GT80 audio board failure leads to an unbootable laptop

My GT80 SLI decided to brick itself. The boots got incrementally longer - up to 1 hour until the power button had no effect at all.

Having sent the notebook to MSI, I got this.

Has anyone else experienced the "audio board" failure leading to a non-bootable machine? The machine is out of warranty and they are charging $200 to fix it.

 

It's possible, GT72 has an Audio + USB daughter board as well. But I have never heard of an Audio failure causing boot issues before.

Sent from my SNE-LX1 using Tapatalk

 

You probably have a more severe circuitry issue other than audio IC, but it can be a root cause.

 

I will request them to test it before they ship it back.

I have never had a computer brick itself to that degree. This is sub-standard quality. While my GT80 is in repair, I pulled the old Dell L702x from storage (circa 2011) that keeps on working, the machine that GT80 replaced to begin with.

 

It definitely sucked that the machine had gone bad, hopefully they bring it back to you fully repaired.

 

I will keep updated.

 

I got the machine back a few months ago, it was working fine for about 2 months and today it decided to brick itself once more. The power buttons turns on the keyboard but no MSI splash screen shows up. I hit the reset button in the back a few times to no avail. It doesn't boot.

This has been a very problematic machine in the last year.

 

All is working

If it does not boot in under 30 seconds, you have a hardware issue - don't bother troubleshooting it, send it in.
MSI should have a better job of programming the bios so it could boot despite an audio board failure.

There are 2 other posts about getting stuck in at the splash screen that suggest it is a relatively widespread issue.

 

My GT80 just died tonight. I was having audio problems with a game though the nature of those problems normally is a config file. I was going to reboot to restart the game and got a shock from the keyboard and the screen went black. No response from power button after that. I've had it 5-6 years now, would expect more life from a $5300 machine as my old 2004 Sager lasted 10 years (last tried it still worked) before this one replaced it.

 

Audio interface comes from the chipset, if for some reason the DAC is holding the interface stuck the chipset wont let the laptop finish the boot process, its more of a bug on Intel ME than on MSI side, because they dont have all that much control over the Azalia interface.

 

My solution has been this - I keep 2 identical GT80 SLI machines, if one goes down, all I have to do is swap the SSDs into the new one. They have become cheap enough that it's economically feasible, you can pick up a used GT80 SLI for under $1,000.

This is easier given I've broken the RAID it came with and really all I have to do is move a single SSD the entire os is installed on. But with a RAID the process is similar, just move the SSDs into the same location.

I don't trust this machine enough for travel, it's a great quasy-desktop replacement but it's heavy, the runtime is awful and there are much better, more reliable options these days if you seek mobility.