Question [SOLVED]Trying to improve NVidia performance on Arch led to failure to boot

[commongoer]

Specs: Asus TUF X570 Plus WiFi MOBO
AMD Ryzen 7 5800x
NVidia GTX1080 (latest drivers)
Monitor connected via display port
Latest standard kernel

I'm in over my head. Bottom line is, I was taking some of the steps listed on the "Improving Performance" and "Gaming" pages on the Arch Wiki, and it led to my system being unable to boot, or even present me with my BIOS, even with all drives disconnected. The main changes I made were (in this order, or at least as best as I can remember):

Installed Gamescope

Added nvidia, nvidia_drm to the modules section in mkinitcpio.conf (and ran mkinitcpio -P afterwards

Added nvidia_drm.modeset=1 to grub.cfg (after GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT), and ran "sudo grub-mkconfig -o /boot/grub/grub.cfg"

In my MOBO's UEFI settings menu, enabled resizable BAR.

The last step is where I noticed a change. When I saved the setting and rebooted, I got a black screen. Usually I would get an Asus TUF logo, then my GRUB boot screen, then my SDDM login screen. After this, my monitor would seemingly lose signal until it eventually showed up at my login screen. After this, my OS worked normally.

However, due to a number of other issues, I decided I'd just cut my losses and reinstall to start fresh and hopefully make less mistakes. (I'm only 3 days into this install so I have barely anything on my system). I plugged in my install thumb drive, rebooted, held down F2 which is what should bring me to my UEFI menu, nothing. Let go, waited for a minute, nothing. No SDDM this time either. Tried again, same thing. Said screw it, powered down and unplugged my rig, unplugged all my drives, plugged the computer back in, turned it on, still nothing.

I literally cannot think of anything else I can do. Unfortunately I can't verify if my GPU is somehow bricked because my CPU doesn't have integrated graphics (if it's worth anything, the GPUs fan is working normally, so it's getting power). My MOBO isn't throwing any codes via it's built in LEDs, so I don't think it's borked.

(EDIT: Double checked, I'm getting a solid white light that corresponds to a VGA error. I was mistaken and for some reason thought the white LED was for Boot).

I don't have access to another GPU (reaching out to a friend who may be able to loan me one for a day), so I'm kind of in a jam. Is there anything I can try before I take it to a repair shop to have it properly diagnosed?

 

[rgd1101]

reset the bios?

 

[commongoer]

Did try this, unfortunately no change. Still have a VGA light on

 

[rustigsmed]

If it were me - I would unplug power - take out the ram - - press power button about 10 times, put one stick back in, move the gpu to the other pci slot and try and again.

 

[commongoer]

If it were me - I would unplug power - take out the ram - - press power button about 10 times, put one stick back in, move the gpu to the other pci slot and try and again.

Okay I'll give this a try after work today. Thanks, not super experienced with hardware issues such as this

 

[commongoer]

If it were me - I would unplug power - take out the ram - - press power button about 10 times, put one stick back in, move the gpu to the other pci slot and try and again.

Okay, so I just gave this a shot:

Unplugged, pressed the power button a dozen times, unplugged both RAM sticks. Plugged one back in, moved the GPU down one PCIe slot. Turned on power, nothing.

Repeated the process but switched RAM sticks, again, nothing.

Then I decided, for the heck of it, to try it with HDMI instead of Display Port, turned it on, finally got a display, took me right to my BIOS setup screen. Tried with both RAM sticks, then with my GPU in its original PCIe slot, and sure enough it seems to be working via HDMI. As far as I'm concerned, that mostly rules out MOBO issues.

Verified that HDMI worked on both of my monitors, none of my DP outputs on my card give picture.

I would find it incredibly odd if my cards HDMI port is fine, but I somehow managed to fry all 3 DP outputs on my card, so I'm wondering if this is a firmware issue on my card itself, or if my cable somehow went bad somewhere in this process. Unfortunately I don't own any other devices with DP outputs so I can't test the cable, but I do have a couple other cables somewhere so I'll test those maybe this weekend.

Thank you for the tips, I can usually deal with software woes easily enough but I've never had a hardware scare like this so your suggestions helped a huge amount. Glad to have my system running again even if there's still some question about why DP isn't working.

Edit, did a litte research and found that, indeed, a firmware update for my series of cards came out about 6 months ago, specifically for DP issues. Ill have to make a small Windows partition and see if I can update the firmware, hopefully that fixes it.

 

[rustigsmed]

glad you got it back online! good luck with the DP - not sure what you can do there

 

[commongoer]

glad you got it back online! good luck with the DP - not sure what you can do there

Welp, final update. After resetting the BIOS, I plugged my drives back in, made a small partition and installed Windows 10. Downloaded NVidias firmware updater, applied the update, and that got me back to having DP functionality, but not during the boot process only on login. I then thought to check the BIOS version, sure enough, I was 6 months out of date for that too. Updated, disabled fast boot which I saw a few people mention, and I am now currently looking at my BIOS via Display Port. Big win considering I was about to list my GPU for sale lol.

Lesson learned: Update my darn firmware frequently

 

[rustigsmed]

Welp, final update. After resetting the BIOS, I plugged my drives back in, made a small partition and installed Windows 10. Downloaded NVidias firmware updater, applied the update, and that got me back to having DP functionality, but not during the boot process only on login. I then thought to check the BIOS version, sure enough, I was 6 months out of date for that too. Updated, disabled fast boot which I saw a few people mention, and I am now currently looking at my BIOS via Display Port. Big win considering I was about to list my GPU for sale lol.

Lesson learned: Update my darn firmware frequently

Still strange how it happened - but good work following up and posting the solution here in case someone else runs into the issue.

 

[commongoer]

Still strange how it happened - but good work following up and posting the solution here in case someone else runs into the issue.

It is strange indeed. This was either a mistake on my part during tweaking that caused a firmware/BIOS issue, or a very very coincidentally timed firmware bug that was bound to happen anyway. Either way, hopefully if anything this works as a cautionary tale, I'm sure I'm not the only one out there who forgets about those firmware updates.