Alienware M17x R3 GTX 580m Unstable Windows 10 Driver??

[Swango]

Hello everybody, thanks for taking the time to read this.

I have an Alienware M17x R3 laptop with a GTX 580m GPU.

The laptop runs just beautifully until I apply a load onto the GPU; At which point the driver dies and I get the Windows 10 BSOD.

I've tried:

• 
  Bare-bones boot (No extra RAM or drives etc)
  Reinstall GPU drivers using safemode to remove the old ones.
  Reinstalling windows and being sure to follow the dell recommended driver install order.
  Experimenting to see if the temps had any correlation and found none.
  Tried seeing how much load it needed to cause the issue (The answer is anything above around 50% usage can kill it at any time).

I'm looking for suggestions as to what to try next. I'm aware it may simply be a dead GPU, but I'd prefer not to bow down to that as I did have it working for a full gaming session merely 2 nights ago.

Would going down to windows 7/8.1 have any effect?

Thank you all.

 

[EpIckFa1LJoN]

Yes it seems that is a very old laptop. If the thing dies as soon as you put load on the GPU, that is the issue. Given the age it is most likely dying. Another possibility is the power supply unit is failing and not delivering enough juice to the GPU (not totally sure how power is delivered in a laptop). Unfortunately in a laptop that means taking it to get repaired/replaced, or getting a new one altogether. BSOD is almost always hardware failure.

 

[Swango]

I totally agree with what you're saying. My only reservation is that the BSOD gives a fault of VIDEO_DXGKRNL_FATAL_ERROR, which comes back with a driver conflict. Should I just give up and pick up something new?

 

[EpIckFa1LJoN]

No if it's coming back as that it is possible it is a driver issue, However the fact that it only happens under load isn't comforting.

It depends on how deep you want to go. It could be a number of things with that code. It could even be your RAM failing. The problem is that we are dealing with a laptop it isn't nearly as easy to diagnose a hardware failure.

First things first, try using DDU to uninstall your graphics drivers, and then go and reinstall the latest ones. Cross your fingers and hope for the best.

Next you should try doing a full virus and malware scan. See if anything comes up.

Did you install any new software recently? that could also produce that error code.

Barring those things it could be a number of other drivers. So I would move on to hardware.

Try disabling the GPU and running off the integrated graphics and see what happens. I'm not sure how to do that on a laptop so your guess is as good as mine. On a desktop you can just unplug it and take it out, but I know there is a way to switch between the Intel graphics and the dedicated graphics on most laptops.

Other than that I'm not sure what else you could do to diagnose a hardware issue on a laptop so I would say take it in to a repair shop and see if they can diagnose it.

 

[Swango]

All these suggestions are fantastic so I shall do all of them tonight.

I can remove the GPU or disable it from the BIOS so I can do all the testing.

Watch this space and I shall update you in a few house when I have finished work.

If you have any ideas please don't hesitate to drop them in here or email me at Swangosix@gmail.com (I hope its not against guidelines to post contact info).

Thank you again, sir.

 

[EpIckFa1LJoN]

All these suggestions are fantastic so I shall do all of them tonight.

I can remove the GPU or disable it from the BIOS so I can do all the testing.

Watch this space and I shall update you in a few house when I have finished work.

If you have any ideas please don't hesitate to drop them in here or email me at Swangosix@gmail.com (I hope its not against guidelines to post contact info).

Thank you again, sir.

NP. Good luck. hope it works.