Used XFX RX580, sometimes (2%?) full speed fan during boot, always bad color during boot, is this a problem?[resolved, wrong edition BIOS was flashed]

CyberStone · March 19

Edit: TLDR the bad coloring was caused by having the wrong edition of BIOS which passed my stress test, the fan was kicked on to full speed if the card was over 50c during boot up.

I bought a used XFX RX580 on ebay and it passed all the graphics stability tests I’ve thrown at it. I’ve checked with GPU-Z and it seems to be running a stock BIOS.

During boot up the colors are bad, the colors go normal if the system continues to boot up, or if I go into the motherboard UEFI settings. Also it sometimes would keep using good colors if I rebooted, not when I’ve been recently looking for this though, so that is another intermittent issue . I’ve tried going to a different monitor, a different cord, and the 3 different display ports in the back of the card. to no effect.

See attached images for Qubes boot screen, and Windows boot screen.

The intermittent nature of the fan speed really gives me pause. I wouldn’t mind if it was consistent, it probably happens in 1 of 40 runs. What happens is the computer starts coming up, and for a few seconds the GPU fan runs are full speed, then goes silent. I didn’t worry to much about this at the time, so I didn’t take notes and am not sure if this only happened on wake from suspend, warm boot, cold boot, nor am I confident on the exact timing between the events. Probably it happened on during the wake from suspend just because that’s what I’ve been using to do most of my testing. I’ve been running Fedora 37 and Qubes (I think Qubes is still basically Fedora in dom0)

I’m leaning towards returning this card even though I haven’t found any “real” stability issues.

I’m running this on an X570 Taichi motherboard, that was working fine with a RX 6600 XT. (I’m trying to set up PCI passthough VM stuff), most of my testing was done with only the RX580 installed.

My question:

Is this OK? Is this somewhat common and I just haven’t been able to find any similar info on it happening to other people?

Edit: I was just verifying core/memory speeds I remember seeing from the GPU BIOS listing on TechPowerUp... and it does seem to be running stock BIOS, but for the wrong edition, it's 1150 / 2100 but should be 1366 / 2000. When I was initially checking it before I couldn't see which edition it was via the sticker because the other video card was in place. Based on Actually Hardcore OC's youtube on ex-mining GPU's this is probably not an issue, or rather it should show itself under load. I'm out of time to check this angle right now an will tackle this later today.

CyberStone · March 20

I checked if it had a stock bios, it was installed and I couldn’t see the sticker so I didn’t bother verifying it. I mean it didn’t have a mining BIOS, why would someone put the wrong BIOS on the card? (because it was the best one that worked)

So the bad coloring was due to it having the incorrect BIOS, admittedly I’m a bit surprised the card only had problems during boot, and passed my stress tests. Shocked even.

The full speed fan was triggered if the card was over 50c during bootup. On windows the full speed fan got triggered just before signing on to my user, so maybe when the display drivers were fully loaded up?

Ya I’ll be trying to return this. Gotta say this gives me a rather sour taste with getting used graphics cards.