Sapphire Radeon R9 270 Refuses to Work. Any Ideas, or is the GPU, as I assume it is, Dead?

[Darkroe]

A friend gave me their Sapphire Radeon R9 270 Dual-X to diagnose as it suddenly stopped working in their system.
With my test PC, I loaded up a fresh copy of Windows and tried seeing if any of the GPU's display outputs worked. HDMI? No. DP? No. DVI? Yes! Granted, this was just with the basic Microsoft Display Driver, but it shows an image.

Here's where the problem gets interesting. I tried downloading the driver for the GPU through Windows update (it might be an older driver, but they typically work). As soon as the AMD driver was installed: black screen, no image. But the fans were still spinning, albeit a little slower than before at a constant RPM. I shut down and rebooted the PC. Interestingly, the GPU outputted an image for the boot screen (motherboard logo + spinning circles), but as soon as Windows loaded, black screen again. I checked to make sure there was still an image by removing the GPU and using my CPU's integrated graphics. Yep, there's an image.

So I decided put the GPU back in to see if it would output an image. After Windows' went through the "Repairing your PC" and "Diagnosing your PC" steps, it loaded into Windows with a higher resolution image. You'd think "Ah, success!" But alas: No. Upon launching Heaven Benchmark, a slew of errors prevented the benchmark from launching, citing VRAM errors and GPU detection errors. Curious, I loaded up GPU-Z. It properly detected the GPU. Going over to Device Manager, It also detected the correct GPU, but it had the yellow exclamation triangle indicating that, while it could see the GPU, the driver was either corrupt or not compatible with the GPU.

So I decided to use DDU to uninstall all previous display drivers, downloaded AMD drivers from AMD's website, and set my WiFi to Airplane mode after downloading the AMD drivers so Windows Update wouldn't interfere when I went to install the AMD drivers.

After a restart, I launched the driver installer only for the installer to say it could not detect a GPU compatible with the software, even though the GPU is listed under the compatible hardware on AMD's website. No problem, I just decided to download an older version of the software on another computer, move it over to my test system, and try launching that driver software. It allowed me to install the driver this time, but when it finished installing the driver: black screen.

So it was pretty clear that somehow ANY AMD driver, once installed, was not working properly with the GPU. I decided to try and flash a fresh BIOS onto the GPU. I did so successfully, using the same version it had before, but with the BIOS file from Tom's Hardware's BIOS database for the specific model GPU. Then I attempted every previous test again, only to get the same results.

I then tried giving the GPU a deep-clean, scanning over all the components to see if anything was broken / missing. Nothing is broken / missing.

So I am stumped, and am assuming the GPU is dead for some reason. If anyone has any ideas, please share!


Thanks for reading this far; have a great rest of your day!

 

-Darkroe

[Husky]

Yeah that sounds pretty bad - it is probably dead.

 

One last thing you can try to do to confirm is to boot a live USB of Linux. I'd recommend Fedora Linux as it has up-to-date packages and works brilliantly on most hardware. Simply write the ISO to a USB and boot from it - you don't have to install it or anything, just use it live and see if you get a display output, and if you can use the system without it crashing.

[Darkroe]

2 minutes ago, Husky said:

Yeah that sounds pretty bad - it is probably dead.

 

One last thing you can try to do to confirm is to boot a live USB of Linux. I'd recommend Fedora Linux as it has up-to-date packages and works brilliantly on most hardware. Simply write the ISO to a USB and boot from it - you don't have to install it or anything, just use it live and see if you get a display output, and if you can use the system without it crashing.

Probably a good idea; I'll give it a go. I'll try it with Ubuntu as I have an ISO of that just sitting around. 

[da na]

That sounds pretty bad indeed. Tried the good ol baking it in the oven? 

[Darkroe]

1 minute ago, Mel0nMan said:

That sounds pretty bad indeed. Tried the good ol baking it in the oven? 

I actually tried using a hair dryer (same principle) for about 10 minutes; forgot to mention that. Same issues as before. On the bright side, the GPU looks very clean now.