Monday, 16 Jul, 2018

 

 

In the past few weeks, my Dell XPS 15 L502x started experiencing unexplained freezes, with a blank screen (ie. black, white or other solid colour background), no mouse cursor and no BSODs.

It was a little bit hard to troubleshoot my problem.

tl;dr FIX:

  • MSI Afterburner with the MINIMUM POSSIBLE GPU and Memory Clock settings.

 

 

Impossible problems.

The issue that affected my laptop was pretty weird and unexpected at the beginning - all of a sudden, the laptop did turn off without notice.

  • I did test anything and everything, by focusing on the traditional culprits (ie. Memtest, full disassemble/re-paste/re-assemble, different OS/different HDD, etc.).

After a few Months, I started noticing a pattern - The issue recurred anytime I had my external HDMI monitor connected to the laptop.

(So) I naturally started suspecting that there was an issue with my nVidia discrete graphics card (an 525m).

In order to confirm an issue with my nVidia discrete graphics card, I started testing the video ram by using a tool similar to "Memtest for graphics cards" (Video Memory Stress Test v1.6 - http://sourceforge.net/projects/vmst/). VMT found no problems at all with my video RAM.

  • I also tried a hacked/modded BIOS (obtained from notebookreview - http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads/l502x-modded-bioses-download-gpu-voltages-and-more.635536/).
  • This BIOS downvolted the GPU to 0.85v in both 3D and 2D modes (to no avail. unfortunately - I kept experiencing crashes!).

 

 

Unexpected solutions.

One day, I then gave MSI Afterburner a go, by *progressively* downclocking the nvidia graphics card GPU Clock AND Memory Clock (until I reached the *Minimum possible values* of GPU Core Clock = 300MHZ & Memory Clock = 450Mhz).

A few weeks later, I started noticing some stability b/c I was then fully able to utilise my laptop while connected to the external display via HDMI.

 

In other words, MSI Afterburner with the MINIMUM POSSIBLE GPU and Memory Clock settings (at system startup/in kernel mode), made my system stable and usable again!

Try that and let me know if that fixes the issue for you too.Nvidia Custom GPU Settings

 

 

[BONUS] Run Dell U2711 at native resolution via HDMI.

In addition to all of the above, and considered that my L50X is connected to my 27" Dell U2711 (Native Resolution of 2560 x 1440) via HDMI, I was also able to get my DELL LCD U2711 to work at its Native Resolution via HDMI.

To achieve the above, I was able to hack a custom display resolution via the nVidia Control Panel and set it as follows:

 

2560x1440 60Hz CVT RB Custom Resolution

SRC: http://superuser.com/questions/119755/hdmi-with-resolution-2560-x-1440-possible

3.1/5 - (44 votes)