Thinkpads Forum

I have a T61 that when you turn it on the you are greeted by a gray screen, sometimes a half white / half gray screen. When I plug it into an external monitor, I get a bunch of random colored lines. This seems like symptoms of a GPU problem, but I figured it wouldn't hurt to ask the board. I've tried reseating and replacing the RAM, pulled the battery, the hard drive, reseated the CPU, pulled all the cards, it still acts the same.

So if it is the GPU, is the only solution to replace the motherboard? Or does anyone do GPU repair (for less than the price of a new motherboard)?

Thanks all!

Which GPU do you have?

There is a very well documented problem with Nvidia G84 and G86 core video cards, which unfortunately include the Quadro GPUs in the T61s. These cores fail across the board, and not just with IBM/Lenovo. This is why all current discrete GPU offerings in the Lenovo line are ATI... Nvidia really dropped the ball on this and to the best of my knowledge they have not(or probably will not) offer any sort of fix. Unlike the 'loose GPU' problem with the ATI T4x systems, this is a defect inside the GPU die itself... the entire GPU is bad.

If you have warranty remaining, send it in... they will end up replacing the motherboard. If you don't... you're looking at having to purchase an entire system board, I'm afraid.

Yep it was an NVIDIA, and unfortunately no warranty. Oh well. Thanks for the input!

It would be nice if Lenovo had stepped up and warrantied the GPUs as other manufacturers have, but so far they have chosen not to do so.

FredGarvin wrote:It would be nice if Lenovo had stepped up and warrantied the GPUs as other manufacturers have, but so far they have chosen not to do so.

I can definitely see the problems with this on both sides... on one hand it sucks for the customer as they buy a ThinkPad expecting extreme durability and end up with a bricked system due to the screwy GPU issue. However, the problem doesn't lie with Lenovo, but Nvidia. I simply have very little faith with Nvidia products now, and kinda regret getting my M1730 instead of holding out for a W700 with ATI graphics. Granted, my 8800M cards are G92 cores, but there have been reports of them failing as well. I'm out of warranty on my system, and I know that replacing my cards will run significantly more than replacing a motherboard will... so this issue has definitely drawn my ire.

Simply put, it stinks that Lenovo isn't extending GPU warranties, but they're losing quite a bit of money due to Nvidia's fault... they have to eat the cost of the motherboard and related components, even if Nvidia is refunding them for the faulty GPUs.

I'd definitely agree nVidia is the bad guy here. The saw there was a problem and promptly went into witness protection program. I'm fairly certain Lenovo would really rather not have to deal with this train-wreck. nVidia could fix them, but it'd probably bankrupt them, which isn't good either.