Chosen Solution
My Razer Blade 14’’ 2017 with an i7-7700HQ and a GTX 1060 is unable to use the GPU. Windows is showing error 43 in the device manager. Naturally I’ve attempted to uninstall the driver and allow Windows to reinstall it upon reboot but that did not work. To ensure it wasn’t a driver related issue I even formatted the SSD and installed Windows from a flash drive so all of the software is fresh. I did make sure to perform all updates from Windows with no luck. I’m aware of the myriad of hardware related issues with these things so at this point I’m beginning to believe this to be a hardware issue rather than a software one. If I missed any steps in troubleshooting the software side please let me know. I’m curious if anyone has seen this happen on one of these Razer Blades… I haven’t really seen anything online that had a solution and unfortunately there isn’t a board diagram for these. I know a lot of the VRMs are prone to failure on these boards due to the excessive heat but before I open it and start poking around at things I felt it might be wise to seek some further advice. Thanks for any help you can provide. UPDATE: I installed GPU-z on the laptop to check if it could detect the GPU. It was able to, however the GPU showed no activity with clock rate of 0 MHz and so on. I’m pretty certain at this point that this is indeed a hardware issue but I’m willing to attempt to fix it. I don’t think the chip is dead but I could be wrong there. It does heat up when the laptop is running which is interesting considering it’s barely detected by the computer.
Checking your computer’s Event Viewer (eventvwr.msc) may offer clues. In the Event Viewer window, go to the upper left-hand corner and double-click “Custom Views”. Then click “Administrative Events”. Scroll through the entries that appear to find any that might be related to your graphics card. In some situations, an outdated BIOS could be causing a specific issue with a device that’s making it report an issue to Windows, so updating your BIOS/UEFI may help. You may have to replace your graphics card, but before you do, try re-seating it in its slot to see if that helps before you spend any money.
