[SOLVED] Purchased a new graphics card, wondering how I install it?

[Ezra27]

I'm switching from a 970 to a 5700XT. What steps do I take in order to upgrade? I've had people telling me contradicting information, specifically on whether to use DDU or not.

EDIT: Afterthough question, but should I also upgrade my PSU? I have a Corsair CX600 that I've been using for ~5 years.

And I have an i7 4790k, from my short searches it looks like that will bottleneck my GPU. I'm planning on buying the rest of the parts later on, but figured I would just go with the GPU upgrade for now.

Oh and, when using DDU (if that's what I should use.) do I need to make a system backup? or would it be safe enough to not worry about that.

 

[Darkbreeze]

On the question of the power supply, resoundingly, yes. Absolutely. First, that was a REALLY mediocre power supply when it was new, and it's capacitor selection wasn't particularly good. That exact unit is one we've seen more problems with here, in higher numbers, than any other. True, part of that is because it was SOLD in such high numbers because it was an incredibly affordable budget model. It is not however a good companion for that graphics card by any stretch.

For the installation. My recommendation would be to do as follows.

Make sure motherboard BIOS is the latest stable release.
Remove old card.
Install new PSU.
Install new card.
Do a hard reset of the BIOS as follows.


BIOS Hard Reset procedure

Power off the unit, switch the PSU off and unplug the PSU cord from either the wall or the power supply.

Remove the motherboard CMOS battery for five minutes. In some cases it may be necessary to remove the graphics card to access the CMOS battery.

During that five minutes, press the power button on the case for 30 seconds. After the five minutes is up, reinstall the CMOS battery making sure to insert it with the correct side up just as it came out.

If you had to remove the graphics card you can now reinstall it, but remember to reconnect your power cables if there were any attached to it as well as your display cable.

Now, plug the power supply cable back in, switch the PSU back on and power up the system. It should display the POST screen and the options to enter CMOS/BIOS setup. Enter the bios setup program and reconfigure the boot settings for either the Windows boot manager or for legacy systems, the drive your OS is installed on if necessary.

Save settings and exit. If the system will POST and boot then you can move forward from there including going back into the bios and configuring any other custom settings you may need to configure such as Memory XMP profile settings, custom fan profile settings or other specific settings you may have previously had configured that were wiped out by resetting the CMOS.

In some cases it may be necessary when you go into the BIOS after a reset, to load the Optimal default or Default values and then save settings, to actually get the hardware tables to reset in the boot manager.


Next, download the DDU and run it in SAFE MODE as outlined here followed by the installation of the latest AMD graphics drivers afterwards.

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