First off, I am totally digging this website, stumbled upon it looking for ways to diagnose a GPU on component level. The emojis are putting a big smile on my face. They take me back to my teen years, I've highly missed the old school ones. Anyway, on to the reason I am here and asking for help.
I recently acquired an ECS Geforce RTX 2070 GPU from eBay. I have been able to bring back a few of the 10 series GPUs from the grave and really wanted an RTX card so I pulled the trigger on this one. The GPUs I've been able to fix have been easy ones, fans, noticeable parts missing on the board, or simple reflows. This one is not something easy, but I don't want to give up on it.
The issue I'm having is this. When installed in the pc with the 8pin power connected, fans spin but the pc will not post. If the 8 pin is removed, then it will display the message "please connect power to this gpu", or something along those lines. If I install it as a secondary card, the pc boots and loads windows, but then crashes with a display error. After that the pc will keep rebooting and trying to load Windows until the OS gets corrupted and I have to completely reinstall it. IThe pc seems to crash quicker on each reboot. It does this with or without the 8pin power cable connected. On a fresh install of Windows 10 if I quickly get into device manager it detects the card as a "generic VGA device" but is automatically disabled. On an updated version of Windows it doesn't seem to detect the card at all.
I looked over the pcb as well as I could, and I did not notice any "ah ha" spots. Except for things looking on the cheaper side, everything looks good. I also poked around with my multimeter (a sexy Extech MN16A, yes that's sarcasm) for probably 2 hours, still with no "ah ha" moments. Doesn't really help that I don't know what I'm looking for.
I tried to find anything I could online about this card and I can not come up with a single thing. All I know is that it came out of a Dell pc.
So hear I am, reaching out to people that actually know what they are doing. I have a basic understanding of pcbs and how they work. I took an electronics class in high school, but that was back in 2000, a lifetime ago. I have always loved to tinker and try to fix things, and absolutely love the feeling of bringing something back from the dead. I've just never had the time to truly learn things on a component level, but I have always wanted to. I appreciate any help that anyone can provide me and thank you just for reading my, way to long, post here. My life took me down the path of being a meat cutter and a family man, but I will always be a nerd at heart.