Hi guys, After some advice from those of you who have recently custom cooled the 290x. I've done this install 4 times before with no problems on GTX 680's. Took off 1 of the Arctic Accelero Hybrids to put on the 290x. I know the 290x was all good (both of them) with stock cooling as i played Crysis 3, BF4 etc. After putting on the larger alphacool vram heatsinks (also used before successfully) and the Arctic cooler I did a fairly hacky job with re-using the single line of thermal adhesive from the stock 290x heatsink and glued on some of the arctic VRM heatsinks. Note- the fan was disconnected and not used (just like on the 680s- the fan connector to the GPU PCB not in use) Fired up the PC- ran Unigine Valley in Windowed mode and watched the temps via GPU-Z. No overclocking, just stock. GPU temps were < 40c and just before the whole PC black screened, VRM 1 and VRM 2 were reading 35c or so. I figured it was the hacky job with the VRMs and maybe one of them wasnt really getting the cooling it needed. Re did the heatsinks direct to VRMs (i.e. 3 long aliminium heatsinks across the 6 vrms and 3 for the others) At this point i couldnt boot the pc with the GPU. Took out the 290x, cleared bios used the inbuilt 4770k iGPU. All was good. Plugged the 290x back in and I was able to get into the BIOS using the iGPU which showed me on the bios PCI card list an AMD 290 GPU running at x 16. Still cant boot with the card in even using iGPU. Tried switching back to Quiet mode from uber mode etc... Any ideas / help much appreciated otherwise i reckon i might have a very expensive paperweight on my hands.... Reklaw
put the stock cooling back on. make sure you have it on tight and try again using both dvi or other connections.
Hey Cowie, Ta for the advice however no good news from this end Put back to stock and while i can boot into Windows using iGPU, the second i try to install Catalyst drivers again (i uninstalled with card out) the system freezes. So while it can be seen at bios level and as a basic display driver- it's had the 290x burnt out of it Don't think there is anything else i can try. I have the second one half prepared however now i'm a bit too scared to continue. I reckon I might jam a few of the 680's back in for now and do some more reading / research and wait for the enzotech copper heatsinks to arrive.
next to VRMs are resistors which have not insulated contacts and if heatsink of VRMs are incorrectly applied it does short circuit them. That is Why Accelero comes with sticky tapes to do safety barrier between resistors and VRMS heatsinks. If you remember how close to resistors you placed heatsinks then you can guess if you did or did not short circuit them. VRMs on 290(x) are same type as 7900 ref, which can take 125°C. So if some burned out it would happen between 135-150°C which may leave little oil like stain on PCB. And that you can detect by eye.
Hi Fox2232- thanks for the really in depth technical run down. This indeed sounds like what has happened- haven't had a chance to look at all the resistors yet however i think this is the culprit. Next question for you- is this something i can get repaired e.g. at an electronics shop (i.e. remove borked resistor- solder in a new one) or is it buy a new card type deal? I'm hoping its the former- even if it costs a hundred bucks or so its much better than needing to get a new card!!! Ta man, Ecurb
