Laptop Graphics card suddenly not detected

Conger88

Posts: 66   +1
Hi,

I bought a laptop this time 2 years ago. Suddenly wile watching a hd film in bed my laptop over heated and then crashed. So I waited then booted up again and now my good graphics card is not working :(
It is not being detected in device manager at all. Does anyone know how to fix this?

some details on laptop and graphics card. cost me a good bita dosh so would like to get it fixed :(
Chassis & Display Vortex Series: 17.3" Matte Full HD LED Widescreen (1920x1080)
Processor (CPU) Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Mobile Processor i7-3840QM (2.80GHz) 8MB
Memory (RAM) 32GB KINGSTON HYPER-X GENESIS 1600MHz SODIMM DDR3 (4 x 8GB)
Graphics Card AMD® Radeon® HD 7970M - 2GB DDR5 Video RAM - DirectX® 11
 
Ouch if the laptop over heats and shuts down and not recognized again it could actually be physical damage to the video card. Another way to test if the video card has completely failed is by plugging an external monitor into the display port on the laptop. It could connect via hdmi, vga, or possibly display port. If a picture appears on the monitor then it could possibly be software related if you dont see a picture the video card has failed for sure. If it has failed you will more than likely have to replace the motherboard. In rare chance the video card may not be intergrated to motherboard but I doubt it. If you know someone that could whats called (re-flow) the video card
 
I think I made things worse last night when I was playing around with it. at the start an intel 4000 graphics card was dispaying in device manager under devices. This is the back up graphics card I presume or the main one used for normal gfx?
Now only this 'standard' graphics card is displaying. So technical there are 3 gfx cards? is this correct? I checked the website where I ordered the laptop and I have the following warranty details.

Warranty 3 Year Standard Warranty (1 Month Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)
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Change to: 3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour)

I wonder would this cover it? I will try your monitor test later tonight as I am not at home at the moment
C
 
Looking at the specs this is a high end laptop designed for gaming unlike most of them. I think it will have a separate graphics card module. If that was soldered onto the motherboard that would be pretty well the end of it. It should be possible to renew the thermal pads and heat paste for the graphics card but I reckon that is likely to be a job for a technician and you don't want to void the warranty. So, even if the card is damaged it can most likely be replaced. I'd look into the the warranty if the laptop needs to be dismantled.
 
Good news! I rang pcspeicialist last night. And we tried the following. Downloaded drivers from website. extracted installed, rebooted, and this resulted in the graphics card displaying in device manager again but when I booted to windows the screen was flickering constantly.
So something was clearly wrong. So then I luckily and last minuite found my origanl disk with drivers etc. So I gave this a go next. This resulted in the famous blue screen of death and windows crashing. So I thought god dammit my card is broke.. :/ but when I booted up again it was working lol. Im still not convinced its 100% working but when I checked it last night it was back working. Tested playing high graphics game, crysis 3 and it worked fine.

So all appears to be good again for now
Strange one
 
It probably cost you a fortune and was designed for the job so it should be able to handle heavy use.
 
Yea it cost close to 2k Euros....I happened to be watching a HD movie, streaming a football match and having a game open at the same time. While the laptop was on a duvet. So the air fan wasn't getting out fully. This is when the laptop crashed and was way over heating before I even noticed. so when I booted back up the graphics card wasn't being recognized, so I was fully sure I had done physical damage and burned the card out.... But thankfully just re-installing the drivers appears to have fixed it.

Kinda relieved to say the least.
 
It's a pity portable computers were ever called "laptops." They need to be used on a hard flat surface. :)
 
I have a hp dv6 pavilion with switchable graphics...my amd 6770m disappered suddenly from device manager(invincible) only intel hd graphics 3000 is show!!the 2 options when I right click ie graphics options(catalyst center) and configure switchablegraphics are gone....plz help howdid you do it
 
There seem to be three laptop designs. Firstly, those with just an integrated graphics chip, secondly those which also have a "high" performance graphics chip soldered in to turbocharge performance for occasional gaming. The HP dvd6 is one of the second setups and so apart from fiddling with drivers you cannot do much to solve a graphics issue. If the additional graphics chip is damaged the laptop is just going to be a basic laptop. It would be too expensive to replace the motherboard. Only a very expensive dedicated gaming laptop will offer the opportunity to replace or upgrade the graphics card but the HP dvd6 is a budget model and that option is not available. You can look in the BIOS to see if you can make changes or reinstall the graphics drivers but if the graphics chip is now dead you will have to settle for using the laptop for basic things only.
 
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