Graphics Card upgrade failed and now no card is detected in any PCIE slot.

Melco · June 4, 2023

Hey,

so I wanted to finally upgrade my graphics card from a gtx 980 to a 7900 xt.

First my specs:

PSU: Straight Power 11 1000 W Platinum

RAM: Kingston Fury Renegade 6000 MT/s Cl 32 2 x 16 GB

CPU: Ryzen 7700x

Mobo: Gigabyte B650 Aorus Elite AX

GPU: Sapphire Pulse 7900 xt / GTX 980 reference model

Boot SSD: Samsung 980 Pro 1TB

Windows Version: Windows 10 22H2

I upgraded my motherboard and other components early this year.

First I installed the new beta bios F6b because of the security fix regarding the Vulnerabilities Reported by Eclypsium Research.

I removed my old graphics card and used onboard graphics to removed the old nvidia drivers via the control panel.

Then I installed the graphics card and installed the drivers.

Everything seemed to work just fine, so I launched a demanding game (Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020) to test if everything was working.

After about 20 minutes I got a black screen (sounds were still playing in the background). I tried to restart but now the vga light is on and I got no display out.

I reseated the 7900 xt but still nothing.

So I once again used the onboard graphics and got in the bios menu. There the PCIE slot was empty (N/A).

After that I removed the new card and put my old 980 inside again and switched the display cables.

The Light on the card went on as well as the fan. But after a short time the lights went dim and the fans got very loud. (I don't think 100% fanspeed but close to it).

And once again via oboard graphics: PCIE slot was empty.

So my old card was not working now.

Then I tried to reset cmos and tried a different pcie slot, because maybe I damaged the main one (even though I am not able to see any damage), but still same result.

So I tried to connect an old PSU I had lying around and connected only the gtx 980 to it, but still same result.

Then I tried to see what is happening when I don't plug in the power cable... I got the error "please power down and connect the pcie power cable for all graphics card" so display out for the error message was working.

I fear that somehow my board got fried and no PCIE extensions slots are working.

I still have another Mobo and CPU combination lying around on which I can test stuff but I do not have a cooler installed so I would need to just use my hand to cool it, which I am not really fond of doing. Another thing I can try is to switch the M2 slot of my ssd to see if the other PCI lanes are working.

I tried searching for different solutions but this is such a weird issue I just found general solutions, which did not work.

Melco · June 4, 2023

So update: I just used my computer a bit with onboard graphics. I installed my old GPU again and it somehow did not increase the fan speed and dim the lights. So I looked in bios and well it showed as a PCIe 3 x16 device. So my old card is working again with video out. I will try to install the new one tomorrow. But I have no clue why it works now.

DarkWaterSong · June 4, 2023

This is smelling like a power supply issue. You should have enough wattage, but there could be other issues. You may want to poke it with power supply tester, as they are $15 to $25 USD. This is not a recommendation, its just a example of what i am talking about:

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-PC-Tester-Connectors-Enclosure/dp/B076CLNPPK

Melco · June 5, 2023

11 hours ago, DarkWaterSong said:

This is smelling like a power supply issue. You should have enough wattage, but there could be other issues. You may want to poke it with power supply tester, as they are $15 to $25 USD. This is not a recommendation, its just a example of what i am talking about:

https://www.amazon.com/Computer-PC-Tester-Connectors-Enclosure/dp/B076CLNPPK

I doubt that the PSU is the problem, since I tried with another one, too. Someone said it could be a bad CPU mounting, but they think it is unlikely since my old card was working in the system before. I still fear, that my mobo is somewhat broken.