- Sep 6, 2022
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Hello folks. Yesterday morning about 10 seconds after I turned on my computer and logged in: suddenly my graphics card cut out and stopped being recognized by my system entirely, so I ended up writing this thread in the hopes that somebody could tell me what to do, but throughout the day I managed to get it working again and thought I should post the thread anyway along with what fixed it for me in case somebody has the same issue. If you are not here to fix your GPU, then you may want to skip to the last paragraph where my last real issue/question lies.
As my screen cut to black I looked down to see my GPU sitting in my computer lifeless. I switched my DP cable to my integrated graphics to find my 2070 missing from the Device Manager. I immediately restarted my computer and checked the bios to find nothing there either, went ahead with downloading the latest windows update (for W10), and updating the GPU drivers from both the GeForce Experience App and the official Nvidia driver website to be told that neither were compatible because there was no compatible hardware installed. The only other thread I could find on an issue similar to this was solved by simply going to the Nvidia Driver website and downloading that driver as opposed to the one provided by GeForce Experience, and in that case, the user could actually see the windows logo upon booting up their computer again whilst I cannot - my gpu is essentially dead, but the entire case of the GPU is heating up in an almost usual seeming way whilst no fans spin for it (maybe it could be warm air being pushed from the CPU fan slowly heating it up, but I think it feels kinda warm on both sides). I have a prebuilt Alienware Aurora R8 for reference ,but I've swapped the ram and added an SSD in the next available x4 PCIe port (the third slot) (because the GPU covers the second one for no reason).
At the time that was the end of the thread, but I didn't want to give up and just push the problem to the peeps on these forums. For reference, my computer is like 4 or 5 years old and these Alienware cases are horrific - a pain in the butt to take apart and clean, to say the least (they usually sell them on a $1000+ discount because they're so bad : ^). I started by turning off my computer and cracking open my case to find it, to nobody's surprise, full of dust. Every square millimeter of the GPU's PCB was covered in a noticeable brown film layer. I carefully pulled the tab underneath and disconnected all the cables so that I could pop it out, and besides one very slightly rusty screw (that's normal I live next to the ocean) there was no visible damage or short circuit. At this point, I'm just trying to tell myself that all it needs is a good cleaning, so test #1 is to give it a shower in 90% rubbing alcohol and a little scrub with a soft toothbrush. I proceeded to leave it in the sun to make sure there wasn't any residual water from the rubbing alcohol, and when I got it back in my computer.... nothing... It didn't do a single thing - it still wasn't in my device manager or even acknowledged by my computer in any way for that matter. For some reason, after this, I decided to check the bios again, and again found nothing about my GPU... but upon booting my computer back up again, to my surprise, and by some miracle, my GPU was showing up in my Device manager once again! This time, however, something was wrong; my GPU had a yellow triangle of death next to it, and within its properties, an error read "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems - Error 43." I was concerned, to say the least, and that concern would only grow as I reached down to see if my GPU fans were showing any life - not only were they completely dead, but the entire GPU, after only less than a minute of my computer being on and being completely unused, felt like it was radiating heat to the point of feeling as if the entire thing could catch fire at any moment. With haste, I hurried to shut my computer down and left it be for a few hours. When I got back on my computer hours later I immediately went to my device manager to uninstall the GPU along with all software linked with it. And after either scanning for hardware changes or restarting my computer, I found my 2070 back under display adapters as "windows generic display," and from there, things only looked up - I could proceed with re-installing the Graphics Driver that I got earlier from the Nvidia website, so after just one more restart for the drivers to boot up properly, and a bit of time to let the GPU cool off again, I was back to having a 'fully functional' GPU!
"Fully Functional" because the GPU honestly seems to stutter just a tiny bit more after this whole ordeal, as if it were a human who suffered an actual stroke, and I can only imagine that this was somehow caused by either the dust or a corrupt driver that was acting up.. Or maybe the dust corrupted something during the boot sequence - there's really no way to know.
Also, this morning when I turned my computer back on it first went through a cycle of just being a completely black screen and windows never started - my monitor was picking up a signal as it didn't go into sleep mode after 5 seconds, but it was stuck in somewhat of an infinite booting loop and none of my peripherals were given power, so I held the power button on the case to turn it off and back on. My PC booted after that, and I'm on my PC now, but I never got the 'windows' (Alienware) logo upon booting, and I would really like to know if there's something wrong with my PC acting as a ticking time bomb before my PC dies for good - if anybody could shed some light on what could make that booting issue happen?
As my screen cut to black I looked down to see my GPU sitting in my computer lifeless. I switched my DP cable to my integrated graphics to find my 2070 missing from the Device Manager. I immediately restarted my computer and checked the bios to find nothing there either, went ahead with downloading the latest windows update (for W10), and updating the GPU drivers from both the GeForce Experience App and the official Nvidia driver website to be told that neither were compatible because there was no compatible hardware installed. The only other thread I could find on an issue similar to this was solved by simply going to the Nvidia Driver website and downloading that driver as opposed to the one provided by GeForce Experience, and in that case, the user could actually see the windows logo upon booting up their computer again whilst I cannot - my gpu is essentially dead, but the entire case of the GPU is heating up in an almost usual seeming way whilst no fans spin for it (maybe it could be warm air being pushed from the CPU fan slowly heating it up, but I think it feels kinda warm on both sides). I have a prebuilt Alienware Aurora R8 for reference ,but I've swapped the ram and added an SSD in the next available x4 PCIe port (the third slot) (because the GPU covers the second one for no reason).
At the time that was the end of the thread, but I didn't want to give up and just push the problem to the peeps on these forums. For reference, my computer is like 4 or 5 years old and these Alienware cases are horrific - a pain in the butt to take apart and clean, to say the least (they usually sell them on a $1000+ discount because they're so bad : ^). I started by turning off my computer and cracking open my case to find it, to nobody's surprise, full of dust. Every square millimeter of the GPU's PCB was covered in a noticeable brown film layer. I carefully pulled the tab underneath and disconnected all the cables so that I could pop it out, and besides one very slightly rusty screw (that's normal I live next to the ocean) there was no visible damage or short circuit. At this point, I'm just trying to tell myself that all it needs is a good cleaning, so test #1 is to give it a shower in 90% rubbing alcohol and a little scrub with a soft toothbrush. I proceeded to leave it in the sun to make sure there wasn't any residual water from the rubbing alcohol, and when I got it back in my computer.... nothing... It didn't do a single thing - it still wasn't in my device manager or even acknowledged by my computer in any way for that matter. For some reason, after this, I decided to check the bios again, and again found nothing about my GPU... but upon booting my computer back up again, to my surprise, and by some miracle, my GPU was showing up in my Device manager once again! This time, however, something was wrong; my GPU had a yellow triangle of death next to it, and within its properties, an error read "Windows has stopped this device because it has reported problems - Error 43." I was concerned, to say the least, and that concern would only grow as I reached down to see if my GPU fans were showing any life - not only were they completely dead, but the entire GPU, after only less than a minute of my computer being on and being completely unused, felt like it was radiating heat to the point of feeling as if the entire thing could catch fire at any moment. With haste, I hurried to shut my computer down and left it be for a few hours. When I got back on my computer hours later I immediately went to my device manager to uninstall the GPU along with all software linked with it. And after either scanning for hardware changes or restarting my computer, I found my 2070 back under display adapters as "windows generic display," and from there, things only looked up - I could proceed with re-installing the Graphics Driver that I got earlier from the Nvidia website, so after just one more restart for the drivers to boot up properly, and a bit of time to let the GPU cool off again, I was back to having a 'fully functional' GPU!
"Fully Functional" because the GPU honestly seems to stutter just a tiny bit more after this whole ordeal, as if it were a human who suffered an actual stroke, and I can only imagine that this was somehow caused by either the dust or a corrupt driver that was acting up.. Or maybe the dust corrupted something during the boot sequence - there's really no way to know.
Also, this morning when I turned my computer back on it first went through a cycle of just being a completely black screen and windows never started - my monitor was picking up a signal as it didn't go into sleep mode after 5 seconds, but it was stuck in somewhat of an infinite booting loop and none of my peripherals were given power, so I held the power button on the case to turn it off and back on. My PC booted after that, and I'm on my PC now, but I never got the 'windows' (Alienware) logo upon booting, and I would really like to know if there's something wrong with my PC acting as a ticking time bomb before my PC dies for good - if anybody could shed some light on what could make that booting issue happen?
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