Phenquestions
Many owners of the Microsoft Surface Book have been experiencing GPU problems for the past couple of months. For some strange reason, the computer is no longer detecting the GPU, and that's never a good sign. The GPU inside of the Surface Book 2 comes from Nvidia, but strangely enough, neither Microsoft or Nvidia had any means at the time to get folks out of the problem, but things have since changed.
Surface Book not detecting NVIDIA Graphics Card
If you face this issue, you need to first Update the system. You can download the latest update by going to Settings > Update & security > Windows Update. Finally, click on Check for updates and wait for everything to be downloaded and installed. You will be required to restart your computer.
Says Microsoft-
“When Surface updates are provided via the Windows Update service, they are delivered in stages to Surface customers. As a result, not every Surface will receive the update at the same time, but the update will be delivered to all devices. If you have not received the update, please manually check Windows Update later.”
Once you have updated your Surface, do the following.
1] Change Power settings
Launch the Settings app by clicking on the Windows Key + I, then select System > Power & sleep. From here, you must scroll to “On battery power, turn off after” and “When plugged in, turn off after” and choose Never from the drop-down menu.
Doing this should force the Surface Book to work at its best possible performance.
2] Detach and reattach the Surface Book
The next step, then, is to open the Device Manager. Do this right-clicking on the Start button, then selecting Device Manager from the list that appears.
Finally, unplug your Surface Book. Make sure it's on a full charge because having your battery power running out before the end isn't ideal.
Detach the tablet section from the keyboard and wait for up to 15 seconds until the system updates the connected devices. During this time, the Device Manager screen should flicker a few times, so keep an eye out or that.
Now, reattach the tablet to the keyboard and wait for the Nvidia graphics card to pop up in the Device Manager that should still be onscreen. The next step is to shut down the computer normally but make sure that at this point, the Nvidia graphics card is still visible in the Device Manager.
3] Hard Reset
Once the Surface Book is off, you'll now need to make a hard reset of the Surface device. Bear in mind that hard resetting can potentially remove all files from your computer, therefore, you should backup all important contents before moving forward.
A hard reset is done by pressing the volume up button and the power button for at least 20 seconds. Bear in mind; you must first press down on the volume up button first before pressing on the power button.
Chances are, you might see the UEFI system. If it appears, just exit the system and allow it to restart back into Windows 10.
This should help with the Surface Book 2's GPU detection issue. We're certain that at least one of these options should fix the problem. If it doesn't, then there's a deeper issue with the GPU which is unrelated to what most folks have been experiencing.
