Hi everyone! I’m new to the forum here but I’ve been reading the site for a while, really appreciate the wealth of knowledge here.

I have a slowly growing collection of functional early XPS laptops, my main concern is keeping them running for as long as possible. There are many reports of Nvidia GPU failures around this era, however the 6 and 7 series were never (from what I can find) confirmed to have that fault, only the 8400 and 8600 chips did at least from the lawsuit around 08 I think. From the XPS Gen 2 onwards they seem to develop lines/random characters/blank display issues over time (many eBay units have the display line issue). My main thought is clearly the video ram they had used was being pushed too far, and would become corrupt over time eventually leading to display anomalies, and soon after most likely total failure. I’ve been attempting to underclock the card with Rivatuner, but the forceware drivers from Dell’s site don’t seem to want to save the clock speeds that I set, even when some power user options are toggled. I have been using Powermizer on the low 3D power mode to downclock the card to 250mhz and 330 on memory , this works but is a bit slower than what I’d like, but the system runs extremely cool with that at least and most games still run ok. Anyone have any experience with these laptop graphics cards? Any tips or tricks would be greatly appreciated. I have a spare XPS Gen 2 that I’d like to eventually try a memory chip replacement on once I have the skills to do so