The Case of the Haunted Graphics Card

frysauce01 · January 4, 2019

Just to preface: I don't need any help. I'll find a full solution soon, and it's fixed enough for now. I just thought you all might enjoy this quick mystery.

So I've got my rig (here it is if you're interested: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/Yzx9pG), looking good in its nice blue RGB. All of the sudden, it starts glowing a dim orange (pictured below). ORANGE! And, unfortunately, I'm no Bronco fan. Along with the orange glow, Asus's Aura software no longer detects the card.

"No big deal," I thought. "I'll just reinstall Aura."

Now, as many of you probably know, Aura and other software like it can be rather finnikey. I wasn't really worried... until the fresh install didn't work.

"Hmmm... I guess I'll restart?"

Oh, silly fool. No go.

"Ok, how about I just turn it off and try again later?"

This is where things got weird. The thing was still on during shut down... and when I turned off the power supply... and when I pulled the cord.

Now, transistors on a motherboard can hold electricity for a while, but they're not supposed to POWER ORANGE FREAKING LEDs! But, I gave it the BOD and left for a small run to Walmart for some things I needed. I also started a timer on my phone...

An hour and 45 minutes later, I come home. PSU still off. Cord still unplugged. AND THE ORANGE LIGHT STILL ON?!?

At this point, I was coming to grips with the fact that Satan had taken up a summer home in my graphics card (I dunno, maybe my 75° C-under-load card is cool compared to hell? Idk). I figured "hey, maybe I'll get the powers of hell and some wicked sweet FPS now." I didn't.

It was time for some more invasive measures. I opened up the chasis and unplugged the PSU cable on the card. Still the light. (What else was I expecting at this point?) Then, I took the card out from the PCI-E lane. STILL THE ORANGE LIGHT.

So, was Satan in my RX 580? Not quite. You see, I also pulled a noob move and had the HDMI cable still plugged into the card when I removed it from the motherboard. Once I unplugged it, the LED finally turned off. Weird, right? Why the heck would my monitor change the LED?

Well, the answer actually isn't the monitor. Or Satan. The answer lies in a Raspberry Pi and a crappy HDMI splitter. As you'll see below, I've got a little Pi I use to practice coding. I've got it and my rig hooked up to a USB splitter and HDMI splitter to switch my peripherals and monitor between the Pi and my rig. I've used this setup before with no issues, but I recently moved to a new place.

Here's my theory: When I set it up here, the Pi mistook my GPU's RGB lighting for a pixel, and output a dim orange to it, stealing it away from Asus Aura. Once I unpowered the Pi, Aura was able to take back control of the card (although it sees it as a motherboard rather than a VGA accessory).

It seems far-fetched, but the HDMI cables are all with ethernet, so data can certainly be transferred between devices, plus this HDMI switch is pretty crappy.

Crazy, right?