPS Gen 2 Video problem (Go 7800 GTX)
Hi, first post - good to be here.
My system is an XPS Gen 2, self upgraded the Go 6800 Ultra to a Go 7800 GTX and it's worked fine for 4 years.
System crashed yesterday with blue screen error with message stating unable to activate display driver - boots to safe mode Ok and I've got the system running in normal windows mode with standard VGA driver. If I try to install a 'proper' display driver via windows update (or dell driver/3rd party) I get the same blue screen error. I'm getting display corruption on the BIOS splash screen (it looks like a mesh of blue pixel clusters) but everything looks Ok during windows load/normal desktop operation.
Don't know whether the card is on the way out, find it strange that it's works fine using a standard VGA driver but it crashes using a dedicated driver, I'm guessing a dedicated driver is calling on features of the GPU that may have a 'hardware' fault which is causing the system to crash. (Though I may be talking nonsense here).
Just wondering if anybody out there has experienced a similar problem and if I need to search for a replacement video card (there's one on ebay US though it's > $300 (yikes !).
Appreciate any help/advice.
kirkd
5.2K Posts
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March 13th, 2011 11:00
You could first try an updated Nvidia driver. They now update laptop drivers regularly. When you update the video driver, DO NOT uninstall the old driver first. This has caused problems for some.
Could be a video RAM problem, as with VGA drivers you will not use as much memory, and the bad ram could be elsewhere.
Because of corruption on the BIOS page, you might have a screen problem. You could try with an external monitor.
If you decide it is the video board, a last resort is baking the board in your oven. Search the web for examples. Some are very successful using this trick.
Do you still have the 6800 Ultra? It's not as good as the 7800 GTX, but it's free. One comparison listed the 3DMark 05 at 600 for the 7800 GTX vs. 5000 for the 6800 Ultra.
webvoyager
2 Posts
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March 13th, 2011 16:00
Thanks for the reply.
Unfortunately don't have the 6800 anymore (with hindsight I should have kept it as a 'spare'). If it's video RAM then I suspect there's no way to change that on it's own so we're still talking about a card replacement - I'll check out the bake idea (I actually work for a PCB assembly company so I might be onto a winner with that one, something to do with reflowing the solder ??). I've tried the output to an external monitor and am getting the same BIOS corruption.
I've also tried several driver updates - they all give the same problem... it's looking very like the board is faulty.
Thanks for the advice, appreciate it.
Regards.
kirkd
5.2K Posts
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March 13th, 2011 20:00
Too bad.
For the oven bake, read several posts. Times and temperatures vary, as does success. However, if it works, it's cheap.
Here's a post to start with:Oven "resoldering" of PC Boards