Nvidia Geforce GT635m not working : memory not detected in GPU-z

[Zantrope]

Hello, first of all : I'm french, I'm not used to write in english, I will try my best.

Few years ago I bought a laptop from lenovo : a lenovo ideapad z500.
The specs (at the time) :
CPU : i5 3230m 2,6Ghz (2 cores, 4 threads)
RAM : 4 Go DDR3
GPU : Nvidia Geforce GT 635m
HDD drive hitachi 1 To

It worked very well for two years, I was even able to game on it, only games which aren't too heavy to run, but good enough for my personal use.
However, it slowly started to became laggy. Eventually, one day I couldn't run any game, and the issue seemed to be related with my graphic card.
I wasn't as skilled with computer then, so I just disabled the switchable graphics option in the bios to only use the intel HD graphics.
This computer started to became outdated, so I stopped using it.

Until few weeks ago, I dusted off this PC and bought some new parts to increase his performances. I was not planning to use it again for games, I just needed a laptop.
After reinstalling windows 10 on a clean new drive, it worked perfectly fine, good as new.

The specs (now) :
CPU : i5 3230m 2,6Ghz (2 cores, 4 threads)
RAM : 12 Go DDR3
GPU : Nvidia Geforce GT 635m (not properly working)
SSD drive crucial 1 To

I reenabled the switchable graphics, and download the latest Nvidia driver.
As it seemed to work again, I downloaded minecraft and was even able to play for a few minutes. The next day my computer froze and blue screen when the game started.
I tried some other games and softwares, forcing windows to use the gt 635m : the computer froze every single time.

So I downloaded GPU-Z to see if I could find the issue, GPU-Z first displayed the intel HD graphics, so I selected the gt 635m and the computer instantly froze again.
Here is what I did :
- I disabled the switchable graphics in the bios again
- I removed every Nvidia driver
- I reenabled the switchable graphics in the bios
- I checked in the device manager and the gt 635m was still detected
- I start GPU-Z again and here is a screenshot of what it could detect :

This graphic card is supposed to have 2Go of VRAM in DDR3 (I think), and on GPU-Z some other infos are missing.
My question is : Is there a way to fix this GPU ? And what could cause the memory to be erased ?
For instance, this computer tends to heat up a lot, maybe the heat damaged the GPU ?

Thank you for reading all of it ! I'm waiting for your feedbacks and advices.

 

[StefanM]

- I checked in the device manager and the gt 635m was still detected

What does the general tab say?
Device works fine or code 43 ?

 

[FreedomEclipse]

10 year old laptop. My guess is the memory chips on the dedicated portion of the graphics card died.

You can probably fix it with a hot air gun, some flux. solder, soldiering iron and memory chips pulled from a donor motherboard but buying those alone will probably cost you more than what the laptop is worth.

Alternatively, if youre technically skilled. you can buy the motherboard for cheap and just replace the one in your laptop with it. £24 for a replacement board is an absolute steal IMO. Just make sure the model numbers for both boards match up.

You could also buy the board and take it to a repair shop and have them do the work for you.

 

[Zantrope]

What does the general tab say?
Device works fine or code 43 ?

Thank you for your answer. I will spare you the french description, but it says that something is wrong with the driver, which is perfectly normal since I removed every Nvidia driver to be able to run GPU-Z and get some infos. I also get a code 32.

10 year old laptop. My guess is the memory chips on the dedicated portion of the graphics card died.

You can probably fix it with a hot air gun, some flux. solder, soldiering iron and memory chips pulled from a donor motherboard but buying those alone will probably cost you more than what the laptop is worth.

Alternatively, if youre technically skilled. you can buy the motherboard for cheap and just replace the one in your laptop with it. £24 for a replacement board is an absolute steal IMO. Just make sure the model numbers for both boards match up.

You could also buy the board and take it to a repair shop and have them do the work for you.

Thank you for your answer ! I was thinking something like that ... I am familiar with the soldering fix but never tried myself. I don't want to take the risk of burning something or desolder another chip, the CPU is close to the GPU area for cooling purpose ... I don't know if I will find a replacement board for cheap in France, but I might consider this.

 

[Count von Schwalbe]

When you say:

download the latest Nvidia driver.

Did you download the latest one for your laptop or the latest one overall?

IIRC the 700series and earlier are out of driver support.

 

[DR4G00N]

If reinstalling the ver. 391.35 driver doesn't fix it you may want to try reflashing/updating the bios. The Vbios is part of the main bios and is simple to flash using the bios flash utility for your respective laptop on Lenovo's site.

I think this is it: https://pcsupport.lenovo.com/us/fr/...tops/ideapad-z500-notebook/downloads/ds035727

If that still doesn't work then it's probably done for unfortunately.

 

[FreedomEclipse]

Thank you for your answer. I will spare you the french description, but it says that something is wrong with the driver, which is perfectly normal since I removed every Nvidia driver to be able to run GPU-Z and get some infos. I also get a code 32.


Thank you for your answer ! I was thinking something like that ... I am familiar with the soldering fix but never tried myself. I don't want to take the risk of burning something or desolder another chip, the CPU is close to the GPU area for cooling purpose ... I don't know if I will find a replacement board for cheap in France, but I might consider this.

if you know of a good repair shop - you can always buy a non-working board for cheaper and have them take the memory chips off it and switch them with your board. Its just another option depending on what is available to you. Plenty of people will buy faulty devices as a donor to fix their own devices. Repair shops do the same thing all the time.