Tops and Bottoms of Screen Flickering

[hoffmann]

Summary (short story): Noticed performance issues, re-installed graphics driver, and on the top and bottom half-inches of the screen, it flickers with horizontal bands of white/black. Also, the same performance issues remained. I then wiped my hard-drive and the same thing remained. Note, this only happens when I'm using the gaming-graphics, not the integrated. It also is fine when using an external monitor.

Story (long story): After I noticed some performance issues in my Alienware M17X laptop, I uninstalled and re-installed one of my graphics card drivers (this one: Radeon HD 6870M not the integrated graphics) and the result contains several problems. The performance issues remained, which happen sporadically (just as before I uninstalled and reinstalled). Some days my games will run great (Guild Wars 2, Battlefield III, and Starcraft II on high graphics) and others it will fail to play the games on low graphics with FPS scores around 20 (on low settings). What's worse is that the top and bottom half inch of the screen flickers and shifts constantly. On the top half inch of the screen, it is a bunch of shifting (by shifting, I mean that what is displayed will go up and down around once every 5 milliseconds) and bands/lines of horizontal lines. Note, the flickering only happens when I'm using the Radeon HD 6870M graphics card. When I switch to integrated graphics, it works just fine. Same thing when I hook it up to an external monitor. On the bottom half inch, there is a horizontal band (about 5 pixels in width) that flickers on and off. So, to fix the problem, I formatted my main partition and re-installed Windows along with the drivers (in the correct order) and the result is the same. What is the problem? LCD along with a broken graphics card? Or just the graphics card?

 

[chriss000]

Logical progression; if the mobile card works fine on an external monitor, it isnt the graphics core. If the laptop screen works fine on onboard graphics chip, it isnt the screen. You have a slightly intermittent fault somewhere on your system between the mobile gpu card and the laptop screen. I would take the cover off the mgpu and check the card hasnt become loosened by travel, vibration etc and that no pins have arked and burnt. Best first look i cn think of I am afraid.

 

[hoffmann]

Logical progression; if the mobile card works fine on an external monitor, it isnt the graphics core. If the laptop screen works fine on onboard graphics chip, it isnt the screen. You have a slightly intermittent fault somewhere on your system between the mobile gpu card and the laptop screen. I would take the cover off the mgpu and check the card hasnt become loosened by travel, vibration etc and that no pins have arked and burnt. Best first look i cn think of I am afraid.

sounds like something for a tech-shop to work on, not too familiar with working on the innards of an m17x laptop. then again, if they break it while working on it, i doubt they'll buy me a new laptop. there's youtubers who take these laptops apart, but i doubt i'd see the problem if it was right in front of me. the problem as you've explained it seems to be somewhere from the graphics card to the display. either it's plugged in loosely, some line is kinked, the card is going, or some combination of the three. i'd rather not get overcharged to look at it if it's something that's easily taken care of. anyone know if taking apart an alienware is difficult or dangerous?