Acer 3820tg discrete graphics- Unusual issue

sllewgh

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Dec 23, 2010
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I'm having a bit of an unusual issue.

I own an Acer TimelineX 3820tg with switchable graphics w/ ATI 5650m discrete graphics card.

The 5650 seems to have completely disappeared. It doesn't show up under the device manager even when I set the BIOS (stock v 1.19) to use only the discrete card. I've tried every manner of driver installation I can find/think of, and the problem persists even when I use the never-altered factory hard drive with stock software, ect. instead of the SSD I put in immediately after unboxing. This makes me think it's a hardware issue and not a software issue.

I've got a broken screen I'm dealing with, and today I was poking around with the Embedded Controller to achieve the "unsupported brightness levels", relatively risk-free because I'm getting a new screen anyway. When I got no results, I read that there were different values set in the EC for the discrete and integrated graphics, so I went to switch to the 5650 to see what I could accomplish, when I first realized it was no longer there.

My current theories are, either I did something in the EC which would cause the discrete graphics card to no longer function (unlikely, as the settings don't seem to persist after rebooting), or, whatever caused my screen to break (trauma or otherwise, I don't know) also caused my GPU to fail. The break is on the rightmost quarter of the screen, and the GPU is on the left side of the motherboard, if that's relevant.

Edit: Worth noting- When I set the BIOS to "DISCRETE" and force the computer to boot solely from the discrete (now missing) card, the display gets distorted/static-y from POST until Windows first loads. After that, it behaves normally, but uses/shows the integrated graphics only as before.

Any thoughts?
 

steeks

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Jun 19, 2012
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Hi!
Having the same problem. Did you find any solutions?

/stefan