Asus N76VB + EXP GDC v8.3E: Nvidia works, AMD does not

[kenryk]

Hello!

 

I have an Asus N76VB (i7-3630QM, HD4000+GT740M, 16GB DDR3, Windows 10 x64) and an EXP GDC v8.3E adapter. I have recently purchased a 4GB Sapphire Nitro+ OC RX 480 and cannot get it to work properly.

 

I got the adapter about two moths ago and tested it with my friend's 2GB MSI GTX 760. Everything ran perfectly. All I had to do was plug it in, uninstall my nvidia driver and install the desktop version. I didn't test it for long, just one or two games, but it worked as expected.

I then borrowed a 4GB Palit GTX 760 and tested it for a couple of days. The setup was exactly the same, except I also disabled the Intel and Nvidia gpus from device manager. it worked flawlessly for extended periods of time (4+ hours). I tested Heaven as well with the same clocks and settings I saw in an online result and it was only ~10% slower.

The internal display worked on both cards, but the performance was much worse with it enabled, so I only used one external display.

Black Friday came, and while I had originally intended to buy a 3GB 1060, I found an RX 480 that had a very good price. I remembered seeing some videos on YT with working RX 480s via the same adapter I have, and even one comment that mentioned it works on the 15 inch version of my laptop (Asus N56), so I thought it was a no-brainer.

 

I picked it up yesterday, plugged it in, uninstalled the nvidia drivers, installed the AMD drivers and... bsod. The driver seemed to crash anywhere from 10s to 2min after logging in. The error was VIDEO_TDR_FAILURE. I looked it up online and concluded that it can mean almost anything.

I reinstalled my OS today, Windows 10 x64, same as before, and thought I'd give it another try. The same issue popped up, although I did manage to run a windowed Heaven benchmark. Launching it full screen causes an immediate freeze/crash. Artifacts appear on the screen (green squares, lines, etc.) and soon after my display loses input, so I believe the GPU stops working. Even stranger, after setting TdrDelay to 16s (found this workaround online), I don't get a bsod anymore. Whenever the crash happens, both displays remain black. This only works if I disable both the Intel and Nvidia gpus from device manager.

If the Intel gpu is enabled, almost anything will crash it, including the Windows display settings. It sometimes crashed during login (both displays stay black). I confirmed this by looking at the Event Viewer and seeing that LogonUI.exe crashed; the faulting module was atidxx64.dll.

Just to be safe, I tested the gpu and the psu in a PC and it works: I uninstalled the nvidia drivers, installed the AMD drivers and everything ran perfectly.

 

I have done everything I could think of, so any and all help is greatly appreciated. In the meantime, I will probably give it to my brother and use his 760.

 

Edit: I also gave Windows 8.1 a try since I saw some people mention that the tdr error might only occur on Windows 10. It made no difference whatsoever.

 

 

 

Edited November 29, 2016 by kenryk
Grammar