Quote:
Originally Posted by jaycee
Mine went dead past weekend. I got my M1330 in September...
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I can't believe my eyes... after adding several posts to this thread - but
not having the problem myself, my M1330's GPU*
went belly-up last night...
Same deal as many of the posters here: vertical lines appeared out of nowhere while I was simply surfing a website, reboot, ok for 5mins, then checkerboard-like patterns, reboot, then nothing.
Wait, it's not nothing, 'cause the screen's getting brighter... oh noo, the dreaded vertical colored lines...
Even worse, the Notebook was pretty much
dead-slient,
no HDD access sounds, no fan, nothing. When I powerd it off, I heard the HDD spin down, but that was it.
I opened up the panel covering the HSF just to see if it would help cool the chips, but it didn't help. What it did do is make me realize that
the HSF was heating up quite a bit during those short attempts to reboot and that's when I started to panic, thinking of the
CPU which could possibly get damged in the process!
I took
a few pics of the psychadelic screen as well as a few of the HSF. As I noted in a post above, there are (at least) two different versions of the M1330 HSF available!
JC's HSF is different from mine and I even managed to find official pics of both HSF types from two different Dell M1330 guides.
The key difference is that one HSF uses
independant Heastsink "plates" connected together only by the copper
heatpipe while the other (mine) has a single "rail" which
spans the entire length of the heatpipe.
I wish I knew
which was the 1st Gen and which was the 2nd gen
(assuming they've improved the HSF) so that I make a note to Dell & Rep to bring along a
"newer" HSF in case mine's of the old type. It makes no sense to put in a new mobo if the problem is going to happen again because of a bad HSF...!
*I'm still convinced that the problem is directly connected the the graphics system and I say "system" because the graphics system's dedicated memory also plays a role and can also be the culprit. I was unable to "locate" the 128MB of memory that is dedictated to the GPU: anyone know where the memory chip(s) is/are...?