R9 280X troubleshooting

Gwyn · August 18, 2016

First of all, hi everyone, this is my first post on the forum.

Some time ago I got a used Gigabyte Windforce R9 280x rev 2.0 that was probably mined on, I guess. The card displays video signal normally, but when I try to install drivers for it, during the installation of the AMD Display Driver the screen goes black and the whole computer seems to freeze (so far I've not found a way to check that), and the only thing that I can do is a hard reset. Then, when I try to boot, I get no video signal at all. I've tried a bunch of different things, such as different versions of drivers and installing them using device manager, but with no results. The card has a dual BIOS switch, but it came with the same F60 version (015.038.000.003.003435) on both of them. At this point I tried to flash the BIOS. Gigabyte says that you can only flash a F1X to a F1X, a F2X to a F2X and so on, but since there is no sign of any F6X BIOS that is not a F60 on the web, and I had nothing to lose, I flashed it with a F4; of course it didn't work and the card is not booting from that BIOS now.

Now I'm wondering if there is any hope for this card. The cooler works fine, and when I boot from the iGPU after I've tried to install the drivers it actually displays a R9 200 series in the device manager. I considered the card to be broken a long time ago and I have a different setup now, so I don't really need it, but I have some spare time now and I kinda want to play around with it.

I run out of ideas, so if anyone knows if I can do anything else to get it to work, please let me know. I apologize for my english, I'm not a native speaker.

SpaceGhostC2C · August 18, 2016

I have a similar experience updating the driver for an R9 280 + HD 7950. The only difference is that, after the forced reboot, the PC boots normally, and AMD crimson says the driver is up to date and everything is happy. It only happened with the last 2 updates from AMD.

The 280 BIOS Version is 015.048.000.036, the 7950 is 015.040.000.001 according to said software.

Gwyn · August 18, 2016

Indeed, I have heard that the black screen problem is quite common. Howewer, from what I've seen online people generally solved it easily, while nothing seems to work for me.