Sad Day

It’s dead

My laptop that is. It isn’t (wasn’t?) the latest or greatest, but I could utilize open source LLMs on it and run Unreal Engine 5. It is/was an Asus RoG Strix G15 with an AMD Ryzen 9 (8 core) with iGPU, 32GM RAM, 6TB of SSD, and a Nvidia RTX 3070 dGPU. All in all, not a bad laptop. And it’s served me well for the past four years.

It’s hard to believe it’s dead. I don’t know what happened, I was running a little LLM app and it went kaput. I managed to get Windows up again once and copied most of my important files off of the SSD, but it never booted again. I thought to myself, “this is the perfect time to convert it to Linux!” And it would seem so, but alas, it was not. I could not get Ubuntu to finish booting. It would always freeze a few seconds after Grub started to boot the OS. I tried Fedora, Cachy OS, Pop! OS, and Windows 11. I tried different USB ports and storage devices. I updated the BIOS. I think I may have invoked an incantation at one point. It still sits here, on my desk, dead and cold. No longer generating heat as it generated tokens or polygons, it sits quiet and so very cold.

I have decided to admit that fixing it is beyond my capability. I suspect a hardware issue, specifically related to the iGPU. I’m basing this on one data point really. Basically a wild guess based on the fact that when I pass nomodeset or amdgpu.dc=0 or nvidia.drm=0 to Grub, it usually freezes after trying to initialize the AMD iGPU. It gets less far without passing those arguments in Grub. The BIOS screen and ROG boot logo work fine. The display works (text mode) in Linux up to the point of touching the iGPU. Then it freezes. Windows doesn’t event get that far, at least that I can tell. I see the animated loading circle for a moment, then it locks up.

I am out of ideas. This is the limit of my current laptop troubleshooting capability. But I can’t throw it out! Don’t worry, I’d keep the RAM and SSD sticks. But I just know it should work. I feel it in my bones.

Well, I’ll figure something out. At least I still have my old Lenovo Thinkcentre. It only has an Intel i7-6700T CPU with HD530 iGPU which can only drive my 4k monitor at 1920x1080!