So my G701VI been working fine after the messed up BIOS update forcefed by M$ few months ago. I mostly run my laptop 24/7 on my desk connected to a MSI 144Hz monitor and it works fine, playing games, 3D modeling, surfing etc.
At some point during January I updated my NVIDIA drivers to 441.66. Everything worked fine, games played fine, but noticed occasionally that after turning my external monitor off and returning to the computer after few hours, the laptops own display would be messed up, like the backlight wasn't on but still showing a bit on the center.
Didn't think much of it because rebooting the laptop shows the Asus logo just fine. However now that I'm not at home and I need to use the laptop display without the external display, the problem is still here.
So the symptoms:
- during boot, the initial Asus logo shows fine
- after that, everything is almost black (login, desktop). In the center I can see a bit of things and that everything there like login screen, but very faintly, I can login and I see faintly a tiny bit of the center of desktop, but it seems that there's no backlight
- I removed NVIDIA drivers in safe mode and now the display is working fine. Installing different NVIDIA drivers (tried two399.x and newest) result in same problem as soon as the driver finishes installing, meaning the screen goes to 'unlighted' mode immediately.
- Linux works the same. As soon as NVIDIA drivers kick in, screen goes to the unlighted mode.
So I'm now left wondering WTH? It kinda seems like hw problem, but it's only limited to modes where NVIDIA drivers are running the show. With generic M$ driver the display works fine and is crisp as ever. Also the Windows recovery mode views show correctly as they aren't using any NVIDIA drivers.
Have NVIDIA drivers somehow turned off the backlight or WTF? With external display gaming and everything works fine, no graphics problems or hanging.