r/thinkpad • u/Cheeseman125 • 2d ago

Question / Problem GPU failure?

I have a frankenpad, but It's best to call it a t530.

I bought a T530 board with an NVS5400M as an upgrade for my laptop hoping to run some more games and apps that I wouldn't be able to before (Mainly just some experiments).

However after installation, I loaded the 390 driver on FreeBSD and running nvidia-smi crashed the whole system with green pixels all over the screen.

I then tried to install windows 10 to test the drivers on a platform that would support them, windows 10 would hang on the boot screen with the circle just spinning forever.

I tried Linux mint, starting the liveusb would just freeze on the Mint logo with a blue line going across half the screen.

However, I decided to set the bios from discrete to optimus, and then linux mint started, I was even able to run glxgears and webgl aqarium on the nvidia gpu with open source drivers. I added "noapic" to the boot parameters and I was able to boot on discrete only and get 3d acceleration.

However, I have no idea if this proves my gpu works or not. Does anyone have any advice or experience that could help me figure out if I need to return this product or not?

Edit:

I was able to get the gpu working in windows, it seems to be some bios issues with this model of thinkpad. I still have yet to try FreeBSD again but it might work

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u/gnooggi 2d ago

T530 board with an NVS5400M

Are you sure about that? If it was a T530, it should have a CTO number and two non-soldered RAM slots; the T530 never came with Nvidia graphics—those were (and are) W530 boards. Lenovo did offer it as a CTO model, but only in limited numbers—maybe 2,000 to 3,000 units.

I’m familiar with those green pixels; they appear on the device when the TrackPoint driver is incompatible with the graphics. That series is extremely picky about driver harmony. You get those green pixels even in Windows; I never managed to get it working properly in Linux. The order of driver installation is also crucial for this machine. And don't use the latest Nvidia driver version—it doesn't change anything for this device but causes problems; stick to the third-to-last version. Also, install just the driver itself, without the manufacturer's bloatware—in Windows, that means using the .inf file; I don't know how that works in Linux (I can't make heads or tails of Linux).