Acer Laptop crashes when using nvidia 540m gpu for anything.

Yui Kitamura · 24 Jul 2014

This is a pretty old problem, this was originally my laptop that I gave to my friend for his birthday. A year or so later he can no longer use the dedicated gpu, any game he started up crashed his computer after about 3 seconds of running. Furmark crashed as well. I'm almost certain that this isn't a heat issue, even though it seems like it would be. The laptop will still crash even if it's cold to the touch. The laptop was recently sold from my friend to another friend of mine, who has requested my help in making his games/desktop run well without the gpu.

tl;dr: I'm curious why the gpu crashes the computer, is it fixable?

Thanks,
~Tyler

EDIT: Laptop turned itself off when I wasn't looking, it's extremely hot. It's hard for me to believe that the fan wasn't working, but this is bad. It won't turn back on so I'm assuming I just fried the cpu. Wonderful. Any suggestions?

badger906 · 24 Jul 2014

chances are the thernal compound on the cpu and gpu is just old and degraded. causing heat issues.

easiest way is to crack it open, replace the compound (or TIM) on thr cpu and gpu and then reassemble and try then.

while your at it clean out all the fans and air ducts.