Korean Job Discussion Forums

[t-rock]

I have a nearly 2 year old Dell Inspiron 9400 with 2 gig ram, core 2 2GHz with GeForce Go 7900 GS card in 'er. Just after the 1 year warranty expired I started to have issues while playing games. I get parity errors nearly every time I play and the occasional stop error. These are accompanied by tearing and graphic flickering. At first they were rare but are ever increasing. This found on NVIDIA forum seems to sum up my experience:

"I have a GeForce Go 7900 GS in my laptop that I have run sucessfully for over a year when over the last week, I started getting polygon issues in games.

Then, The other day I get Blue Screened and the following error:

***Hardware Malfunction
Call your hardware vendor for support
NMI: Parity Check/Memory Parity Error
*** System has halted ***


This error occurs when I attempt to play any sort of game."

The following solution was also posted by a moderator:

"It's probably time to open up the bottom of your notebook and clean out the dust. It's usually impossible to get the majority of it out wiithout some disassembly. Check with your notebook's manufacturer for directions.

The TIM (thermal interface material, usually a thermal pad or some form of grease) between your GPU core and cooler may have also degraded over time and be in need of replacement."

I can handle taking my laptop apart to clean the dust out. I am assuming that compressed air is the way to go for cleaning. Please correct me if wrong.

My questions/Statements are:

1. Is this a probable diagnosis?
2. Where do I go about acquiring the thermal pad and/or grease which might be in need of replacement?
3. Once acquired how easy would it be to replace?
4. Any other probable diagnosis/solutions to the problem?
5. Card has never been over clocked and I am only running WoW and the occasional round of Dark Crusade.

I have done some research and it seems these cards have quite a bit of trouble within the Dell laptops.

Any constructive input is greatly appreciated.

Thanks

[JustJohn]

You can get thermal paste at parts stores in yongsan or online. Artic Silver 5 is the most common. I've never heard of re-doing the thermal paste on video cards though, usually it's a CPU thing.

At any rate, I'd go ahead and try what the mod said. Note that laptops are fairly hard to take apart; you might need to get some instructions online if you want to avoid breaking your casing.

[I_Am_The_Kiwi]

wouldnt bother changing the grease on the GPU.....run speedfan and see what temps your getting to and what are stock temps that you should get. might let you know if it is a dust/heat problem.

just be aware that using compressed air, while a good idea, will move the dust from one place to another unless your sure to be blowing it out of the laptop and not just off the card.

[Ji]

It might be safer to just take it in to an AS center and have them look at it and then call you with a price estimate for repair.

[eamo]

I had a 7900GT (virtually the same as the 7900GS) in my desktop until about 1 year ago which went the same way. Artifacts, flickering, miscoloration.......lots of problems.

I did a lot of research at the time and found many others with similar problems. Some people thought it was the new versions of Nvidia drivers which were the problem.

Anyway, I couldn't fix it. Luckily, it being a desktop, I was able to swap it out easily for an ATI 3870.

I'm not sure if a full video card replacement is easy or not in a laptop......but that's what I would do. The 7900 series is quite long in the tooth now. You could match or better it's performance by getting a $100 card nowadays.

Just to add that I think it very highly unlikely that the problem might be down to the thermal grease degrading. I know of people running CPU's and GPU's for years and years without that happening. It's a very rare event. As said above, just to rule that out, run something like speedfan to try and get the temperature of your GPU diode. For the 7900 series, anything over 70C would cause problems and shutdowns.

If the problem is overheating, then it's much much more likely to be because of the GPU's fan clogged with dust. Spay out that dust and see what happens.

[t-rock]

my running temp during gaming is high 60s C low 70s C when I have the temp monitor running. It used to be high 70sC until I took off a panel on the bottom to allow more airflow which temporarily fixed the problem. I also thought about replacing the card but I am not sure how easy it is for replacing a GPU on a laptop. Also what is an AS repair shop?

[eamo]

[I_Am_The_Kiwi]

sounds like dust build up n worn out fans to me.

give it a clean out and see how you go, otherwise you might need to take it in and get i properly serviced. new fans, new grease...maybe even a new card.
be sure to clean dust from the intake and exhaust grills too.

[hugekebab]

[EuroFunk]

I kinda the same B.S.O.D., but with a Dell ATI card on the lappy. Give it a go and clean/dust it since anyone can do it, but it might be a driver issue if that doesn't work.

And if the driver doesn't fix anything, then I can't think of anything else because I fixed mines with that, sorry.

[t-rock]

Thanks for all the helpful responses. I disassembled my laptop and dusted out all I could see/get at. My gpu temp while playing games dropped about 3-4 degrees. I also updated the gpu driver on dell's website. This increased the crash rate so I went to these wonderful albeit confusing at first forums: http://www.laptopvideo2go.com/ I highly recommend to all who have NVidea cards in laptop. I found the most stable driver according to feedback and things seemed to be looking good as I received about 5-12 FPS boost on games. However, I still get flickering graphics and crashes are still common after about an hour of playing. I guess its time to take ol' Ruby in for a tune up and get me a new GPU. Anyone have any experience with Dell's A/S centre here? Should I bring a Korean friend with me, once I find the place, or should i be able to get by with my non-existant Korean.