Acer M5640 Win 10 desktop drops my Nvidia GeForce GT 710 graphics card

Long story but I will try and provide as much detail as possible. I had an earlier issue where at times my computer would not turn on (just random) and when it did turn on, sometimes my old graphics card AMD Radeon HD 5450 would not work. I did a lot of research and ultimately replaced my power source with a 550 Watt Seasonic gold and replaced my Graphics card with a Nvidia GeForce GT 710. It appeared to me that my original HD 5450 card was no longer supported by AMD nor by Microsoft and the intermittent inability to start my computer was related to the power source. So now when everything works, everything works well. The inability of the computer to turn on has disappeared. The issue I now have is that when I turn my computer on (after a shutdown overnight), the computer seems to drop the GT710 graphics card. If I hook up the monitor to the onboard graphics card and check the device manager, the GT710 has been disconnected and is a "hidden device". I can uninstall the device and restart the computer, it may take a few attempts but all of a sudden, the monitor connected to the GT710 will start working. I can put the computer to sleep and "wake it up" and everything seems to be ok but when I shutdown the computer, it seems to drop the connection to the GT710 card and I have to start over again. I don't even have to go into the device manager, just turn the computer on and off a few times and the card starts working again. Solutions attempted include: Tried to update the nVidia chipset drivers (i think the supported drivers are quite old for the motherboard - MCP73; updated the GT710 drivers, turned off the fast startup in power settings (I had read that some folks encountered issues there). The system bios version is 08.00.15. There is another version number 2.5 R01-A3. Not sure what that is. I have 4 GB of memory. I am totally stumped and hoping that I don't have a bad motherboard. The GT710 is windows 10 compliant. Like I said, when it works, it works well. The computer just seems to drop the GT710 after you turn it off. Any help would be most appreciated. Thanks in advance! Brady

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billsey

Sounds to me like hardware, most likely in the connector that the graphics card is plugged into. Try reseating the graphics card and perhaps vacuuming around that are when you first pull the card out for the reseating. Dust in the socket could easily be the culprit. When the BIOS does it's initial start at POST it looks at all the slots to determine what's there. If it sees a graphics card it switches to that instead of using the onboard graphics. That seems to be when the issue happens.

kghMCdKM

Thanks Billsey! I just received a Windows 10 update and one of the sections that looks different is in the display area of setup. I'll see if this has corrected something. It was a large update and took probably more than an hour. I'll turn it off overnight and see what happens when I power it up. It took me 4 tries to get the monitor to work this morning so it should be able to tell quite quickly. If my problem still persists, I'll try your suggestion. Thanks again!

kghMCdKM

Hi Billsey! Problem continues to occur. I tried your solution and reseated the graphics card and vacuumed out the slot. The computer still drops the graphics card and uses the on board graphics when you turn the computer off and then on again. I can go into device manager and uninstall the GPU and restart the computer and it may pick up the GPU after one or 2 restarts. There doesn't seem to be any logical pattern. Thanks in advance.

billsey

Sorry to say that pretty much leaves the motherboard as the culprit. You were having trouble with the original graphics card and with the new one. You've replaced the power supply, which is often the issue with the newer graphics cards. You've verified there's not a physical problem with the graphics card slot. The machine is old enough that you may want to look more toward an upgrade to a new machine than toward fixing the old one. If you do go the fix it route make sure the replacement motherboard uses the same memory and processor as the original one.

kghMCdKM

Thanks again Billsey! I resigned myself to getting a newer machine. We don't use this machine for much more than emails and watching some youtube videos so I was hoping for a cheap fix. Thanks for the advice about the processor and memory.

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