I bought a Lenovo Legion 5i Gen 7 in December 2022 with an i5-11400, RTX 3050, and 8 GB of RAM. I later upgraded it to 32 GB of memory, added another SSD, and replaced the original graphics card with an RTX 4060, which worked without problems.
After buying Forza Horizon 6, I became concerned about the RTX 4060's 8 GB of VRAM. I decided to try an ASUS Dual RX 9060 XT because it was considerably cheaper than the comparable NVIDIA option and appeared suitable for my system.
Before installing it, I booted into Safe Mode and used DDU to remove the NVIDIA drivers. The computer initially booted with the AMD card installed, but Windows crashed while I was installing AMD Adrenalin. It now repeatedly enters Automatic Repair and reports an SrtTrail.txt error. I have also seen a blue-screen error related to Windows not shutting down properly.
The RTX 4060 still works normally when I reinstall it, including after reinstalling the NVIDIA drivers, so the rest of the system appears functional. The RX 9060 XT displays an image in Safe Mode, but I cannot complete the AMD driver installation there because Adrenalin needs services that Safe Mode does not provide. Normal booting crashes again. Startup Repair, Command Prompt repairs, and other recovery options have not fixed it. The system has a 650 W power supply, which should meet the card's requirements.
Could this be a defective card, an AMD driver or Windows problem, a PCIe compatibility issue, or a limitation of the Lenovo OEM motherboard?
2 Answers
The older RTX 3050 and RTX 4060 use a different PCIe lane configuration from the RX 9060 XT, so the OEM board may be having trouble negotiating the new card's link settings. Clearing CMOS is worth trying, and if the firmware offers a PCIe generation option, manually setting it to Gen 4 instead of Auto may help. Lenovo systems often hide or limit these BIOS settings, though.
Make sure the motherboard BIOS is current and verify the exact power requirements and connectors for the RX 9060 XT. A power supply can appear fine with one graphics card but fail under the different load of another. The most useful test would be installing the card in a known-compatible computer; if it works there, the Lenovo system is the likely source of the issue, and if it fails there too, the card is probably faulty.
The BIOS is already up to date, and the system has a 650 W PSU. I am building a replacement system with a new CPU, motherboard, and power supply. If the 9060 XT still fails in that computer, I will know the card itself needs to be exchanged.
I cleared CMOS and tried forcing the slot to PCIe Gen 4, but neither fixed the problem. I decided to move ahead with a custom build using a new case, motherboard, power supply, and CPU instead of continuing to troubleshoot the Lenovo platform.