[SOLVED] New PSU or ESD damaged GTX 970?

[Marcusmravik]

I’ve had a MSI GTX970 for about 6 years now. I’ve taken it out of the case maybe a handful of times.

Yesterday I was trying to replace my power supply to get ready for an upgrade. I replaced my EVGA Supernova G3 550 with an EVGA Supernova G5 1000.

While taking it apart to replace wiring (my cousin recommended that I just replace all the wiring just to be sure), I cleaned the computer of dust and took the graphics card out (then outside) to clean it specifically of dust.

After cleaning it I put everything together and plugged a monitor in. Booted it and didn’t see anything. I reseated the graphics card (it turned out to be unseated) and tried again. Still no display.

I thought maybe the something was wrong with the display or graphics card power so I remoted into my computer to see if it had booted. It had. I then checked to see if Nvidia recognized my card. It didn’t.

I’ve since probed the PCIE pins with a multimeter to test for a short. There were two but with a fair amount of resistance and they seemed to be quite intermittent.

I then opened up the card, taking off the cooling fans and the plate and noticed what I believe to be burn marks on the card. See images.

https://imgur.com/a/Xbu2qwT

View: https://imgur.com/a/Xbu2qwT


I’m unsure of whether or not ESD can cause this amount of damage. I’ve heard that modern graphics cards (which I believe this to be) are pretty resilient against ESD.

I don’t have another graphics card to put in here. And I haven’t contacted EVGA yet because I’m pretty sure this just boils down to “my fault, suck it up”.

What are your thoughts? Anything else I can test?

 

[Darkbreeze]

That was likely due to being poorly seated. Either that, or you used cables from the old PSU with the new PSU, which is not EVER a good idea unless you know FOR ABSOLUTE CERTAIN that between the two PSU models, all of the modular cabling has exactly the same pinouts which often they do not even within the same model series. A 550 and 750w unit from the same series can without doubt have different cables and pinouts.

If the cables were ALL replaced with those from the new PSU, then I'd say, if this card worked normally prior to this operation, that not seating the card correctly was the reason for the short or touched something to something it didn't belong touched to in the PCIe slot. ESD doesn't cause that. Any damage from ESD, and I've personally never experienced any significant ESD damage to ANY hardware in 35 years of doing this, would be something you couldn't see and likely would be along the lines of errors and faults that you can't figure out. It certainly would not cause that.

 

[DSzymborski]

You can always ask EVGA -- the worse they can say is no -- but given that's well past the warranty, they almost certainly wouldn't be much help.

Sounds like a short. ESD damage on a GPU is unlikely to be that much. Hopefully by replacing the wiring, you meant you replaced all the PSU cables! EVGA PSUs aren't identical to each other and these two are manufactured by different companies.

I'm not sure if I'd even have done this PSU swap at all. The G3 was a better quality PSU than the G5 is and if it's something you need that much wattage, I'd look elsewhere; the G5 isn't a great choice if you were looking at a high-powered recent GPU as the unambitious primary of this platform is poorly suited to dealing with the quick changes in voltage required.

 

[Darkbreeze]

You can always ask EVGA -- the worse they can say is no -- but given that's well past the warranty, they almost certainly wouldn't be much help.

Sounds like a short. ESD damage on a GPU is unlikely to be that much. Hopefully by replacing the wiring, you meant you replaced all the PSU cables! EVGA PSUs aren't identical to each other and these two are manufactured by different companies.

I'm not sure if I'd even have done this PSU swap at all. The G3 was a better quality PSU than the G5 is and if it's something you need that much wattage, I'd look elsewhere; the G5 isn't a great choice if you were looking at a high-powered recent GPU as the unambitious primary of this platform is poorly suited to dealing with the quick changes in voltage required.

This, which I was going to say earlier and forgot. No way for a high end GPU that NEEDS that much power, that the G5 would EVER be a choice I'd go with for that kind of expensive hardware. Totally not on the same level as the G2 and G3 were.