Question New build, VGA Light, black screen and unresponsive

[gphlipot]

I'm currently trying to get my first PC up and running and I'm running into what look like GPU issues. My components are:

CPU: Ryzen 9 7900x
RAM: G.Skill Flare X5 Series 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR5-600
Motherboard: Gigabyte Aorus B650 Elite AX
Power Supply: Corsair RM850x (certified refurbished)
SSD: SAMSUNG E 1TB 980PRO NVME GEN4SSD
GPU: Used Dell Alienware RTX 3090 (from Ebay)
CPU Cooler: DeepCool AK620
Operating System: Ubuntu 22.10
GPU Driver: nvidia 525 proprietary driver

During setup, I originally turned on XMP in the BIOS, a ran some GPU-intensive workloads for an hour or so. Then the screen went black, and the display reappeared with some artifacts, but was unresponsive. Since then, sometimes when I try to boot, the VGA light on the motherboard comes on and it doesn't boot. Other times it boots fine, but crashes under any remotely intensive GPU workload. The VGA light comes on seemingly randomly during boot (although it is becoming more common the more I troubleshoot this), and nothing I tried (listed below) seemed to have any affect on whether it would boot or not.

I've been using glmark2 as the "GPU-intensive workload", but I'm seeing the crashes when the GPU is only pulling ~150-200 watts and is ~50C. But I've also had it crash when running pytorch over SSH so it doesn't seem to be due to my display or the specific benchmark. Here is a screen shot of some of the artifacts that show up after the screen goes black for a few seconds and is unresponsive (the artifacts are clearest in the nearly-black glmark2 window):

https://ibb.co/VQsV91t

Things I've tried that did not work:

• All nvidia drivers available for Ubuntu 22.10 (and 22.04 LTS)
• Reseating the GPU
• Plug and unplug PCIe cables
• Place GPU in other PCIe slot on the mobo
• Plug GPU cables into different slots on the PSU
• Clear CMOS on mobo (turning off XMP)
• Changing HDMI cable

Everything works fine if I use the integrated GPU on the Ryzen 7900x.

From googling, it seems like it could be either an issue with the power supply or the GPU, but I don't have any extras laying around to test. Any suggestions?

 

[jojesa]

Yes, it could be either the GPU or PSU.
You never know the condition of a GPU when getting from eBay. I am more inclined to believe the GPU is the issue, since when a PSU that cannot handle the load, it causes a reboot or shutdown.
The Corsair RM850x has been certified refurbished by whom?

 

[gphlipot]

Yes, it could be either the GPU or PSU.
You never know the condition of a GPU when getting from eBay. I am more inclined to believe the GPU is the issue, since when a PSU that cannot handle the load, it causes a reboot or shutdown.
The Corsair RM850x has been certified refurbished by whom?

I'm leaning towards the GPU too, but surprised because I bought it from a seller with a lot of reviews, high rating, and a 30 day return policy.

I bought the PSU certified refurbished from microcenter. But I'll also mention that when I get the "crashes", the screen becomes unresponsive, but the machine does not shut down. Audio still plays in the background (e.g. a youtube video), and I have to force shut down the PC. I don't think that the PSU is overloaded because then I would except a shutdown.

I also suspected that it could be a bad connection between the PSU and the GPU, but the power supply only came with 2 daisy-chainable connectors so it is hard to me to really test that. I have been using both cables for the 2 8-pin connector on the GPU, but I also tried daisy chaining each cable individually just to see if it would fix the VGA light, but no luck there.

 

[jojesa]

... the power supply only came with 2 daisy-chainable connectors so it is hard to me to really test that. I have been using both cables for the 2 8-pin connector on the GPU, but I also tried daisy chaining each cable individually just to see if it would fix the VGA light, but no luck there.

So, there are two individual GPU cables coming from the GPU or it is only one cable with two 8-pin connectors?

 

[gphlipot]

I'm using two individual cables. Each cable has 2 8-pin connectors, but only 1 of the connectors on each cable is plugged in (I've tried switching around which of the two connectors on each cable is used to connect to the GPU, and there didn't seem to be any change).

As a test, I tried only using 1 cable and plugged in both 8-pin connectors to see if the issues I was seeing was due to one of the cables being bad (since I only have the two cables to test), but that didn't fix anything so I went back to using the two individual cables.