Wanted to install a GTX 1080 in my wife’s machine last night, but I think I ended up frying the motherboard instead.
Board: ASUS M4A89GTD Pro
PSU: Corsair HX650W (it’s a pretty nice PSU, so I’m assuming it has some kind of protection against overloading?)
The machine was working with an HD5870. All I changed was the graphics card.
I Googled around and was pretty sure the board could take the 1080 without issue, but when I switched the machine on the first time it looked like it was stuck on the “Entering ASUS ExpressGate” screen.
Switched it off and back on and it won’t POST at all. Black screen, no lights on the keyboard. Sometimes the mouse will light up, but never the keyboard. I’ve tried another keyboard just in case. I’ve also tried plugging the keyboard and mouse into different USB ports which gives random results — sometimes the mouse turns on, sometimes it doesn’t.
I’ve removed the graphics card from the machine entirely to try and use the on-board graphics, but it still won’t POST.
I’ve tried resetting the BIOS, and have even tried removing the CMOS battery for 30 minutes. Still nothing, no POST, even with the graphics card removed.
Did I kill the motherboard, or is there a chance I somehow overloaded the power supply and that’s the problem?
what you can do is unplug the mobo from the psu for atleast 24 hours for the caps to discharge and then try again, also check closely on the board if anything popped by any chance and then have you tried booting it with some other ram
That’s a pretty ancient board, not sure about the power delivery. So, it helps to remember that the GPU doesn’t pull all of its power from the power supply. It draws a fair bit from the PCIe slot itself, up to 75W depending on spec as I recall. That’s why some low end cards can run with no external power connector. It may be that there was a current surge on startup which fried the PCIe slot or some other components, but that’s just speculation. Since you’ve already tried onboard graphics, your only other option is to swap out power supplies.
PCI express slots have fixed amounts of power it delivers to a card for example a 1x will draw x amount of amps or a 2x card y amount of amps, it works on the same principles as the old agp cards
i doubt the card blew the board, since cards have a fixed amount of power they can draw from the slot and if a card is incompatible the pc wouldnt have posted at all initially, any addition power a pciex card requires it draws via the 6,8 or 12 pin connectors. and also pciexpress is backwards compatible just like USB thats why you can run RTX cards on old am2+ boards its not a good idea since your’re bottlenecking the card but it is possible.
another scenario could be that you might have pressed a bit to hard on the card when installing it and the pcb might have developed a crack somewhere in the solder bridges. it has happened to me in the past before
This is more than enough for a1080 , I have a 1080 with a 650W and there is still room for minor overclocking.
Have you checked for general loose cables and chip creep, make sure everything is seated and plugged in properly, something might have just come loose or is not making proper contact.
If you can use the card in another machine and If you get the pc to boot again you might want to update the BIOS, some Older Motherboards with modern GPU’s can be a bit finicky with UEFI vs BIOS versions , you could try updating the Motherboard firmware and then if still not working also checking to see if the GPU firmware needs a update or downgrade, if its a MSI their forums are pretty handy for getting firmware I flashed mine to a newer version when I got my card.
I plugged the motherboard power back in and switched it on after 24 hours and same thing. This time neither the mouse nor keyboard switched on.
I tend to keep my builds minimalist — no fancy cooling or audio, so there is limited opportunity for chip creep. Just to be sure I pressed down on everything (except the CPU). I also unplugged the weird VGA switcher card this board came with, blew the dust off, and put it back.
Still nada
Here’s a picture of the rig without any GPU installed to give you an idea.
dont worry i dont clean mine out either unless i need to do something in the machine. that being said however, i have a see through case now and occasionally open it up and just blow some dust out…
