R9 290x not working possible fixes???

[toasty99]

OK so I purchased an r9 290x hoping to be able to repair it because it was fairly cheap. The card boots to bios no problem all the time. Booting to Windows is hit or miss but I can get it to boot and act normal to at least use the internet for like 10 minutes before the screen just goes black or I get a bsod. Games immediately shut the whole computer off. The fan definitely is working, and I did manage to install both MSI afterburner and amd graphics drivers. The odd part is that they both read the GPU as a 290x but can't identify it's clockspeeds because they say it's running at 300mhz and will not let me underclock or overclock anything. I'm considering attempting baking the GPU but any other good solutions to try first?

 

[maxalge]

OK so I purchased an r9 290x hoping to be able to repair it because it was fairly cheap. The card boots to bios no problem all the time. Booting to Windows is hit or miss but I can get it to boot and act normal to at least use the internet for like 10 minutes before the screen just goes black or I get a bsod. Games immediately shut the whole computer off. The fan definitely is working, and I did manage to install both MSI afterburner and amd graphics drivers. The odd part is that they both read the GPU as a 290x but can't identify it's clockspeeds because they say it's running at 300mhz and will not let me underclock or overclock anything. I'm considering attempting baking the GPU but any other good solutions to try first?

all the newer drivers will lock the 290x to 300mhz

you need 17.5.2 or older

also make sure you have a decent 650w power supply

 

[Mark RM]

all the newer drivers will lock the 290x to 300mhz

you need 17.5.2 or older

also make sure you have a decent 650w power supply

When did this occur? there's a trifire 290x setup on my bench getting new SSD's and all three are working with the Adrenaline drivers and not locked to 300Mhz. Especially this last beta that eliminated the direct draw stutter.


Anyhow, is there any chance the guy was just messing with the BIOS? Get the stock BIOS from technpowerup's database and flash it to stock.

 

[maxalge]

all the newer drivers will lock the 290x to 300mhz

you need 17.5.2 or older

also make sure you have a decent 650w power supply

When did this occur? there's a trifire 290x setup on my bench getting new SSD's and all three are working with the Adrenaline drivers and not locked to 300Mhz. Especially this last beta that eliminated the direct draw stutter.


Anyhow, is there any chance the guy was just messing with the BIOS? Get the stock BIOS from technpowerup's database and flash it to stock.

yup its a know issue, affects a lot of people


look at my sig XD

 

[Mark RM]

you bought MSI, you poor ah heck 😉 .. but seriously, what's the issue?

The trifire is 3x 4G XFX 290X DD's, no issue. Second BIOS on the cards is a custom mod I made for the guy to mine with, that works too. 94 Mh/s

 

[maxalge]

you bought MSI, you poor ah heck 😉 .. but seriously, what's the issue?

The trifire is 3x 4G XFX 290X DD's, no issue. Second BIOS on the cards is a custom mod I made for the guy to mine with, that works too. 94 Mh/s

any drivers past 17.5.2 lock me at 300 150, regardless of what i do

 

[toasty99]

Ok follow up: I considered the possible issues suggested. My power supply is 500 watt which is what I was trying to run it on. So, to solve any power issues I grabbed an old 400w PSU and put my CPU and motherboard on that leaving the GPU the 500 watt power supply to itself.

As for the driver suggestion, can confirm that did solve the clockspeed issues.

Got it to load a game, but once I exited out and tried to turn up the graphics the GPU and the power supply running it just it shut right down.

Based off that it seems the GPU is drawing 500 watts by itself??? Is that a possibility?

(The PSU is a thermaltake and not of crappy quality. Have run a Radeon 7950 and a Intel Xeon x5650 overclocked to 4.0 GHz, so that's at least a power draw of 300 watts and that didn't crash anything)

 

[Mark RM]

If it's shorting to ground on the card somewhere the PSU would do exactly the same thing. It's not drawing 500W, there would be a smoking hole in the middle of the heatsink.

Don't forget it's also getting 75W from the PCIe bus.

 

[toasty99]

Well, what failed wasn't the psu running the motherboard and cpu, it was the one running just the GPU. So it doesn't really make much sense.

 

[Mark RM]

you bought MSI, you poor ah heck 😉 .. but seriously, what's the issue?

The trifire is 3x 4G XFX 290X DD's, no issue. Second BIOS on the cards is a custom mod I made for the guy to mine with, that works too. 94 Mh/s

any drivers past 17.5.2 lock me at 300 150, regardless of what i do

I know one thing different about the tri fire rig vs yours now that I think it over (this puzzled me) - the drivers are patched with atikmdag-patcher to allow higher refresh rates than the driver allows

 

[Mark RM]

Well, what failed wasn't the psu running the motherboard and cpu, it was the one running just the GPU. So it doesn't really make much sense.

Yeah it does, the bulk of the power is coming in fro the PCIe connectors, I was just pointing out the slot power because the card would need to be drawing over 575 W for it to be a simple overdraw.

For example, If I overdraw from the 1200W Psu's on the mining rigs, they just shut down, but the mobo with a pico power PSU stays running.

I honestly think your card has a short or you've somehow got a bad batch of power supplies.

 

[toasty99]

Ok still confused. Now I have another issue. After the last shutdown the psu running the GPU will turn on, but only with the 4 pin pci-e power cable disconnected. The 6 pin can stay in and it will turn on, but not the other way around. So is it possible the gpu has some kind of issue with the 4 pin pci-e connecter causing all this? And assuming it is that, is there a way to fix that?

 

[Mark RM]

there is no 4 pin PCIe connector, you had the motherboard ATX header plugged in there and were pumping 12V into the ground plane... a dead short

 

[toasty99]

Yeah my bad I meant the 6 and 8 pin plugs that go into the GPU. It's still confusing me so much. My 7950 is working just fine, but this r9 290x won't even let me turn the PC on when the 6 pin power connector is plugged in. Got a feeling that's my problem, but how exactly do I take a gpu apart and fix that?

 

[Mark RM]

Unless you're skilled with board level circuit repair I have no idea tbh.