Bought Used MSI RTX 3090 Ti SUPRIM X, No Lights, Fans or Display

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mweiss

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I bought this used GPU and installed it today. I used the adapter that came with the card, however, I'm somewhat concerned that the connector that goes on the GPU lacks four "sensing" pins that are on the card's connector and maybe why the GPU has no sign of life.

When I powered up the system, the GPU fans do not turn and there are no lights. Aren't these things supposed to light up like a Christmas tree?
There is no display on any of my connected monitors either.

Do I need the special cable that has 24 pins plus 4 pins on the side to make this card power up? The seller included a cable that has just the 24 pins on one end and three 8-pin cables which I connected to the PSU's VGA AUX power connectors. He said he repasted the heatsinks as well.

There is some visible rust corrosion on the backplate screws and corrosion on the heat sink assembly and backplane, so I'm not too confident that the card is functional, all though the seller included a Furmark screen shot in the sale listing, showing the card performing well.

System configuration:
Supermicro X10DRi motherboard, BIOS latest at v. 3.4a
128GB RAM
Dual Xeon E5-2667 v3 CPUs
All drives SSDs

Reason for the GPU upgrade is my GTX1080Ti was maxxed out at 99% during playback in DaVinci Resolve Studio 20 while main CPU usage was under 5%. GPU was a huge bottleneck. Need Tensor cores to run Resolve's Neural Engine.

How do I get this card to power up? Or how do I know if it's defective?
 
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Hi
Test the card in another system. Otherwise it's a compatibility issue, or a faulty card.
 
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Nichrome said:
Hi
Test the card in another system. Otherwise it's a compatibility issue, or a faulty card.
Click to expand...
I wish that were an option. This is my main workstation. Is the 12V AUX power cable with no 4-pin sensing pins not the cause? I can order a cable with the extra 4 pins and try that. It's not powering up at all and that adapter cable the seller included is suspect.
 
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I found some problems.

1. The card, though it seemed bottomed out in the slot, wasn't fully in. That got the top bar light to come on but not the MSI logo light.
2. The AUX power connections.. I unplugged and reconnected these again. That got all the lights and the fan running.
3. When the system booted, as Windows loads, the screen would go black. I played with the BIOS settings and found that setting PCI slot 4 to UEFI allowed Windows to boot to the desktop. Then I install the drivers.

I am now stress testing the card with GPU-Z running full screen. Monitoring temps with MSI Afterburner on monitor 2 and it's topping out at 64°C. Kill-A-Watt P3 is showing 1134 watts drawn off the wall socket!!
 
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The only weirdness is that Display port #2 seems to be the main boot screen output. Usually DP #1 is boot screen. Is there a way to configure that?

And finally, GPU-Z reports that it's running at X8 in an X16 slot. Any way to correct that?
 
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I shut down the workstation and turned the power back on/rebooted it with the intent of going to the BIOS and trying to see if shutting off quiet boot would make HDMI port work, and now neither monitor is waking up. I see disc activity which means Windows is loading, but no displays. The card itself has the normal light show it had when it was working.
I'm starting to think there's a problem with this card. Not reliable.
 
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I found I had to push down on the card AGAIN to get it to boot up. Seems the card edge connector may be out of spec or short of reaching deep into the slot connector.
Also turned off Quiet Boot in BIOS and now the HDMI port seems to work. Still don't know about the top most displayport though..

Weird thing is the MIDDLE displayport is the BIOS/boot primary. Usually it's the first port not the middle.
 
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There is no way to reconfigure video ports output when it comes to POST/BIOS display.
It may be the card. But it may also be your workstation chassis/motherboard. It is not a usual system to pair with an RTX card.
 
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So is there no way to determine if the top displayport is working? I get no output from it, even if only one monitor is connected to the card on that port. The other ports work. Odd that the middle port is boot/BIOS. But Windows seems to have it figured out and the monitor swapping has settled down.
 
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Oh I see what you mean. I thought you use multiple displays.
With single monitor any and all ports should work. It's only when multiple displays are used there is no way to configure which one will be used as "main" display.
Once in the OS it's a different story.
 
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I do, normally, but I was testing one port at a time. Not sure why the top port has no output. Maybe I need to install some software to configure them?
 
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Nope. It should simply just work.
If the seller sold it claiming it works, then I'd personally return it.
 
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Thing is, I spent 3 days just getting the card to function. And it IS working well on the 3 displays I have connected. As long as the other ports don't stop working, I'm okay. Card does have rust on the screws on the backplate, but it's from Florida.
 
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I have no idea how electronics may look in the US. But if you think it's fine and expected.. 🤷‍♂️
 
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Well I got the first displayport working. At first boot when I plugged my primary monitor into it, only my second monitor came to life and it had the boot bios screen. Then second bootup, the primary monitor came up with the boot bios screen.
But after that, I found HDMI stopped working. I had to plug and unplug the HDMI cable several times and then it recognized the projector on that port. I guess all ports work, but they seem to be intermittent if I change anything.
Performance-wise, the card does well. Really breathes new life into my dual Xeon workstation.
The guy probably did a good job repasting the heatsink. Running a stress test, the card only got to 64°C and when I stopped the test, it dropped to 27°C within seconds. I've never seen temps come down that fast on a GPU before.
I am going to cut a hole in the side panel to vent the output of this card's cooling, because with the cover on, temps rise to 72°C on stress test so the case fans are inadequate to handle the extra BTUs. Plexiglass side panel, so easy to make a cutout for a vent so it runs even cooler.
 
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