Question Is it safe to put electrical tape on GPU pins ?

akam06

Prominent
Jul 7, 2023
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510
I recently purchased an MSI RX 6600 XT which seems to have some issues with my GIGABYTE H510M H motherboard. Everytime i shutdown the PC it will just boot back up again. I researched online and found other people had the same issue with the same mobo and GPU series.

One solution I found said that they put tape on the 5th and 6th pins on the gpu. I tried this solution out and it solved the issue I was having. My question is how safe is this for the GPU and mobo in the long term, will it damage the components?

link to the source of the solution:
https://www.reddit.com/r/gigabyte/comments/u84qij/rx_6600_series_and_intel_500_series_incomplete/

My GPU with the tape: View: https://imgur.com/a/OO9HM2c
 
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I would be look at the rest of your hardware before looking into the solution stated in that reddit.

When posting a thread of troubleshooting nature, it's customary to include your full system's specs. Please list the specs to your build like so:
CPU:
CPU cooler:
Motherboard:
Ram:
SSD/HDD:
GPU:
PSU:
Chassis:
OS:
Monitor:
include the age of the PSU apart from it's make and model. BIOS version for your motherboard at this moment of time.

If your platform checks out, then alone should you be going forward with the tape mod. What I meant was that your parts aren't questionable before you point a finger at the GPU. Did you run DDU to remove all prior GPU drivers from your system before you manually installed the latest GPU driver sourced from AMD's support site? Your post makes it seem you performed a GPU upgrade.
 
Specs
Motherboard: Gigabyte H150M H rev1.7 - - BIOS version F18
CPU: i5 11400F
GPU: MSI RX 6600 XT
RAM: Corsair [2 x 8GB] DDR4
Storage: 500GB Crucial SSD, 1TB Crucial NVMe SSD
PSU: Cosair 550V bought it about 1.5 years ago
CASE: SAMA IM01

Sorry for not clarifying earlier, I originally had an RX 570 4GB which worked as normal, i upgraded it to the RX 6600 XT which is when this issue started to occur, I swapped the GPU back to the 570 to see if the issue persisted but it worked as normal. I also tested the RX 6600 XT on my friends PC and it worked like normal (cant remember his specs).

I used DDU before installing the RX 6600 XT and then did it again after I had the shutdown issue, but the issue persisted
 
It's perfectly safe to apply electrical tape to sensitive electrical contacts. The problem is peeling the tape off later can generate such ridiculously high voltages that it can emit light or even X-Rays.

The risk is probably really small with such a small piece of tape, but to be perfectly safe when it needs to be removed, it may be a good idea to slide the tape off the edge rather than peeling it, then clean the sticky residue with some oil and finally remove the oil with some alcohol.

The other issue is the thickness of electrical tape can cause a permanent set, reducing the springiness of the terminals in the PCIe slot. Kapton tape is 1/3 the thickness of something like 3M Scotch Super 33+ or 1/4 as thick as their best quality Super 88 electrical tape.
 
Should be no issue. I would take a look at it after a couple weeks to see if its holding up. If it gets too warm, sometimes the glue can shift. Definitely have a plan if the tape gets stuck in the slot.
 
You're obviously not shutting down your pc, but putting it to sleep.
Disable hibernation/hybrid sleep. And issues should be solved.

Execute from elevated command prompt:
powercfg /h off
If this is the issue then the solution is to turn off system wakeup from HUDs ,you have to go into device manager and check the option for any and all devices that could wake up your system from sleep.

That way you can still use the main power button to put the PC into hibernation.
allow-device-wake-computer-windows-10.jpg
 
If this is the issue then the solution is to turn off system wakeup from HUDs ,you have to go into device manager and check the option for any and all devices that could wake up your system from sleep.

That way you can still use the main power button to put the PC into hibernation.
allow-device-wake-computer-windows-10.jpg
Ok thanks i will look at these solutions asap.
Just curious, why does taping up the pins work for me? what do the pins control