Associate
- Joined
- 22 May 2021
- Posts
- 2
- Location
- Coventry, UK
Hi, overclockers,
In these trying times of insanely high GPU prices I have turned to looking at faulty GPUs on eBay and attempting to see if they can be resurrected. I saw this MSI GTX1080 FE on auction coming from a seller who wasn't too tech savvy. They installed it on the second PCIe slot of their system and ran GPU-Z to see if it was being recognised. Indeed it was. However it was not giving any video output! I assumed the reason for this was that the drivers were not installed and that it was conflicting with the AMD card present on the first PCIe slot, so against my better judgment I bid on it, taking a huge gamble.
Fast forward 2 days later and the GPU arrives, looking in pristine condition. All cleaned, no bad capacitors, no signs of corrosion/liquid damage/physical stress. I plopped it in my system expecting to see a signal but after 1 minute... nothing. The only thing that was lit was the VGA LED on the motherboard, signaling a GPU fault. I reset my CMOS, put back my other GPU to set up settings in BIOS, all sorts of settings related to PCIe link management, but to no avail.
The GPU has a "Geforce GTX" logo on its side that lights up. When turning on the system, this lights up for a few seconds, and then it turns off precisely when the motherboard starts showing the VGA LED. In all this time, the fan of the GPU is spinning. It never turned off. The VGA LED stays on for a few minutes, indicating that maybe the motherboard doesn't even POST.
But after these few minutes, the PC continues to boot "normally" from SSD. Yet there is still no video output. It boots into Linux and I can connect remotely to it to see what is going on with the GPU. The GPU is correctly detected as a GTX1080, and I can even see every detail about it using "lspci" and "nvflash". Because the GPU was being detected but the drivers were failing to initialize it, I assumed that this was a vBIOS issue, so I grabbed an original MSI FE ROM and flashed the card. Still, after a reboot there was no video output.
Messages from the kernel log would output:
which indicates that the driver can't talk with the GPU at all. Bad news!
I took the GPU apart and gave the graphics processor a very good clean, as the thermal paste was covering the capacitors surrounding the core. This also did nothing.
My system consists of a Ryzen 5 2600, 16GB of RAM as well as a MSI 5600XT running on a MSI B450 PRO-M2 motherboard. The PSU is a 600W EVGA bronze.
Are there any steps I could take to check what component on the GPU board is faulty? Would reflowing be worth it in this case?
In these trying times of insanely high GPU prices I have turned to looking at faulty GPUs on eBay and attempting to see if they can be resurrected. I saw this MSI GTX1080 FE on auction coming from a seller who wasn't too tech savvy. They installed it on the second PCIe slot of their system and ran GPU-Z to see if it was being recognised. Indeed it was. However it was not giving any video output! I assumed the reason for this was that the drivers were not installed and that it was conflicting with the AMD card present on the first PCIe slot, so against my better judgment I bid on it, taking a huge gamble.
Fast forward 2 days later and the GPU arrives, looking in pristine condition. All cleaned, no bad capacitors, no signs of corrosion/liquid damage/physical stress. I plopped it in my system expecting to see a signal but after 1 minute... nothing. The only thing that was lit was the VGA LED on the motherboard, signaling a GPU fault. I reset my CMOS, put back my other GPU to set up settings in BIOS, all sorts of settings related to PCIe link management, but to no avail.
The GPU has a "Geforce GTX" logo on its side that lights up. When turning on the system, this lights up for a few seconds, and then it turns off precisely when the motherboard starts showing the VGA LED. In all this time, the fan of the GPU is spinning. It never turned off. The VGA LED stays on for a few minutes, indicating that maybe the motherboard doesn't even POST.
But after these few minutes, the PC continues to boot "normally" from SSD. Yet there is still no video output. It boots into Linux and I can connect remotely to it to see what is going on with the GPU. The GPU is correctly detected as a GTX1080, and I can even see every detail about it using "lspci" and "nvflash". Because the GPU was being detected but the drivers were failing to initialize it, I assumed that this was a vBIOS issue, so I grabbed an original MSI FE ROM and flashed the card. Still, after a reboot there was no video output.
Messages from the kernel log would output:
Code:
NVRM: RmInitAdapter failed
NVRM: rm_init_adapter(0) failed for device bearing minor number 0I took the GPU apart and gave the graphics processor a very good clean, as the thermal paste was covering the capacitors surrounding the core. This also did nothing.
My system consists of a Ryzen 5 2600, 16GB of RAM as well as a MSI 5600XT running on a MSI B450 PRO-M2 motherboard. The PSU is a 600W EVGA bronze.
Are there any steps I could take to check what component on the GPU board is faulty? Would reflowing be worth it in this case?
