I have an older Lenovo IdeaPad 330-15AST that still works well for school. It has an AMD A9 processor with integrated R5 graphics, a dedicated Radeon 530, 16 GB of DDR4 RAM, and a 1 TB drive. After powering on, both graphics devices initially appear in Task Manager. However, opening a browser or doing other basic tasks often causes a blue-screen crash mentioning MEMORY.DMP. After the restart, the dedicated GPU no longer appears in Task Manager. I have already used DDU and reinstalled the graphics drivers, but the problem remains. While repasting the laptop, I also noticed what looks like actual black plastic melted near one of the GPU VRAM chips, not just dried thermal paste. Could this physical damage be causing the crashes and the dedicated GPU to disappear?
3 Answers
Actual melted or blackened plastic near the VRAM is a serious warning sign. It could indicate overheating, a damaged VRAM component, or a failed power circuit, and that would explain why the Radeon 530 vanishes after the system crashes. Driver cleanup or an operating-system reinstall will not repair physical damage. Stop stressing the dedicated GPU and have the board inspected by a repair technician; replacing the motherboard may be more practical than repairing the graphics circuit.
The most useful next step is to inspect the Windows crash dumps. Check C:WindowsMinidump after a crash and copy any files somewhere safe before compressing them. Those logs may identify whether the failure is coming from the graphics driver, memory, or another component. If no dumps are being created, enable small memory dumps and reproduce the crash.
A clean OS installation could rule out corrupted Windows files, but the visible damage makes a hardware fault much more likely. Before reinstalling, you could test the laptop using only the integrated graphics and check whether it remains stable. Also verify that the RAM is seated properly, since memory problems can produce general MEMORY.DMP crashes, but they would not normally make only the dedicated GPU disappear.
The integrated graphics continues working after the restart, while the Radeon 530 is the part that disappears.
It is definitely black plastic rather than thermal paste. I noticed it while opening the laptop to replace the thermal paste.