Question Possibly fried my PCIE slot by putting in "new" GPU?

[ethjhtrege]

1. Friend's R9 390 Sapphire stopped working after he dropped his PC by kicking it accidentally, had black screen issues before that too and now GPU doesn't even start when he powers on his PC
2. I took a look at it and found out that a Resistor was fried and that is apparently a common issue with 390's. I tried putting it in my PC too and it wouldn't work.
3. I replaced the Resistor, my soldering skills are bad but I thought the result was sufficient
4. I took out my own 5700XT, which is working fine and put in the 390 to test it (Motherboard X570 Aorus Elite)
5. Doesn't work, same issue as before
6. I remove the broken 390 and put my 5700XT back in
7. Now 5700XT doesn't work - no LED, no signal, fans still
8. I put the 5700XT in the other PCIE slot (I have 1x PCIEx16 and 1x PCIEx4) and it works
9. I have not put the 390 in the 2nd PCIE slot for obvious reasons.

Now, did I fry my PCIEx16 slot? Is there any way to fix this? Could this have damaged my PSU or something else too?
Any help is greatly appreciated

 

[In2Photos]

Did you try clearing the CMOS?

 

[solidsnake1298]

I would try In2Photos' suggestion. I can't imagine why changing graphics cards would cause a BIOS bug or something, but that wouldn't be the weirdest thing I've seen a computer do.

If a resistor fried, it is almost guaranteed that something downstream of that resistor got too much current and is also fried. Replacing that one resistor wouldn't fix the fried components downstream, possibly including the GPU itself. This can cause all kinds of weird electrical behavior, like electricity going down paths it wasn't intended to go (i.e.: lots of power going down a data only pin).

Modern motherboards have a lot of protections built in to protect other components from electrical surges and whatnot. I wouldn't be surprised if these protections saved your CPU, but sacrificed the PCIe slot the GPU was connected to.

 

[igor_kavinski]

RX 580 fried all the PCIe slots on my mobo (well, at least the 16x and 8x ones). One of these days when I win the lottery, I will take a flight to the city of residence of the world's best mobo repair technician and pay him so I can sit with him and understand what actually happened. I need closure.

 

[lopri]

I have not seen that myself. I would have thought the slots could burn the cards, not the other way around. XD Don't the cards get power from the slots?

 

[igor_kavinski]

I would have thought the slots could burn the cards

That should be an issue with AGP slots where older slots had higher voltage and newer ones were lower (3.3 and 1.5V if I remember correctly)

With RX 480/580, they didn't put in a power limiter in the board design. So if the card needs more power that isn't provided by the GPU connector, it will try to pull that extra power from the PCIe slot, disregarding the max 75W limit of the slot. That's what happened to me.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I need closure.

Were you having un-protected insertions into your mother board again??? Why else would you have an emotional attachment to your mother board?

 

[igor_kavinski]

Why else would you have an emotional attachment to your mother board?

It was a $300 mobo!

 

[VirtualLarry]

It was a $300 mobo!

Did it demand a ring bus?

Did it have a daughter board?

 

[ethjhtrege]

I'm sorry for the late update, life happened but this is the current situation:

I tried everything with the X570 (CMOS clear, unplugging everything, different CPU, RAM in every slot, etc...).
Meanwhile ever since all this happened my PC would randomly freeze requiring a restart, in either slot with every config.

So, I used the x4 Slot for a while until I got tired of it.
I then tried putting it back in the supposedly fried X16 Slot and eventually I got it to work with one RAM stick in a specific slot.
I then tried adding back in both RAM sticks and at first this would not work no matter how often I changed the slots or restarted the PC.
At one point it just magically turned on and everything was fine and it actually stayed that way but the problem was that the RAM sticks were both in non-dual slots which bothered me but I let it be since I was really over it at this point.

Well after some time precious was not happy with no dual-channel so precious me went ahead and tried putting them back in the original slots with dual-channel mode.
After that the mobo was dead for good.

I switched to a new B450 Tomahawk Max and everything works except that my PC still freezes randomly (like 2-4 times a month I think) , so I am guessing I damaged my GPU and/or RAM..

The freezes happen in Linux and in Windows (seperate SSDs), the only thing is sometimes I can "fix" it in Windows with Ctrl + Shift + Win + B so I don't have to restart but it does not always work. In Linux I am not familiar with a similar shortcut so it just freezes..

 

[igor_kavinski]

the only thing is sometimes I can "fix" it in Windows with Ctrl + Shift + Win + B

Great shortcut. It resets the video driver. Guess something is wrong with your GPU (maybe just slightly flaky?).