A Tale of Two Blades...

tl;dr: If you don't want to read this whole story, skip to the last two short paragraphs - they are the whole point of my long tale.
----------------
Hey, long time since I posted in here in the Razer subs. I own two Razer Blade 14" models - the 2014 and the 2015 model. I've had an interesting (to me) experience in the last few weeks, and thought I write it up, in case anyone else might also find it of interest.

The 2014 model has the NVidia 870m GPU. It was purchased in Spring of 2014 (after returning another 2014 model that experienced an unfixable panel glitch) from the Microsoft Store. After about a year of use (relatively graphically unchallenging games like Fallout 3, Fallout NV and Skyrim), the internal SSD failed utterly without a moment's warning. Even though I had an expensive service contract with Microsoft, I was unwilling to drive 150 miles to a store location to get a replacement ssd, so I ordered one overnight, and installed it myself. It still continues to function today.

After the hard drive incident of spring, 2015, I moved to a couple of more challenging games for the 870m - Dying Light, Cities Skylines and GTA V + GTA Online. A few months afterwards, my games all started crashing to the desktop after just a few minutes (often, seconds) of gameplay. I couldn't fix it, so I decided to do a clean install of Windows (Windows 10, not the 8.0/8.1 that the machine was originally licensed with - the machine had not yet been upgraded to Windows 10 at this time.) After getting everything set up, I was very, very disappointed to see that the CTD's had not improved at all - every game crashed to the desktop every time within a minute or two of play.

Finding this unacceptable (obviously), I, in a fit of perhaps foolish anger and impatience, ordered a 2015 Razer Blade (16GB RAM, 3200x1800 touchscreen, 970m GPU) from Amazon for overnight delivery. I set this machine up, installed all my games (this time the machine actually came with Windows 10 pre-installed, iirc), and played happily away, the CTD's apparently forever banished.

This agreeable situation continued from fall 2015 until about a month ago, when I decided to spend an evening with a friend playing a new mod for Skyrim SE called "Beyond Skyrim - Bruma". So that my friend could see the gameplay, I ran an HDMI cable from my home theater receiver to my machine's HDMI output port. I played the game from my laptop screen, with the TV simply mirroring the laptop's screen - my setup was configured at 1920x1080 for the Windows desktop and 1920x1080 for the game, exactly matching my Samsung television's FHD resolution, and the HDMI cable delivering the surround audio to my very nice surround-sound home theater receiver.

I guess we got carried away with the new mod, which really caused the machine's fans to rev up, because we wound up playing for about 2 1/2 hours. I failed to note how hot my machine was getting while driving the two displays - does playing on the laptop screen while mirroring the display to an external monitor increase the GPU's load? I don't know if it does or not, but either way the machine got blazing hot. Suddenly I heard a noise (in retrospect, it was probably an electrical pop, but at the time, I thought it was a noise coming from the speakers because of the game crashing during play), and the Blade suddenly shut completely off.

I figured the game crashed, or perhaps the machine got too hot and shut down to protect itself. In either case, it was late, and my friend left and I went to bed. The next morning I came in, turned the computer on, and the machine would not start or display an image on the screen. It was not even booting with no video display, because none of my other computers could see the machine on my local network, so I knew it was not even booting - it's completely dead. My theory is that either the HDMI cable may have flexed in the port during my gameplay and shorted something out, or the machine got so hot that something died.

After this happened, I debated a few days and decided to order a new laptop (an Alienware this time, instead of a Razer Blade). This is where the story gets interesting, though.

While I was waiting for delivery of the new machine, I decided to dust off my old 2014 Razer Blade, which still ran just fine as long as I didn't use the NVidia GPU to play games (which rapidly and unfailingly caused a CTD). Desperate for something to game on while I waited for the new machine, I configured the NVidia control panel to use the integrated GPU for all 3d activities, and installed updates for the machine's OS and let Steam update my older games, including Elder Scrolls 3 - Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout NV. Also, for fun, I decided to see what I could do with Skyrim SE on the Intel iGPU.

Surprisingly, as long as I dialed the settings down (1280x720, medium settings, view distances to medium, medium shadows, medium-quality textures, no anti-aliasing at all), these games, including Skyrim SE, would play acceptably well. The first three, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout NV were especially fluent on the Intel iGPU, and could pretty much maintain 60fps with my dialed down settings.

I got the new Alienware machine and set it all up and was happy as a clam, until, two weeks after taking delivery, it died an early and unexpected death - no video display, not even a flashing POST failure code on the power button - the tech support called it a pre-POST failure. The machine went back for a refund. I'm currently testing another Alienware (the first was a 15" model - this one a considerably less expensive and less sophisticated 13" model - also much cheaper than the 15").

But here's the kicker - in the middle of all this machine swapping, I went snooping online for information about whether it was possible to remove the 970m GPU from the dead 2015 Razer Blade and put it in the 2014 model. The answer I gleaned from this research was that it was not feasible - at least for someone with my modest technical skills. However, during my research, I ran across a neglected post detailing persistent crash-to-desktop problems with the 2014 Razer Blade's 870m. Fascinated, I followed up on the thread, and found that the original post's author later updated the thread (much later) with the information that he had fixed his CTD problem by going into the NVidia control panel and switching the Physx processor selection from automatic (preferring the NVidia dGPU) to just use the machine's CPU for Physx.

I couldn't believe this might be the solution for my long-forgotten problem, but I tried it, and, lo and behold, the 2014 870m-based Razer Blade is now a full-fledged game playing machine again - every game I own will run on it for hours on end using the NVidia GPU and never a single CTD. It's glorious.

So, after this long tale, my only point is that, if you, like me, had persistent CTD's with a 2014 Blade when using the 870m GPU, try switching the Physx option in the NVidia control panel to "CPU" and you may restore your older gamer back to a useful life!

Thanks for reading this long (overly long) post, but I was so excited to get back the use of my original gaming computer, I just had to tell somebody!