Thinkpads Forum

SO I thought the Quadro FX 3700M in my W700 had finally kicked the bucket, but now not sure. The story so far:

A couple days ago, while just sitting on a table, my W700 completely froze - no keyboard response, no mouse, nothing did anything forcing me to do a hard power down (holding down the power button for a few seconds).

Open restart, the windows 7 boot screen would get to the point of showing the rainbow Windows 7 logo, then screen would go black for a while. Eventually I would get a blue screen error

Attempt to reset the display driver and recover from timeout failed.

STOP: 0x00000116 (The big long string of hex numbers after this keeps changing).

nvlddmkm.sys - Address FFFFF880058BF180 base at FFFFF880058AA000, DateStamp 4b17e5d4

I managed to get into safe mode one time, but after that first time even going into safe mode was failing, would start loading the long list of files, get to digimon.sys, hang for a bit, then reboot itself.

After a little research I started to believe the video card had died. Although I found it a bit weird that I could boot from a DVD such as the Windows 7 system disk, and everything worked fine in that case, so the video card clearly is not completely dead.

Thinking heat may have been an issue I tore the W700 down to the point of removing the heatsink/fan assembly from the video card, giving the insides a though cleaning and dusting (and yes there was a fair amount of dust in the vents and fan), and reattaching the heatsink/fan assembly with fresh arctic silver 5. Meant to pop out and reseat the video card itself but I forgot that until I had reassembled most of the laptop.

Any, at first no real change - boot to the windows 7 logo, hang, blue screen (same error). Plus on the initial BIOS boot up screens I was noticing a few graphics glitches - blue or white dots flickering on and off a few points around the screen.

But then I discovered safe mode worked again, and I could boot from the windows 7 dvd as well. Tried automatic system repair, no luck. System restore now does not see any recent safe points (I had to hard power down again when the boot got hung on the black screen after the windows 7 logo), so getting afraid that in addition to a faulty video card, I might have munched my windows install too.

So back into safe mode, and for the hell of it tried rolling back the video driver to the default VGA drivers - and lo and behold the ol'W700 booted right into my normal desktop - albeit at the horrid 640 x 480 resolution. So then I go and redownload the Nvidia driver from the Lenovo support site, reinstall, and upon reboot - back to the blue screen crash noted above.

So anyone got any idea if I actually have a faulty video card, broken windows install, or both?

My vote goes to the faulty GPU.

Generic VGA driver doesn't push it hard enough, but the nVidia one does - and boom - the machine starts misbehaving.

My $0.02 only...

Good luck.

MSR_Steve wrote:Plus on the initial BIOS boot up screens I was noticing a few graphics glitches - blue or white dots flickering on and off a few points around the screen.

What you are thinking about Glitches at BIOS screen => GPU is dead

May be it is weak BGA - so frying may help or may not

Definitely an FX3700M going out.

Replace it at your earliest convenience. Chances of repairing your current card are very slim- you could try and cook it in an oven, but that will only temporarily fix it. Also make sure it's evenly and properly mounted in the heatsink- if one screw or mounting point is loose at all, that gives the chip room to dance around on the solder balls.

You have the option of the Quadro FX2700M or the 3700M as a replacement. DO NOT buy the Dell modular FX3700Ms, it needs to be an MXM 2.1 card. Here's a pic: http://thumbs3.ebaystatic.com/d/l225/m/ ... W64Zzw.jpg

The Quadro FX2700M runs cool and is very reliable, so if you don't rely on your W700 for extreme tasks or gaming, you might want to opt for this card. It's also cheaper, so it's great as a fallback solution. The Quadro FX3700M has a lot of newer features and is far more powerful, but runs extremely hot and usually ends up killing itself in the long run if you're not careful. If you decide to get another FX3700M, make absolutely sure you mount it properly!

Either way, good luck.

Thanks guys, super frustrating for me as I didn't realize until just now that even on the base VGA drivers I can use the screen at 1920x1200, so I'm doing that now and it seems to work fine. I guess you're right in that the base driver is not pushing it hard enough. Just so annoying to get it so close to working (apparently), but still know things are not all right.

For what it's worth the initial boot screen graphics glitches only started after I popped the heatsink and redid the thermal compound, so thought I may have not put enough of that on or something.

I do game with it a bit so I am inclined to try and get another 3700M, but it did occur to me that going down to a 2700M would be an option too. Well time to troll ebay / parts resellers.