Tuesday, February 24, 2009

Laptop Video Dead

It would appear that after my recent laptop video replaced under warrenty this new one also died.

I'm starting to suspect nVidia QA issues with my GeForce Go 7900 GS as well. What's strange is both GPU cards died from a vram related issue. I suspect that the cooling pads for the vram are not sufficient to cool down the chips. Unfortunately I don't really see a way of correcting this issue.

Perhaps with my next unit I will put better thermal compound between the GPU core and the heat shield but I doubt that will fix the issue because the ram chips are the ones that are dying no doubt due to thermal expansion and contraction of the solder joints.

if you have a Dell Inspiron 9400/e1705 with an nVidia or ATI graphics card and suddenly get a BSOD with a NMI: Memory Parity/Check error, you can be pretty sure your video card is starting to go bad and the memory in question is vram.

For my next mod once the video card is back I will try and replace the thermal pads with a solid aluminum block along with buffing the surface to hopefully improve the thermals just enough to prevent another premature failure. Failing that my only solution is to continue buying new video cards off ebay as they are a "hot" item (excuse the pun) for this model of laptop.

1 comment:

Laptop Parts said...

It happens sometimes although everyone knows that NVidia laptop video cards are the best in the business. All you can do now is to give your PC in the safe hands for the repair work.

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