Replace / Fix HD8970m

Hi,

First actual post, so hope it's in the right place and that I will have enough details.
I have an AW17 R1 may 2014 - with the AMD R9 M290X with 4GB GDDR5

I've recently suffered from a freezing Windows 10 (20H2) after installing a new SSD, decided to update to the latest windows version. It worked for a little while and all of a sudden crashed windows where I had to hard shutdown with the power button. Then black screen and had to reinstall...

Right now with the M290x/HD8970M disabled or no attempt to install a driver, the computer works fine, just can't play anything as the on-board card it not strong enough...

Anyone experienced this issue and have a step by step procedure to resolve?
Here is what I tried so far:

Windows re-install many times (Didn't go back to very old build)
Use DDU with safemode boot and uninstall all drivers, even removed the Dell/AW driver for the HD4600 and installed the latest from Intel. Before attempting to install the AMD driver.
For the AMD I tried many different drivers, all the way back to the catalyst 15.11.1 ...

Still no luck, computer freeze in the middle of the driver install, in safemode driver install but black screen when I boot...

Would a new GPU fix my issue? The is a local store who can sell me same card for 225$...

I don't need to upgrade either cause it had enough power for me, getting old and can only play a couple of World of Tanks round a week... Not the addict I use to be

Thank you so much, really appreciate you guys helping out!

D.

 

I would start off looking in Event Viewer to see what's going on specifically as it should show some logs of the issue.

I have sporadic issues with spontaneous reboots w/o any real trigger that show up as a kernel-power issue. Before switching to 20H2 they were becoming very frequent and random as in it would happen within minutes or just a couple of hours of the prior reboot. Since updating the system image it's sustained consistent uptime for a few days at a time. I tested out Linux for a couple of days to rule out actual power issues and didn't have any reboots at all which led to the 20H2 switch from 1903.

Being that this seems to be a GPU issue it might be a bit harder as most games aren't Linux compatible to trigger the issue under a different OS. There seems to be more issues with Windows though as they make updates they break more stuff in the process.

If you're going to fiddle with the GPU replacement process maybe look into NVIDIA options as they're a little less buggy when it comes to playing nice with the OS. I've used both AMD / NVIDIA over the years and they both work well depending on the OS. AMD tends to be a little more finicky in Linux though.

 

@ MrNiceGuy80 You'll want to read this link as well.
https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us...-windows/e4c25ad9-61f6-4165-b350-b5e63c90a8e2

And along with this I doubt MS will provide support for this old of hardware as well. So everything will have to be a DIY and if they GPU and O/S doesn't support that hardware your left with the last support O/S and drivers for it. This may also be the reasons for your issues as well as the O/S isn't support by that hardware.