I have a
1 year old Acer Predator 17 G9 793.
About a week ago it started
bluescreening about once per day, which was annoying but I could put up with it
since it rebooted ok. The last
bluescreen was stranger, the laptop's display had a lot of horizontal grey
lines (or rather "zebra" patterns of intermittent white dots, that on a 4k display appear
as grey).
Upon
rebooting, things were not ok this time. First off, the boot process appeared to take a bit longer than usual before anything showed up on the screen. But more important:
- the grey lines stayed on, even in the BIOS
boot screen (which comes up when pressing F2), like a "zebra" pattern; one can make out the UI with considerable effort (moving a little the windows to avoid the obstructions for each line), so something still works with it, but far from usable
- the HDMI connector for external monitor no
longer transmits any signal; I had to dig up a USB to HDMI external video adapter,
that works fine at 4k resolution, enables me to work in a pinch
- Device Manager in Windows 10 shows the
generic "code 43" error, in effect saying that Windows stopped the
GTX 1070 due to the video card informing the OS of a hardware failure
- the laptops’s display does still appear to
work somewhat, at least the 75% of the pixels that aren’t covered by grey lines
- trying to change the resolution to a lower
one (than the native 3 840x2160) is greyed out, and the driver used is “microsoft
basic display driver 64hz”. The 64Hz is
a weird refresh rate, but that is greyed out too (I’d be happy with a lower
rate)
- getting the latest Nvidia GTX 1070 drivers
didn’t help at all, nor did rebooting on my other partition (where I have Win
10 Pro instead of Home, with a different version of the GTX 1070 drivers), nor
a live Linux CD, so I am pretty sure at this point that it is not a driver
issue, but hardware
- I have also downloaded and applied the latest BIOS updates as well as chipset drivers and video drivers from Acer's site, no difference
This hardware
failure is very unexpected 1 year into using this laptop, never overclocking it
or even opening the case, never having ventilation issues (or even pushing the
graphics—have only used it for programming, not games), so I haven’t put it in
thermal stress, nor were there many power cycles (just a daily on/off for about
350 days). I can have it serviced under
warranty, though that would be a hassle for me since it is my work laptop, and would only do it as a last resort. I don't play any games in it, if it were
possible to just disable the GTX 1070 and use instead the built-in Intel
graphics, I would do that in a heartbeat.
Or any other change that could be done, e.g. to force the graphics card into
a lower performance mode (all I care about is the resolution of 3840x2160). Lastly, if the 1070 is toast, I could replace
it with something else that can drive 3840x2160 and have the compatible hardware
interfaces and physical dimensions, does anyone have any suggestions for a cheap video card that could work as a replacement? I'd just pay for a cheaper option out of pocket, but if the GTX 1070 can only be replaced by another pricey GTX 1070, I'll bite the bullet and send it in for warranty service.