Need to disable Cores on my APU

[Kazlehoff]

Not sure where would be best to post this.

 

I recently got a dell inspiron 5555 laptop. t'was abandoned with me due to GPU issues. seems like one of the GPU cores is defective. units for sure shot on its warranty, guy who dumped it off with me (no joke) brought it in with keyboard dented and screen broken. pretty sure he punched it.

 

So the A10-8700p is 4cpu+6gpu cores, and what i want to do (hopefully) is figure out a way to disable the GPU cores one by one to find the defective core.

 

Laptop is running Solus Linux-Budgie.
 

what ive found so far about the issue

 

- Only happens when using a dell approved charger capable of running the system at full power. (with dell systems they wont charge the batteries and run at reduced speeds if you use an unapproved charger). when running off battery / unapproved charger, unit runs normal (although slow)

 

- Only happens on the primary built in screen. mirroring onto an external monitor through HDMI works fine.

 

- Issue only occurs when the system is really being taxed. Can play Half Life 1 without issue, but Half Life 2 is no bueno. (so no, sadly, it will not run crysis.)

 

System specs are a10-8700p, 16gb ram, 1tb WD blue HDD.

[kb5zue]

Just out of curiosity, say you figure out which core it is, then what?  It's not like you can fix it, right.  From what I found, it has 8 gig ram, 1TB Hard drive.  Almost worth just replacing the faulty chip, right?

[Electronics Wizardy]

gpu cores don't work like that.

 

How do you know its a bad gpu core, not a bad cpu core or ram?

 

 

[Kazlehoff]

its a gpu cure because it only affects gaming. Aida64 stressing everything but GPU is fine. even Prime95 is fine. i know for sure its the onboard GPU. 

 

once i figure out what core... Obviously leave that core disabled. use the other five. fixing the system would be ideal, but cant right now. my funds are going toward my wedding.

 

gpu cores do work like that. Hence why companies sell badly binned units as a lower model. they disable the cores that are faulty. therefore there has to be some way to do it, even if its just temporarally for testing.

[Guest]

14 minutes ago, Kazlehoff said:

snip

 

23 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

snip

 

37 minutes ago, kb5zue said:

snip

Just wanted to quote you guys since he forgot.

 

BTW congrats on your wedding!

[Electronics Wizardy]

24 minutes ago, Kazlehoff said:

its a gpu cure because it only affects gaming. Aida64 stressing everything but GPU is fine. even Prime95 is fine. i know for sure its the onboard GPU. 

 

once i figure out what core... Obviously leave that core disabled. use the other five. fixing the system would be ideal, but cant right now. my funds are going toward my wedding.

 

gpu cores do work like that. Hence why companies sell badly binned units as a lower model. they disable the cores that are faulty. therefore there has to be some way to do it, even if its just temporarally for testing.

There is no easy way to disable cores. You would have to change the firmware, and thats a pain and your writing the firmware your self.

[Kazlehoff]

2 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

There is no easy way to disable cores. You would have to change the firmware, and thats a pain and your writing the firmware your self.

well shoot. going to have to wait till i can replace the board then. darnit. also, thank you for explaining why i cant do it.

 

7 minutes ago, Abyss Gaming said:

 

 

Just wanted to quote you guys since he forgot.

 

BTW congrats on your wedding!

thanks, and thanks. maybe the fiancee will let me put a motherboard on the registry.....

 

[Electronics Wizardy]

8 minutes ago, Kazlehoff said:

well shoot. going to have to wait till i can replace the board then. darnit. also, thank you for explaining why i cant do it.

 

firmware tells it how to use the chip. 

 

Also you don't just have 6 'cores' you have thousands of parts and any of them could be bad, or it could be a bad driver or software. Its a pain to know what the issue is.

[Loot]

the A-series uses system ram for the igpu .. if you can go into the bios and allocate it 2gig if possible see if that makes any difference