Help with an Alienware M17-R1

NecroFlex · June 1, 2019

I have a question regarding the M17-R1, hopefully someone will know what i can do.

I work with PCs on a daily basis, i love fixing them up, so when i saw one of my contacts for broken PCs selling an old Alienware M17-R1, i called him and bought it off of him. He said he's not sure about the condition of it, he quickly tested it and it worked, but he wasn't sure why it was thrown out.

In any case i took it just for the looks if nothing else. A glorious Core 2 Extreme QX9300 and a crossfire 3870M's awaited me. I put in a 4GB ram stick and booted it up, it powered on, i got into the bios, the bios said i had 0MB of ram in it, which is said was in dual channel, but i guess that's just an odd bug?

I quickly ran a memtest and it went ok, the battery does charge but idk about the condition of it. In any case, i went on and put in just a random SSD i have for testing, a Samsung 830 pro 64GB, i booted to the windows installation but it didn't see the drive, so i thought it might not be connected at all. Powere off the laptop, reconnected the disk and powered it on again...but no picture, it lit up, if i pressed buttons it beeped, but had no picture.

I thought i shorted something, fully disassembled it, found 2 random screws around the mobo, thought they made shorts, but when i reassembled it back, it still had the same issue. Tried an external screen, same.

After too long, i discovered the issue and i'm really baffled as to how it even worked at all. One of the GPUs is damaged, 2 elements on it are just missing, broken off, but not by me, it had to been there since i got it. Here's a pic of the missing parts:

http://prntscr.com/nwbcdm

The circle shows where the elements should be, the arrow shows which ones should be there.

The thing is idk how it worked, i'm guessing it just got more voltage than it should have and agfter a bit it fried the actual GPU chip.

I tried only using the master GPU (slave one died) but it boots up to a black screen and 3 beeps. Do i need both of them for it to show a picture or should it have showed a picture with only one inside?

Also since the slave GPU is most likely dead, do i need to get another slave GPU or can i get one that's master and put it into the slot where the slave one was? Or do i specifically need a master and slave GPU?

Thanks for the help in advance!