RTX 5070 Bricked my FW16

This is going to sound insane, but I assure you it happened. I received my RTX 5070 graphics module yesterday (sticker said RX 7700S, but showed up as an RTX 5070) and was super excited to install it in my 1st Gen FW16. Everything went well: I installed the new bios and drivers, as per the installation guide and was happily running 3D mark benchmarks (although results were about half of what was expected.) This is when things went sideways. My system hung and crashed with a hypervisor_error (0x20001) error. I thought “no problem”, and hard reset my FW16. The laptop came back on, but had graphics artifacts on the FW boot screen, crashed and locked up again. I went thorough this several times. I reinstalled my original AMD graphics module and the “repair” screen came up and crashed several time, and graphics artifacts also appeared on the screen. The laptop will now not boot with either graphics module installed. I got back into the bios once, and it froze up in bios. Now it is completely bricked and won’t boot at all. The power button light will come on, and sometimes the fans will spin, other times nothing. I’ve tired several things: reseating ram and ssd, resetting the motherboard with the switch by the ram, I reinstalled an SSD I used before upgrading about 6 months ago to see if that worked. Removing one of the ram sticks. Holding and releasing the power button. Removing the battery and reinstalling. My FW16 was working fine with no issues and I’m now regretting trying to upgrade to the RTX 5070. I’m afraid that this graphics module was defective and it’s now damaged my motherboard and bricked my system (which of course as an early adopter of the FW16 is out of warranty.) I bought this laptop to upgrade and paid a premium, only to have the first upgrade brick this expensive piece of hardware. I’ve reached out to Framework, but as it was yesterday, have not received a response yet. I’m running Windows 11, fully updated. Help?

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Do you have another set of known working RAM sticks you could try swapping in? Alternatively you could maybe try putting these sticks in another machine and testing them that way.

Everything I can find on your original hypervisor BSOD seems to say RAM issues can be a common cause, possibly also drivers. Having bad RAM would lead to the machine not booting or even posting. I feel like a faulty GPU would just result in crashes while attempting to utilize the dGPU. The laptop integrated iGPUs should still allow you to boot and get into windows/BIOS, etc. so the dGPU being dead shouldn’t result in nothing.

It’s unfortunate that RAM prices are in space at the moment, but a RAM set would still probably be better than an entire laptop. Even if you could borrow a compatible set to test with, it could be the root cause.

Did you uninstall the AMD graphics drivers before moving to the Nvidia graphics drivers?

EDIT: Don’t do this - comment below explains why :upside_down_face:

All Frameworks Laptop 16 still contain an AMD iGPU, and it will still require those drivers. The driver bundle will reinstall them if you remove them. Their removal is not recommended. :slight_smile:

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Yeah, you right - it was the reverse that once caused me issues.

My bad on that

Sounds like you need to contact FW support basically

Thanks to all who have offered their support and suggestions. I’ve been contacted by Framework support, and the Engineers believe it to be a BIOS issue. I’m waiting to be contacted by the RMA team, who, I’m told, will send me a replacement motherboard to see if that fixes the issue.

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