Recently I got the HTC Vive, and after a short time of fiddling around with it, my computer crashed. The fans were still spinning, but the display was blank. No blue screen or anything. I turned it back on and played a little more, when suddenly, the computer completely powered down, fans and all, and it wouldn’t turn back on again. If I switched it off, unplugged it, pressed the power button, plugged it back in, switched it on, and then tried turning it on, the fans would twitch slightly before stopping.
After a lot of troubleshooting, which I’ll spare the details of, eventually I figured out that it would start up fine so long as the GPU’s (R9 290 Royalking) power isn’t plugged in. When the 6 pin and 8 pin ports are unplugged, the computer starts up fine, even the GPU’s fans spin up, but when they’re plugged in, it acts as previously described, not powering on, with only a slight fan movement. It’s less than a year old, I bought it specifically for VR, and I’ve already had to RMA it once because of some major display issues on arrival, so my suspicion is that it’s faulty, but who knows.
Unfortunately, the place I ordered it from (NCIX) only has a 1 month standard warranty for video cards, so now they won’t replace it. So I really need to fix this card. Since its fans still spin up when the power isn’t plugged in, it can’t be completely dead, right? Is there anything I can try to get it working? Is there anything I should have done to prevent this? (Although I’m honestly dubious that this could have been the result of an error on my part, given such a short lifespan, while only ever barely OCing it, and even then, only by using the provided software).
If I can’t fix this, I’m $350 in the hole, so any advice would be greatly appreciated. My specs are as follows:
- CPU: i7 2600k 3.4 GHz
- GPU: CLUB3D R9 290 Royalking
- PSU: XFX Pro 750W XXX Edition at the time it died, I borrowed a friend’s Corsair 800W (not sure of the model) in the course of troubleshooting, with the same results
- Motherboard: Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3
- RAM: 4 GB Kingston ValueRAM, 4 GB of… Some other brand, I can’t really remember. I’ll look it up if it’s important
