Alienware 13r3 Autopsy

[evilgenius31]

Friends,

 

I lost a dear companion on Wednesday - my alienware13r3 gave up the ghost.

 

I'm VERY experienced in hardware troubleshooting, but this issue has me stumped. I'm trying to figure out what happened even though it's on its way back to Dell right now. I woke up that morning to find my laptop in sleep mode, but fairly warm. I had to physically reboot the laptop because it was completely unresponsive. Upon rebooting, I saw the familiar Alienware logo -  I assumed the laptop was fine until it tried to start windows. Upon reaching the login screen, I entered my PIN. The machine's screen immediately turned black. I rebooted again - with the same result.

 

At this point, I contacted Dell regarding the issue. They ran me through the normal gamut of diagnostics. The screen, CPU, memory and SSD passed with flying colors - but after a couple of minutes in a safe-mode remote support session, the screen on the machine went black and windows locked up. "I'm no longer connected to the laptop!" exclaimed the tech, "Unfortunately, It seems like we'll have to restore the factory image."  I proceeded to use advanced startup to restore the system, but the screen turned black upon entering the factory image restore utility.

 

Has anyone else experienced an issue like this? I always assumed Alienware machines were rock solid QC wise. (though, in this case, I purchased a refurb)

 

Specs wise, It had the following:

1440p OLED panel

7th Generation Intel® Core™ i7-7700HQ

Windows 10 Home 64-bit English

8GB DDR4 at 2400MHz

NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050ti with 2GB GDDR5 - 59W

 

Is it safe to assume the 1050ti died?

[Shiv78]

13 minutes ago, evilgenius31 said:

NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 1050ti with 2GB GDDR5 - 59W

 

1050 with 2gb or 1050ti 4gb?

 

also AFAIK there is no model available with 1050 and OLED...?

[evilgenius31]

It's a 1050ti - and since it's a refurb, I think it's kind of an oddball mix of components.