So I bought a Zotac GTX 1050 Ti LP for my Optiplex 7020 and it worked pretty well but it has a high idle fan speed that bothered me. I found instructions on using GPU-Z to backup my current BIOS and use nvflash to flash an EVGA BIOS to lower the minimum speed from 45 to 30. It allowed me to drop it to 40, but not 30. Emboldened by my first success, I tried a newer EVGA BIOS for the same card and it too worked on my Zotac but it didn't resolve the fan weirdness. I stupidly doubled-down on those successes and flashed the BIOS of another dual fan 1050 GTX Ti card that seemed to be on the compatibility list here at TPU, but while it flashed fine when I rebooted I was greeted by the message:
"Please power down and connect the pcie power cables for all graphics cards"
and the machine will go no further. It has an integrated Intel GPU and when I remove the Nvidia GPU it boots fine. The Nviidia GPU seems to do normal POST-routine startup stuff with the fans and such, too, and it appears to be working fine, but I guess it's telling my mobo that it needs an additional power connector which of course my LP card doesn't have - it's all provided by the PCIE-x16 slot (wired as x4 on the 7020). The BIOS allows me to specify the primary card as Auto/Integrated/PCIe) but even if I select integrated it stops POST with the above error.
To the gurus here: do you think another PC with more user control (i.e. non OEM) might allow me to set the video to integrated/non PCI and POST enough to boot DOS or windows to use nvflash to recover my GPU? Are there other options I'm not considering? I removed the fan and heat sink to look for some sort of points I could reset/short but decided that was well beyond me without help so I'm putting thermal compound back on and putting it back together.
Any help is HUGELY appreciated, and yes, I know I'm an idiot for getting myself in this predicament.
Mark
"Please power down and connect the pcie power cables for all graphics cards"
and the machine will go no further. It has an integrated Intel GPU and when I remove the Nvidia GPU it boots fine. The Nviidia GPU seems to do normal POST-routine startup stuff with the fans and such, too, and it appears to be working fine, but I guess it's telling my mobo that it needs an additional power connector which of course my LP card doesn't have - it's all provided by the PCIE-x16 slot (wired as x4 on the 7020). The BIOS allows me to specify the primary card as Auto/Integrated/PCIe) but even if I select integrated it stops POST with the above error.
To the gurus here: do you think another PC with more user control (i.e. non OEM) might allow me to set the video to integrated/non PCI and POST enough to boot DOS or windows to use nvflash to recover my GPU? Are there other options I'm not considering? I removed the fan and heat sink to look for some sort of points I could reset/short but decided that was well beyond me without help so I'm putting thermal compound back on and putting it back together.
Any help is HUGELY appreciated, and yes, I know I'm an idiot for getting myself in this predicament.
Mark
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