Question Killed my GPU with ubuntu Nvida drivers - thoughts on next steps

w60

Jan 27, 2020
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0
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All,
I have an old clevo P170HM i7 laptop 8GB ram with a Nvidia GT 560M that had Win7 on it. I decided I wanted to install ubuntu 18.04 on it which worked. I then tried to install the nvidia 940 drivers provided by Nvidia rather than the opensource one (I was after being able to use the CUDA for some ML). Unfortunately this had a few hicupps but I finally got the laptop to boot up it appeared good (good screen resolution loaded the desktop gui etc), however literally a second later after hitting the usual desktop screen, the entire screen went a pale orange colour and the laptop immediately powered off.

Attempting to power back on the machine does not appear to hit POST (at least no beeps) just the bluetooth led icon goes orange, there is the usual flick of noise from the dvd drive getting power, no screen output and then powers off after about 4 or 5 seconds.

Items done:
  1. Remove cmos battery for a few minutes, reconnect and boot up - the only change this gave was a single POST beep and then acted exactly the same (subsequent boots there are no beeps so presume it was due to the battery being removed).
  2. Removed the GPU card and booted up, this results in the fans going and POST beeps (obviously no video output!) . Reinstalling the card reverts to the same as before.

It seems that for some reason the nvidia drivers kill the GPU (I guess could have been faulty and the basic generic drivers didnt stress it).

I am just looking on thoughts on how to proceed (trying to thrown good money after bad).

  1. Are there any other steps I should be trying with the existing hardware?
  2. Do people think I should look to purchase a second hand Nvidia Gt 560M, or would people think the laptop might have underlying issues so I would just be wasting money and about to fry another GPU?

To be honest I would now accept the laptop just being able to boot up with no video card but appears that is no possible and presume it is not possible to connect an external video card to get around this as the bios would only look for the one in the card slot before booting.
thanks in adanvce
 

w60

Jan 27, 2020
2
0
10
How did you remove the gt560M? Even you remove the gt560m, the laptop has a GPU built on the CPU.
Hi - thanks for the query, though I may not be understanding. The laptop has a gt560m MXM 3.0 card which connects in to the motherboard (hence allowing the GPU to be upgraded). To my knowledge it does not have any other integrated graphics card built. Either way I meant that I simply removed the 560M MXM3.0 card from the motherboard (along with the GPU heat sink), and then attempted to boot up.

Please let me know if the above does not clarify