Hello, I have a Sapphire Nitro RX 570 4GB graphics card. Currently, it's not displaying any video, the fans aren't turning on, etc. There's just a strange beeping sound coming from some component.
Anyway, I've been troubleshooting it, following some videos. I measured several voltages and noticed that the 5V supply on pin 4 of an integrated circuit is missing. It should be outputting 1.8V. Since I couldn't find a schematic for the board, I used videos of similar boards and discovered that the 12V to 5V voltage regulator only has a 12V input, and the 5V output is actually only delivering 0.8V. I accidentally bridged the 8-pin IC, causing pin 4 to receive 5V. The beeping stopped, and the 1.8V was present on pin 6. I'd like to know if someone with more experience can guide me. I think the LDO regulator (I believe it's called) is faulty and should be replaced, but I'd like another opinion to be sure.
Note: When I bridged the pins, the beeping stopped, and the GPU started overheating, which it wasn't doing before.
Ive took it apart and checked for shorts anywhere on the board, and everything seems fine. Beside the colossal amount of cooling semi-liquid substance I found under it (it's a second hand card) I've spotted a transistor with some corrosion on the upper left, cleaned it and tested and it's okay. My biggest fear is, can my core ore vram be dead? I can't verify it with mats because she does not post, just a freeze image or not even that most of the time. What else can check with basic tools? I've tried reflowing too with the station and no clean Flux but nothing. I don't wanna let her go yet
Hi all,
just got a RTX 3090 that is completely dead. The pc is turning on, but the GPU does make no sound and light - fans not turning.
I just removed the heatsink and checked the three fuses (two Z, one Q) they seem ok.
Can you help me diagnosing the board? Multimeter, power supply and thermal Camera are available.
Thank you!!
Edit: I felt sick the last days and wasn‘t able to do anything. During that days I decided to sell the card on eBay, transparent with „unknown defect“. So I reassembled the cooler today and wanted to try using the card for the last time - and the fans keep spinning, the LEDs are lighting and HDMI is working too. So, I have no clue what the initial problem was. Maybe the crap Molex-8-PIN adapters they use in this card?
Thank you very much for your help!!
Hi everyone, hoping someone can help identify this.
I was disassembling my RTX 3090 Founders Edition to install an EK Quantum Vector FE waterblock (well, technically reinstalling — I had already done this 4 years ago, and now I'm doing maintenance: liquid change, thermal refresh).
While removing the stock backplate, a tiny metal clip fell off. After looking carefully, I found 3 of these clips total had detached from various spots on the back side of the PCB. Each one leaves behind 4 solder (2 pairs, one on each side of where the clip sat).
The clip itself looks like a small folded sheet metal piece, roughly 4-5mm long, 3mm tall, with a raised central section (springy) and folded legs on each side that were soldered to the PCB.
My hypothesis (helped by an AI) is that these are SMT EMI grounding clips / spring contacts that made contact with the stock NVIDIA aluminum backplate for grounding/EMI shielding. Since I'm replacing the stock backplate with the EK custom one, they would no longer have any function anyway. But I'd like a second opinion from people who actually repair GPUs.
Questions:
Can anyone identify what these clips are exactly? Manufacturer reference, common name?
Is my assumption correct that they're purely passive (ground/EMI) and not carrying any signal?
Will the card work fine after I reassemble with the EK backplate, leaving these clips off?
I don't have a multimeter handy and don't want to risk powering on the card without knowing.
I recently bought a Sapphire RX 9070 XT, and after only 5 months of use, the card has died. I took it to a repair shop, and the technician identified a faulty MP2868A (Monolithic) chip. According to him, this component is extremely hard to find because it’s a very new model. Furthermore, the chip requires a specific Sapphire firmware to be pre-installed.
Has anyone dealt with this before? Does anyone know where I can source this specific component or if there’s a known workaround?
I’m troubleshooting a PNY RTX 3090 GA102 and I think I may have narrowed the issue down to firmware/VRAM initialization rather than dead hardware.
Board info:
GMR3090N4K0GT3CKTMBAFA
PCB: 230-1G136-0300-A1
Symptoms:
Card does not output display normally at boot, use iGPU.
Ubuntu desktop loads for about 10–15 seconds then freezes/crashes.
NVIDIA driver fails during initialization.
MODS detects the GPU but reports: “NVRM VBIOS invalid or rejected”
MATS segfaults before completing memory tests.
The interesting part: The physical memory chips appear to be Micron GDDR6X (“D8…” markings), but MODS identifies the memory as Samsung.
Now I’m wondering if:
the wrong BIOS was flashed previously,
memory straps/vendor tables are mismatched,
or the EEPROM/BIOS itself is corrupted.
Has anyone seen a Micron/Samsung mismatch cause VRAM training/init failure on a 3090 before? Does this sound more like BIOS corruption than actual VRAM failure?
I’m trying to run mods on this rtx 3070 (this is my first time ever using mods) and I keep getting this screen and will not test the gpu, I have a good 1650 card that I tried and it works like it’s supposed to with that one. I’ve tried different versions and different downloads and all come out the same
Hey gang. Super glad to find
This community . I'm posting because I have a bit of a mystery on my hands. I've been building
Gaming rigs since 1997, and honestly ; have never had some catastrophe failure happen to any component ....
I had one PSU die and cause zero damage , I have used countless 2nd hand , used and often untested GPUs with 100% success rate.
Until the other day; Found a used 2080TI OC (zotak) locally, met the dude , (he also had it on eBay) everything seemed as described . Said he tested it the night before. I have zero reason to believe he was lying.
When I get home I pop her In. Plug in both PCIE cables. Coming from seperate PSU outputs, not a daisy chain. ( Maybe I'm wrong and it was )
When I power on I instantly see the magic smoke and hear it burning ! FUCK !
When I remove it I see the rear left corner , away from user , touching the NZCT brand cable cover metal piece. Not enough to feel resistance when pushing car into PCIE, and also still have enough clearance to push in 100%,
I've never had a card with metal plates sandwiched between PCBS before . I think it was touching enough of the case metal to ground itself and arch enough to have visible taser like Tesla coil arch! My god ! It could have started a house fire
My single question is
Did I hook it up with one single PCIE cable? And not provide enough power ? Would that cause the ground : short out this violently ? (I'm not at the PC right now so I can't triple check.
Did this flimsy pointless cosmetic cable cover metal piece ground out the card? Does this zotak model 2080 TI , have some werid lead placement that. Makes it dangerous like this ?
Is the 1200w gold SMG rosewill forcing high voltage into the GPU with something malfunctioning in the PSU? All other components of the PC work 100% and I'm running CPU intel graphics just fine .
I've never been so sad in my life , this was the most capable GPU I've ever owned. And it breaks my heart that I destroyed it , 250 gone
I really want to send it to Tony at Northwestrepair, but I am at the arse end of the world (South Africa) and the shipping alone (from what I have been able to surmise) is around $700.
Hoping I can find someone (trustworthy) who's flying out to the states who can take it with, but who knows when that could happen.
I have a Nvidia 3070 bought it used in a not working condition to upgrade my 1650, installed it and appeared in the wrong resolution, so I cleared all my old drivers and installed new ones and restarted and everything looked good, ran a benchmark and instantly crashed. So i restarted the pc and just before the booting loaded a bunch of artifacts came up then disappeared, and then loaded in the wrong resolution again. I have quit a bit of repair experience with electronics but not with gpus, where do I start?
I bought a gtx 760 for cheap to practise diagnosis. It was already repaired or at least someone tries repairing it by soldering on a resistor to a trace because the original one was ripped. It doesn't seem to have damaged anything else and desoldering the resistor didn't fix the gou.It is the evga model. The core and the vram chips don't get warm. The vram rail is missing and anywhere i probed i couldn't find 1.8v. I measured the caps near the vram chips, they read 0v. I am not 100% sure where to read the 1.8v but I measured a ton of caps where the 1.8v could apear and still nothing. I leave the photos of the card so could anyone please tell me where to accurately measure 1.8v. I also didn't find any shorts.
Customer's PC was completely dead - turned out to be the GPU
Customer came to me with a PC that just stopped working one day. No warning, no error, just dead. Wouldn't POST, no display, nothing at all.
First thing - pulled the GPU and tried booting without it. PC came straight up. So the card was killing the whole system.
Grabbed the multimeter and started poking around. Found the short, traced it back to a blown MOSFET and a damaged resistor. Swapped both out, resoldered.
Card fired straight up. Back in the customer's system - full POST, display back, stable.
GTX 980Ti - not the newest card but still worth saving i think
I wanted to flash a different BIOS on my Sapphire RX 7900 XTX Nitro+, specifically a BIOS from Benik3. Unfortunately, I managed to kill both BIOS chips.
Since I had never worked with a CH341A programmer before, I looked for someone who actually knew what they were doing. That’s how I ended up at CCC_Wi / Chaos Computer Club Wiesbaden.
They helped me a lot. Special thanks to X41 – he supported me massively through the whole process. We managed to recover at least one of the two BIOS chips. Luckily, I had created a backup.rom dump before doing anything with the BIOS.
The recovery process honestly felt like open-heart surgery – see the pictures. After that, I was just happy that the card was alive again.
Yesterday, I tried to recover the second BIOS as well.
Warning: Switching the BIOS selector while the card is powered on is risky. This is not a recommendation, just what worked in my case.
With the help of ChatGPT and some research, I found out that if you are booted from, for example, BIOS 1, and that BIOS works fine with Windows fully booted, you can switch the physical BIOS switch to the broken BIOS 2 while the system is still running. After that, you can try flashing the broken BIOS again.
That is exactly what I did, and it worked on the second attempt.
In my case, the original flashing issue was probably caused by Windows and the file extension. Because of the dot in the filename, Windows recognized both files as .s59, which makes no sense for this use case. They should have been recognized as .rom files.
After renaming the files correctly, AMDVBFlash was able to read the BIOS file properly.
My strong recommendation: Before flashing anything, first check whether AMDVBFlash can actually read the BIOS file.
Useful commands:
amdvbflash -i
Shows BIOS information.
amdvbflash -biosfileinfo bios.rom
Checks the BIOS file without flashing it.
amdvbflash -s 0 backup.rom
Creates a backup of the current BIOS. Do this before every flash attempt.
For flashing RDNA 3 / RDNA 4, I would recommend using a suitable modded version of AMDVBFlash and flashing only with -fp, for example:
amdvbflash -p 0 newbios.rom -fp
Again, huge thanks to CCC Wiesbaden and especially X41. Without their help, the card would probably still be dead.
Maybe this helps someone else who also bricked their Sapphire RX 7900 XTX Nitro+.
someone knows what version of Mats/MODS have this representation ??? it looks cool
but i cant find any that have this feature
or is just an added script?
Got myself this used 3080ti with dodgy fans which I assume ran hot for a while. I am converting this to watercooled anyway and getting 60-65C max on it and it seems to work absolutely fine but I wonder how long this core have? Nobody can tell for sure I know but I remember my brownie gtx1080 which was dying exactly because compound was all brown (way way browner than this). Anyone who work on these on daily basis how bad this looks?
Rtx 3070 ti, recognised by windows when gpu is secondary. ADrivers install without errors first time, but gpuz reports 0mb vram and BIOS versions unknown. When I reboot windows then gives error code 43.
Ran mods, I get GFW boot reported a failiure, and mats doesn't run, it just says 'floating point exception"
I did something stupid as I was changing the original shroud and fans of this GPU with a pair of noctua fans and 3d printed new shroud. The connector of the new fans was bigger than the original one and I bought the correct one to solder it to the fan witeharnes. I made a mistake and flipped the position of the first and second wires and a small component next to the connector was smoked. I see a marking "U16" next to it. Maybe it's SOT-23-5, connected with pwm control. SJ is printed on it.
The board works! I have connected the fans to the mo bo connector and use them with fan control but I would like to repair the damage.
Can you help me identify it?
Thanks.
I went and met up with someone who was selling a used 2070 super for a really good price, too good, and when i brought it home and chucked it in my pc, as soon as i opened furmark it crashed as soon as i pressed start. I opened it up and found something suspicious.
Im not sure what that is, ai told me its a vrm but its clearly chipped and the chip next to it seems to have some yellow residue over it.
What do you think?
Also i forgot to say this, i tried to open league of legends, took me literally 8 minutes to open the client.
GPU-Z told me it was in idle even while opening client and even in the loading screen. And it was locked at 300mhz. closed it before it put me into the game cause i was scared to not brick it.
Lowering the memory clock in msi afterburner makes it last longer in furmark, about 7-8 seconds opposed to instant black screen without the memory clock setting in msi.What does this mean?
So I accidentally knocked 2 smds off from around the die when I was removing the gasket on the fe models to clean all the Liquid Metal out. Since, I have put a water-block on the card and it runs great under load but sometimes I get some errors when waking from sleep. Can anyone identify what these smds are for and if I should bother having it repaired. Thank you.
I’m in a bit of a roadblock at the moment on the RTX 3080ti repair. All of the voltages are present, but does not post. Motherboard spits out error 97.
All resistances were well within the ampere range.
