So I'm pretty sure I killed my RX 480... unless you have any ideas.

[Justiceinacan]

I recently bought a bunch of new parts including an i5 8600k, 2x8 GB Ripaws V, ASRock Z370 Extreme4, and an Arctic Accelero Xtreme IV. The first 3 are all working great. I didn't use the RX 480 in it's original state on the new board, I went straight to the aftermarket cooler, so I can't tell you if it worked beforehand. If you need the clarification, I've owned this RX 480 for 2 years and 5 days. I know I voided the warranty installing the cooler, I knew this could've happened, and it did, unfortunately.

Simple as this - it'll boot fine on integrated graphics, but when I throw the RX 480 (properly seated in the pcie slot, and power cable firmly plugged in) I get no display. I touched the heatpipes, wasn't even remotely warm. I go into device manager, no display adapters other than microsoft basic display adapter (I believe it should say AMD AtomBIOS but I could be wrong) I'm led to believe it's a goner. Tomorrow I'm going to test the card with the cooler on my old AM3+ board, and try it on it's old reference heatsink to make absolutely sure, and anything else you may suggest, but as far as I can tell, it's a goner. If it is, I can save up and buy a replacement card new or maybe used that's somewhere in that performance area, has a real cooler on it (that's what got me in this mess)("real" cooler being TwinFrozr, ACX, Strix, that sort of thing) and meets my price point. Thinking GTX 970, 980(Ti if they're low enough) 1060 6GB, or RX 470/480/570/580.

There's plenty of ways it could've died in the process. For one, when it was sitting in my pc, the sag was kind of warping the video card and it looked pretty cringeworthy. Stray thermal paste (I used arctic mx-4) or rubbing alcohol (to clean the old paste off) may have been a factor, I'll be able to see the former if I tear it down, I bet. Or it could've been plain old ESD. Or it could still be functional and I'm missing something very basic here. If you have any ideas on what could've gone wrong or possibly a way to fix/test, please let me know, thanks.

 

[chemmajorp53]

What is set as the primary display in your BIOS? Sorry if you said something about it, just didn't see anything. Are the fans spinning? Sometimes if you reset the CMOS, switch primary graphics to PCIe, and reboot a few times it starts working in my experience. Worth a try.

 

[smorizio]

with your new build make sure it has the newest bios on it to rule out a bios issue. on the mb make sure the 8 pin eps cable is connected and the right cable is in the eps plug. not the video power cable. in the bios make sure primary display not set to auto or ipgpu. set it to peg/pci and turn on multi moninto so both the onboard and your gpu video is on. on the mb make sure the top video port is used. make sure the video card in the slot right and is locked in. if you used windows 7 and not 10. your going to be missing the intel chipset and mei drivers for the mb. with missing drivers the video card may not work.

 

[Justiceinacan]

What is set as the primary display in your BIOS? Sorry if you said something about it, just didn't see anything. Are the fans spinning? Sometimes if you reset the CMOS, switch primary graphics to PCIe, and reboot a few times it starts working in my experience. Worth a try.

Found the option, it's in advanced mode, advanced tab, chipset configurations, and it's right at the top.
It was already set to PCI express... I'm going to test it in my old PC to see if it doesn't work there either.
Edit : Yeah the fans spin.

 

[t99]

Guessing you fixed thid issue since it's been a few days, but if not how old is your Windows install? I had a recent issue with my 480 where I took it out while testing for random restarts and when I put it back the same thing happened.

I put my old card in and same thing. Try to put another gpu in and see if it works or not. If it does not then try doing a fresh install of Windows on another drive if you have a spare or if you have your stuff backed up.

I ended up doing a fresh install of Windows and then everything worked fine. I still have the unrelated restarting issue, but that's another issue entirely. The display worked instantly after doing this, even before installing the drivers, just as it normally would. Maybe a long shot if you have tries everything else. It seemed weird to me that would fix my issue, but it did

When it was messed up and no video detected my tv would show the input, it would pop up switch to input 2 or whatever, but then no signal. Also the fans would spin and lights were on, but it was also cold. Just a couple other things I remembered if it might help.

 

[Justiceinacan]

You know, I was just about to post again because I noticed something weird. You know how I started the thread saying that it wasn't even remotely warm? Well now, just doing basic windows things, it's heating up. Toughing the back grille where the output ports are, touching the backplate, they're both pretty warm. Fan works. (I took off the aftermarket cooler and put reference stuff back on) Another thing I noticed too, I think I know why it's bad. It looks like there's just a little bit of thermal paste on the PCB, below the VRMs, like maybe I had some on my finger and poked it... stupid mistake. Don't know if it's fixable. Also worth noting I ordered a used XFX RX 480 8GB with an RS cooler for $160 total on ebay - should solve the temperature and, you know, broken GPU problem. But if this reference card is still working by some miracle, I could have a loud crossfire setup or sell it or something ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

To answer your question - I downloaded windows 10 on a USB and booted it up on August 23rd. Apparently my old windows 10 key wasn't valid so it isn't activated because I'm waiting on my new video card, then my new case and CPU cooler which I need a lot more badly than I thought, then I can afford a legit windows copy (seriously, I expected the 8600k + corsair h60 to be kinda hot at stock clocks, but I wasn't expecting north of 80 C hot at load, which is an issue) but anyway, I think I might give it a shot. There's nothing on my boot drive except for windows 10, and it's not even a real license, so I'll pull my other drives and we'll see what's up. Why not.

Edit : Well for starters, AMD AtomBIOS is working just fine on my Windows 7 frankenmachine, so that's a start. Making fresh installation media for Windows 10. I'll tell you what I get on the other side. Thanks for the suggestion.

 

[Justiceinacan]

Ah, here's an update.

My RX 480, the old reference card that I thought was bricked, works just fine. Actually a little cooler under stress now because there's an adequate amount of thermal paste on it. Sure as hell not gonna try to put the aftermarket cooler back on though.

My motherboard's top PCIe slot is dead. I never even bothered to check because before I swapped the cooler, it was too bulky to test in the bottom slot. I'm gonna contact ASRock and see if they can replace it under warranty, because I was honestly pretty hyped for Crossfire 480's - why not right? Even if I wanted to use just the RS, that would position the fans of the card a lot closer to the bottom, cutting off airflow to the hottest component in the system. Thanks for making me second guess.

Edit : I won't question it, but I bought another RX 480 8GB off ebay... the new one works in the top slot. I have a working crossfire. Old one doesn't work in the top slot, for whatever reason. Looks like I'm all set - I'll see if it performs as expected in games.