Turns out my RTX3070 killed my PSU today ...

[FirefoxMetzger]

Not quite sure how to phrase the title, but I thought that this could be mildly interesting for some of you.

 

A while back I bought a Gigabyte Geforce RTX 3070 OC, which initially ran fine on my (old) Be Quiet! Straight Power E9 CM 580W PSU. The card needs a 3+2 pin PCIe and a 3 pin PCIe as connectors and I used a daisy chain cable for it; I was worried about power draw at first. POST showed sporadic GPU abnormality, but didn't stop the machine from booting, and after a while it disappeared entirely. Even after benchmarking (I regularly do quite GPU heavy machine learning stuff, which which takes hours, sometimes days, and has about 70-80% GPU utilization throughout) it didn't show any signs of instability and the new system ran smoothly for the last ~ 3 months. Today my PC stopped working and immediately triggered the 12V circuit breaker whenever I hit the power button. I disassembled it, but the same would keep happening with just a PSU + Mainboard + CPU setup (no RAM). So I bought a new PSU (Corsair RM750x, should be current gen) and sequentially reassembled my machine. Now my machine is working properly again, POST comes out clean, and none of the diagnostics that I tried show anything out of the ordinary.

 

The moral of the story: Apparently this particular model of the RTX 3070 likes to be fed from two dedicated PCIe lanes. Also, quality PSUs are very worth it, because chances are it saved my GPU from my naivety and desire to have a bit better a time with cable management (though I can't know for certain if the GPU would have been damaged had I used a lower quality PSU, ofc). 

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

why do people cheap out on psu's? like you have money for a 3070 just get a good psu to go with it

[Naijin]

18 minutes ago, FirefoxMetzger said:

Not quite sure how to phrase the title, but I thought that this could be mildly interesting for some of you.

 

A while back I bought a Gigabyte Geforce RTX 3070 OC, which initially ran fine on my (old) Be Quiet! Straight Power E9 CM 580W PSU. The card needs a 3+2 pin PCIe and a 3 pin PCIe as connectors and I used a daisy chain cable for it; I was worried about power draw at first. POST showed sporadic GPU abnormality, but didn't stop the machine from booting, and after a while it disappeared entirely. Even after benchmarking (I regularly do quite GPU heavy machine learning stuff, which which takes hours, sometimes days, and has about 70-80% GPU utilization throughout) it didn't show any signs of instability and the new system ran smoothly for the last ~ 3 months. Today my PC stopped working and immediately triggered the 12V circuit breaker whenever I hit the power button. I disassembled it, but the same would keep happening with just a PSU + Mainboard + CPU setup (no RAM). So I bought a new PSU (Corsair RM750x, should be current gen) and sequentially reassembled my machine. Now my machine is working properly again, POST comes out clean, and none of the diagnostics that I tried show anything out of the ordinary.

 

The moral of the story: Apparently this particular model of the RTX 3070 likes to be fed from two dedicated PCIe lanes. Also, quality PSUs are very worth it, because chances are it saved my GPU from my naivety and desire to have a bit better a time with cable management (though I can't know for certain if the GPU would have been damaged had I used a lower quality PSU, ofc). 

This could have been prevented. Nvidia also recommends not to use 1 cable that splits to 2x 6+2 pins and a 650W power supply. As usual, the AIB cards have better coolers and can draw more power than the Nvidia spec thanks to GPU boost, which can cause instability with cheap PSUs.

 

Luckily for you, only the PSU died, and your other components are still fine after a PSU swap. Now go enjoy that 3070 to the fullest.

[Xeonzs]

6 minutes ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

why do people cheap out on psu's? like you have money for a 3070 just get a good psu to go with it

It was his old PSU, it was probably fine for what he had at the time and hoped he could swap it out later, there's several reasons, maybe he first wanted to see if a PSU upgrade was also neccesary, maybe he simply didn't have the money for a new PSU yet, maybe he saved several months for the GPU.
Not everyone has thousands of dollars laying around to spend on a PC, some just upgrade part by part.

[Ashley MLP Fangirl]

32 minutes ago, Xeonzs said:

It was his old PSU, it was probably fine for what he had at the time and hoped he could swap it out later, there's several reasons, maybe he first wanted to see if a PSU upgrade was also neccesary, maybe he simply didn't have the money for a new PSU yet, maybe he saved several months for the GPU.
Not everyone has thousands of dollars laying around to spend on a PC, some just upgrade part by part.

you don't have to lecture me, my pc is made up of all used parts that i found for cheap. but i still made sure i got a good PSU. like, power delivery is step 1. 

[jaslion]

2 hours ago, Ashley MLP Fangirl said:

why do people cheap out on psu's? like you have money for a 3070 just get a good psu to go with it

A lot of people just don't know. They trust what the label says and what people say about it on reviews on shopping sites. That is why those 40$ 1000w psu's or 500w 20$ psu's still get decent reviews on amazon and such. Plenty of 1 stars of doa's and dead computers but also plenty of day one reviews of it works and then it never getting updated when it broke.