Thinkpads Forum

hello everyone, how are you doing, i have a problem and i wish you can help me with it, i will appreciate your help.
i am using thinkpad t61, it has a nvidia gpu, the cpu is core 2 duo t7100.
i installed in it gentoo linux, the thing i was always noticing was a garbled title bar on almost every window. i doubted the gpu and the software related to graphics like the driver or gtk as i guess.
recently i heard 1 long beep and 2 short beeps on the boot before the first screen appears, however the screen after those beeps did not show anything and the laptop turned off. when i turn it on again it runs without those beeps and almost once every 3 times i have the same case of beeps.
when i searched for it i found some forums saying that it is a driver problem and the driver needs to be updated. (my driver is nouveau not nvidia's official proprietary driver)
and i found other forums saying that the motherboard needs to be replaced. (when i looked for boards i found in aliexpress a weird type of boards its brand is nokotion, if i need to buy another board is that type good? since i may not be able to buy following other methods)
i don't know if i have any missing details so if any of you wanted any other details please tell me.
i need you to tell me if i should update the drivers only or replace the motherboard. thank you

The beep pattern is produced by the BIOS before the graphics driver is used or linux is run so it is not a driver issue. That diagnostic code indicates that it can't initialize the GPU. Eventually it will always just beep, so while you can still sometimes see the BIOS setup program (when you press F1 immediately on startup) you can read the sticky at the top of this forum so that you can use an external mPCIe GPU to run an external monitor as an option. There are a couple of expresscard docking stations which have a GPU that should work too besides the 2503 advanced dock + GPU card. That is the only alternative to replacing the motherboard.