[g74sx] Color depth reduced, software problem or hardware damage?

[Hideaki]

I've had my G74sx (3D-Display, geforce 560M with 3GB, one HD replaced with SSD) for about three months now and apart from a few crashes I've had no problems with the current machine, or so I thought.

But today when the BluRay player wouldn't display anything but a black screen I got to wondering about the color depth displayed. A few weeks ago I thought I'd noticed a change in how colors are displayed (various images, including the windows login screen I remembered as 'clean' looking different with less smooth color gradients), but dismissed it as just my imagination.

So I found myself a site with monitor test images and looked at the gradient section. And indeed what was supposed to be smooth showed banding. I changed to 16bit color depth and back to 32bit with no change. Then I went back to the latest nVidia reference driver rather than the beta driver I'd been using and it got better, but still not completely smooth (of course, it might have been the reboot rather than the driver change). The java script info box on that page says my color depth setting is 24bit, not 32bit like I set it in the display properties (1920x1080, 32bit TrueColor, 60Hz).

So now I'm wondering, is there any way to more accurately check this and most importantly determine whether this might be some sort of hardware problem?

[380mcn]

isn't the intel DSPT control option ON?

[Hideaki]

DSPT is only set to on in the Battery Saving mode on battery, off for all other Power4Gear profiles. How could DSPT cause something like this?

Update: I experimented with different drivers a bit, using the 'clean install' option every time and now I'm back at the 290.36 beta driver. Somewhere along the line the grid pattern effect thing seems to have disappeared - confirming it as a software problem to my mind - but now when I look at an image or a video that previously showed these patterns there's a noticeable flickering of the screen in that area.

Increasing the refresh rate to above 100 Hz seems to mostly do away with that, but it also means that I get a flashes of visual artifacts every 10-20 seconds or so (which I always have when using the stereoscopic 3d and switch to 120Hz for that). Now I have to decide whether to suffer flickering or artifacts, which is only a slight improvement :(.

[380mcn]

Hideaki wrote:
DSPT is only set to on in the Battery Saving mode on battery, off for all other Power4Gear profiles. How could DSPT cause something like this?

Update: I experimented with different drivers a bit, using the 'clean install' option every time and now I'm back at the 290.36 beta driver. Somewhere along the line the grid pattern effect thing seems to have disappeared - confirming it as a software problem to my mind - but now when I look at an image or a video that previously showed these patterns there's a noticeable flickering of the screen in that area.

Increasing the refresh rate to above 100 Hz seems to mostly do away with that, but it also means that I get a flashes of visual artifacts every 10-20 seconds or so (which I always have when using the stereoscopic 3d and switch to 120Hz for that). Now I have to decide whether to suffer flickering or artifacts, which is only a slight improvement :(.

It is well explained on this forum how intel DSPT in fact reduces color bit, i'm not going to explain again.
but with this extra info of yours is clear to me that you need to RMA it ASAP.
greetings

[Hideaki]

Not what I wanted to hear at all :(. Despite various initial problems I'd been pretty happy with this machine until now. But I guess I have to look up how that works with the local Asus people.

Especially since the fresh and clean install I did today didn't change anything. The 290.36 driver gives the flickering, the older ones the grid pattern. This sucks.

[JRd1st]

RMA it. You never know when something like this is the harbinger of total failure.