Graphics card may have died?

[ascarygrunt]

I was watching youtube when out of nowhere, my entire PC completely locked up. I gave it 15mins before I unplugged it from the wall. Once I restarted, I had no output on either of my monitors. Tried another restart and nothing. I took out the R9 390 that was in and swapped in my old GTX 950 and after a driver install everything works right. I reinstalled the R9 and it still didn't output. I'm pretty sure it is sending some sort of signal though because both monitors remain black, and if I unplug the them both from the card they say no signal and go to their sleep modes. I guess I'm just curious as to if the card is best used as a paperweight or if something got turned around on the software side. 

[Nord]

Card most likely died, yea..

Though it's strange that it did so while doing basically nothing.
To boot, a GPU does not require drivers, like up until the point you enter windows. So if you can't even get that far, I don't think there is much you can do.

You could still try booting up with the good GPU, removing all drivers, installing the drivers for the 390, (probably works better if you use your iGPU if you can instead of the nvidia one) then swapping the GPU’s and only use a single monitor. Preferably also try all the available outputs on the card, like all HDMI’s all DVI’S all DP’s .. 

Also try a different PCI-E slot on the motherboard.

There is also the slight off chance that your PSU “broke” or rather it's 6/8pin plug to the GPU, as the R9 takes almost 3x the wattage the 950 does.

 

I don't really see much success in any of itt, but should only take 30min tops and if you can be bothered, why not.