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I have a Dell Inspiron 15 - i7559 gaming laptop that I bought used. From Dell's official site, and Amazon's descriptions. It looks like I do have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M graphics card.

I did some research to look for the ways to find out the GPU of my laptop on windows. I found two ways, and tried all of them:

  1. On windows windows start => Device manager => Display Adapters, when I click on it, it displays: Intel(R) HD Graphics 530. No other devices are shown
  2. When I right click on desktop, there is no "NVIDIA Control Panel" or "NVIDIA Display", as there should be if I have a NVIDIA's GPU (specified by NVIDIA's website to find out whether my laptop has a NVIDIA GPU).

Neverthless, I am still not convinced that my laptop only has a Intel(R) HD Graphics 530. So I downloaded the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M driver. After I have installed the driver, I cannot open the NVIDIA Control Panel (when I click on it, nothing happens). Moreover, on the device manager, the NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M driver displays an error message

enter image description here

It seems like that my laptop does not have a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M graphics card. I rebooted my laptop several times, still the same result. But I am still not convinced, since on the product specification from the suppliers, they claim that there is a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M. Is that possible that my laptop is an older version which does not contain NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M?

I spent hours on it. Since I am running a machine learning program, and it needs to run on CUDA-enabled NVIDIA's GPU. Currently, it seems to not be able to detect any NVIDIA's GPU. I am trying to find out if my laptop contains a NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M or not? If yes, why I cannot open NVIDIA's control panel to use it? And my laptop is not detecting it neither.

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  • The exclamation mark in device manager suggests something has gone wrong. Reboot your machine and see if it goes away. Otherwise you may need to open up your laptop and make sure it is fitted properly or take it to a repair shop.
    – Mokubai ♦
    Commented Jan 26, 2021 at 8:41
  • If you have an entry in Device Manager for a GTX 960M then you definitely have one present. Whether or not it is enabled and working is another matter...
    – Richard
    Commented Jan 26, 2021 at 9:48
  • @Richard I think that's because I downloaded a GTX 960M device manager by myself.
    – Chen
    Commented Jan 26, 2021 at 14:24

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As GPUs are built in to laptops, you should be able to ascertain the hardware Dell shipped it with.

Find the service tag (usually on a label on the bottom, as well as discoverable in software), go onto Dells support site, enter in service tag and it will tell you exactly what your device shipped with.

Also, it occurs to me it may be disabled in BIOS - you may want to check that.

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  • Hi @davidgo, by entering the service tag, it says that my laptop is shipped with a 490-BCQW : NVIDIA GeForce GTX 960M 4GB GD DR5, but I cannot detect it somehow. Since I bought it old, is it possible that the original seller took the GPU off?
    – Chen
    Commented Jan 26, 2021 at 14:32
  • That is incredibly unlikely. I don't know this specific board, but all the laptops I'm aware of with gpu's have them soldered on to the motherboard. Have you checked the bios to see if its disabled?
    – davidgo
    Commented Jan 26, 2021 at 18:30
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    I went to my BIOS, but I was not able to find a setting to turn any GPU on and off. This is very annoying.
    – Chen
    Commented Jan 27, 2021 at 14:03
  • @Chen Just to ensure: I think name of BIOS setting was ~Primary Display driver~ for me, but very probably you checked carefully enough? (Delete this reply if excessive.)
    – halt9k
    Commented Feb 19 at 5:08

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