I think my GPU is bad

[danieljamestravers]

Hi everyone,

I'm not sure if im posting in the right thread, but if you can help me, it would be great...thanks.

I have a dell xps M1530. I bought it back in 2005 or so (new). Recently, I was working on it and the whole screen just went all blocky with weird writing and coloured blocks. I couldn't do anything so I turned off the laptop by power button and turned it back on. The screen just went completely gray/black. I connected the laptop to a TV via hdmi and the TV showed me the blocky screen. The weird thing is, when I plug the hdmi lead into the laptop , connecting it to the TV, I cannot view the blocky screen on the TV but when I turn the laptop off and on again when there's a USB stick in a port on the laptop, the TV shows the blocky screen....dunno if this has anything to do with the problem.

Anyway, I seen online that it could be the solder connection under the heading connecting to the GPU....and that it may need repair. The method I seen was to remove the heating, clean the hard paste off the top of the GPU,etc...use a blowtorch lightly, apply flux under the GPU, apply thermal paste and reattach the heating and voila.....however...in the videos of this, when being removed the heatsink just came out of the laptop with no effort. I tried to remove my heatsink....it was really tightly secure to the GPU,etc....so does this mean the soldered connection underneath is OK or no?

If you can offer any advice, I would be very grateful. Thank you.

Daniel

 

[danieljamestravers]

Update....I managed to view more on the laptop through the TV. It boots into windows. The resolution in windows is very low. I can move the mouse and do everything as normal. The picture itself is extremely distorted and I can just make out that I'm in windows.

 

[hang-the-9]

If you can't just pop the heatsink off it may just be stuck on because of the old heat grease hardening and acting like concrete basically.

Don't think it's the connections causing this, just a bad chip. If it was a connection issue you would see no image, not a distorted one. Was the fix you were looking at for no video or bad video?