I've recently bought a Sapphire Pulse 9070 XT graphics card, and I've been having some frustrating issues with it on my current setup. Specifically, it only works at x8 lanes, which has led to occasional crashes, resets, or timeouts during gaming sessions—though these problems were way worse a few months back. The puzzling part is that the same card runs at x16 on a different motherboard. On my primary motherboard, other GPUs are successfully working at x16. Here are my system specs: R7 7800X3D, 2X16GB DDR5-6000 CL32, ASRock B650M-HDV/M.2, XPG Core Reactor II VE 750W, the aforementioned 9070 XT, plus 2 1TB NVMe drives and an MT7925 M.2 wifi adapter.
I've already tried a lot of standard troubleshooting steps, such as clearing the CMOS, updating the BIOS, forcing different PCIe generations, toggling power management settings for PCIe, and switching the iGPU on and off. I even took out the wifi adapter and secondary M.2 to see if those were the issue. I cleaned the PCIe slot and reseated the card multiple times, and I also tested the GPU on another system, but it still crashed during stress testing. Additionally, I tested another GPU in my main rig, and it ran fine at x16. I also tried a full system reinstall with Linux. Even after RMA'ing the card, they reported no defects. I'm considering buying a new motherboard to see if that might solve the issue. Do you think that's the way to go, or do you have any other suggestions? Thanks for any help!
2 Answers
Make sure to check your motherboard manual for specific configurations. Sometimes, using multiple NVMe drives can reduce the bandwidth of the x16 slot to x8. There could be a limitation there affecting your graphics card's performance.
It sounds like you've done quite a bit of troubleshooting. Double-check which devices are occupying which PCI slots. If your GPU is in the primary x16 slot, see if moving other components like the NVMe drives around changes anything. Sometimes conflicts can happen that we don’t immediately see.
I've got the wifi adapter in the E-key, the NVMe drives in their slots, and the GPU in the main x16 slot. No SATA drives are connected, so I'm confused why it would only run at x8.