Video Card Upgrade & Black Screen

I finally got a proper heatsink for the Mobility 4870 I got to put in my 1722 ID1, but when I power it up, all I get is a blank screen. If I plug it into a VGA connection, I get a picture. However, this does not work through HDMI. What's strange is that it worked just fine when I had a test heatsink rigged up. I know people have had the blank screen before from initially swapping cards, but it worked before with the 4870, so now I'm scratching my head. I've tried flashing the card with the MSI 4850 BIOS, but I just get screen corruption (not really surprised), and it still doesn't work on the laptop screen. Anyone have any ideas?

Specs:

MSI 1722-ID1
QX9300
8GB PC2-6400
ATi 4870 1GB 2.1 (no HE) (I assume Dell as it has a CD connector)
500GB Momentus XT
2x Blu-Ray

 

Sorry bro!!

The original MSI 4850 only displays over VGA on other laptops, the alienware card only displays over VGA on the original MSI laptop (apparently)... must be some kind of trade off.

Speaking of which, your best bet is to find a 4850 that someone bought for another laptop and is frustrated with it and trade them the good Alienware card.

KingOfInterns might have one.


...I have many AMD cards that only display over VGA. I've also flashed them and only got screen corruption. I think its a physical problem.

 

I can accept that, but it worked once, so there must be some trick! I was able to get into Windows just fine and run the WEI benchmark. Did I somehow get past some whitelist once?

 

Hmmmmmm are your LCD drivers installed? Are the ATI drivers installed? Did it actually display on screen in POST before the OS started?

 

Yes, I was able to see everything from the POST screen going forward. My 9600m GT works somewhat, so I started doing some experimenting. With the 4870 in on the Alienware BIOS, if I go into the laptop BIOS, the model number says GT729. If I flash the 4870 with the MSI BIOS, the model number is GT725, but the display is corrupt, and the LCD still doesn't work. If I put the 9600m back in, the model number says GX720. There's definitely something in the vBIOS that's changing registers on startup. I'm not convinced that there's something physically preventing this from working if it worked completely once. I downloaded AMIBCP and started digging in the options. There is a menu for display options that doesn't seem to show up in the BIOS, even if they're set to be shown. One of the fields is for bootup display. Both the failsafe and optimal values are set to vBIOS default. I changed them to LVDS and tried to flash, but I got a checksum error. I need to start playing around with how to recalculate the checksum.

 

Your best bet is to try a few different vBIOS versions. The 6970M in my GX740 is a Clevo card, yet in order to provide full functionality (HDMI support, clock change in CCC, etc.) it has to run on Alienware M17xR3 vBIOS.
So to sum things up: MSI laptop, with a Clevo card, which runs on Alienware vBIOS.

Maybe Your situation is somewhat similar.

 

Is there a repository of vBIOS downloads somewhere? I can't seem to find any on Google.

 

http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...cards/432773-mobile-video-bios-database.html# - I have no idea, why this thread has been closed. It should have been made "sticky" IMHO.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/hardware-components-aftermarket-upgrades/529192-hd4850-vbios.html#

 

Through some experimentation, I'm not sure a vBIOS is going to solve the issue here. I tried several vBIOS iterations without success. One thing of interest was that when loading the vBIOS the card came with, Radeon BIOS Ediotr complained about no Powerplay settings being found. I loaded the MSI vBIOS in RBE and saved the Powerplay settings. I then loaded and saved them into the Alienware vBIOS. I flashed the card, but then I didn't get any picture at all. Nomally I'd get the LCD backlight on, ad then I could get a picture on an external screen, but the backlight on the LCD didn't even come on. My engineering instincts told me before (glad to put my degree to use for tinkering at home) that this seems to be an initialization issue/power settings. I'm now going down the path of looking at the ACPI table in the laptop BIOS. There are several references to initializing for the LCD and VGA. I haven't dug in deep, but it looks like it falls back to VGA as a last resort. That makes sense why people can get cads working on the VGA port. I'm thinking if it can be forced to use the LCD, things will work properly. I tried doing this before through the hidden BIOS menu settings, but the flash failed on the checksum. I'm not sure how much longer I plan to mess with this, but I think I at least tracked down the root cause.

 

I reopened that thread and bumped it, you would need to ask a gaming moderator about sticking it though (it's a bit out of date anyway since it's been locked).