Troubleshooting a Non-Responsive Nvidia 3060 GPU: An IT Professional’s Dilemma

As an IT professional, it can be frustrating to encounter issues that seem insurmountable, especially when you’re dealing with hardware that was functioning perfectly just a short time ago. Such is the case with a used laptop I recently acquired from my company, equipped with an Nvidia 3060 notebook GPU.

For the initial two weeks, everything worked seamlessly. However, a few days ago, I encountered a troubling problem: the GPU ceased to function. In my effort to get to the bottom of this issue, I have taken several steps that I thought might remedy the situation:

1. Reinstalling Drivers: I meticulously reinstalled the graphics drivers, hoping to resolve any driver-related discrepancies.
2. BIOS Updates: I explored potential BIOS updates, ensuring the system firmware was current and compatible.
3. Rolling Back Updates: I reverted both BIOS and Windows updates, suspecting that recent changes might have introduced conflicts.
4. Driver Rollbacks: In addition, I uninstalled the current drivers and tried reverting to older versions to see if that could bring the GPU back to life.
5. Reinstalling Windows: Ultimately, I even took the drastic step of reinstalling Windows entirely, followed by attempts to roll back to earlier versions in case the latest iteration was the culprit.

Despite all these efforts, the graphics card remains visible in the device manager but continues to be unrecognized by any other applications.

At this point, I’m reaching out to the community for insights. Has anyone else encountered a similar challenge with a disobedient Nvidia GPU? Any suggestions or troubleshooting tips that could guide me toward a resolution would be immensely appreciated! Your expertise could be what leads to a breakthrough in this perplexing situation.

Let’s come together as a tech-savvy community to tackle this puzzle!