- last edited on by
ROGBot
My laptop has had a catastrophic failure. I think my GPU might have overheated and burnt out the cores within.
Its going to be a pretty long story but I want to make sure I'm thorough explaining everything so that maybe somebody else will catch something I missed and I might be able to figure out whats actually wrong.
Last Saturday (4 days ago), I was having a prolonged gaming session in my room and I could tell that my laptop was getting pretty hot. It usually gets hot so I didnt really think anything of it. I just disregarded this until the game I was playing completely froze and the audio in my headphones stopped working and it started to output to the onboard speakers on the laptop. I had to completely shut off my computer and reboot. When it rebooted everything seemed fine but I decided to walk away from it for a little bit and let the laptop cool off. I came back about an hour later and started playing the game again. After about half an hour I went to pickup my laptop and move it while the game was still running and it froze again. After rebooting it again everything seemed fine. I launched the game one more time and decided to play it without moving or anything and after around 5 minutes, the textures turned green within the game and the computer froze and started outputting a weird audio loop from the internal speakers. after rebooting this time, I could tell the my computer was loading in a lower resolution. I quickly checked device manager and noticed there was a caution icon over my GTX 1060. It said something along the lines of "Windows has stopped this device because it has recognized problems." I cant recall exactly what it said but It was error 43. I just figured at that point, I just had a bad GPU driver so I decided to update it. After running a driver update in geforce experience I restarted my computer and it was at the appropriate resolution and there was no caution sign over my video adaptor in device manager. I decided to test the waters by running something that wasnt as graphic intensive. I decided to launch youtube and after about 5 minutes of running a video and the laptop crashed in the same way as before. This time it was not able to reboot properly and it kept saying windows had failed to boot. I attempted a restore and both types of resets to no success.
during the attempt to do a full reset this happened
After this, I decided to shut off the machine and wait until I could get to a workbench that had a anti-static wristband and mat. Once I opened up the laptop 2 days later, I didn't see anything significant or that would cause alarm. So, I decided to do a complete wipe of my OS and reinstalled windows from a media tool. Once windows was installed I checked device manager and it didn't even have my GPU listed under display adaptors. I decided to open up the laptop again. This time, I noticed there was some thermal paste extruding out from between one of the heat sinks and one of the two chips.
When I removed the heat sink, this is what the two chips looked like
Im no expert, but it doesn't look like theres any thermal paste left in the center of the chips and whats there looked burnt onto the heat sink itself. I decided to clean off the thermal paste and reapplied some now past. I would also like to mention that within that film around the chip on the right seemed to have been a lot of thermal-paste underneath that I couldn't reach to clean. I then reapplied the heat sink and put back on the cover of the laptop. When I booted the machine I heard the hard drive start to spin and the keyboard light up, however, it took around 15-30 seconds for the display to turn on but it never went to POST. I tried rebooting it a couple times till I just gave up and let it sit there. I decided to do something on my work computer for about an hour. Once I turned back around my computer was displaying in the low resolution again. Device manager recognized my GPU but had the error 43 beside it again. every-time I would go to restart the laptop after the update for my GPU was ran, it doesn't want to display anything. I basically have to wait an hour and restart it and then wait another hour to see if it will work that time. Every-time it does turn on its back in that low resolution again.
Today I discovered one more thing about this problem. I just turned back on the computer and about 5 minutes after that, someone sent me an email to my personal account and I heard the notification through the laptop but the screen was still powered on but nothing was displaying. I tried plugging in an HDMI to display it externally but this didnt work.
If anybody has any suggestions as to why my laptop is doing this and why it wont immediately go to post or my BIOS please let me know.
Its going to be a pretty long story but I want to make sure I'm thorough explaining everything so that maybe somebody else will catch something I missed and I might be able to figure out whats actually wrong.
Last Saturday (4 days ago), I was having a prolonged gaming session in my room and I could tell that my laptop was getting pretty hot. It usually gets hot so I didnt really think anything of it. I just disregarded this until the game I was playing completely froze and the audio in my headphones stopped working and it started to output to the onboard speakers on the laptop. I had to completely shut off my computer and reboot. When it rebooted everything seemed fine but I decided to walk away from it for a little bit and let the laptop cool off. I came back about an hour later and started playing the game again. After about half an hour I went to pickup my laptop and move it while the game was still running and it froze again. After rebooting it again everything seemed fine. I launched the game one more time and decided to play it without moving or anything and after around 5 minutes, the textures turned green within the game and the computer froze and started outputting a weird audio loop from the internal speakers. after rebooting this time, I could tell the my computer was loading in a lower resolution. I quickly checked device manager and noticed there was a caution icon over my GTX 1060. It said something along the lines of "Windows has stopped this device because it has recognized problems." I cant recall exactly what it said but It was error 43. I just figured at that point, I just had a bad GPU driver so I decided to update it. After running a driver update in geforce experience I restarted my computer and it was at the appropriate resolution and there was no caution sign over my video adaptor in device manager. I decided to test the waters by running something that wasnt as graphic intensive. I decided to launch youtube and after about 5 minutes of running a video and the laptop crashed in the same way as before. This time it was not able to reboot properly and it kept saying windows had failed to boot. I attempted a restore and both types of resets to no success.
during the attempt to do a full reset this happened
After this, I decided to shut off the machine and wait until I could get to a workbench that had a anti-static wristband and mat. Once I opened up the laptop 2 days later, I didn't see anything significant or that would cause alarm. So, I decided to do a complete wipe of my OS and reinstalled windows from a media tool. Once windows was installed I checked device manager and it didn't even have my GPU listed under display adaptors. I decided to open up the laptop again. This time, I noticed there was some thermal paste extruding out from between one of the heat sinks and one of the two chips.
When I removed the heat sink, this is what the two chips looked like
Im no expert, but it doesn't look like theres any thermal paste left in the center of the chips and whats there looked burnt onto the heat sink itself. I decided to clean off the thermal paste and reapplied some now past. I would also like to mention that within that film around the chip on the right seemed to have been a lot of thermal-paste underneath that I couldn't reach to clean. I then reapplied the heat sink and put back on the cover of the laptop. When I booted the machine I heard the hard drive start to spin and the keyboard light up, however, it took around 15-30 seconds for the display to turn on but it never went to POST. I tried rebooting it a couple times till I just gave up and let it sit there. I decided to do something on my work computer for about an hour. Once I turned back around my computer was displaying in the low resolution again. Device manager recognized my GPU but had the error 43 beside it again. every-time I would go to restart the laptop after the update for my GPU was ran, it doesn't want to display anything. I basically have to wait an hour and restart it and then wait another hour to see if it will work that time. Every-time it does turn on its back in that low resolution again.
Today I discovered one more thing about this problem. I just turned back on the computer and about 5 minutes after that, someone sent me an email to my personal account and I heard the notification through the laptop but the screen was still powered on but nothing was displaying. I tried plugging in an HDMI to display it externally but this didnt work.
If anybody has any suggestions as to why my laptop is doing this and why it wont immediately go to post or my BIOS please let me know.
