I bought a used Sapphire Pulse 9070 XT from a seller in Italy. I briefly tested it in a friend's PC before accepting the delivery, and it displayed an image and reached the desktop, although we did not install the drivers at the time.
A few days later, I installed it in my new system with a Ryzen 7 7800X3D, Gigabyte X670 Aorus Elite, and 32 GB of DDR5. The system worked through the CPU's integrated graphics, but the motherboard did not detect the card and stayed on the VGA debug LED. We updated the BIOS and tried different settings, including Resizable BAR, 4G decoding, PCIe Gen 3 and Gen 4 modes, CSM, and Fast Boot.
We tested the rest of the system with a GTX 1650 and an RTX 3090, and both worked immediately. The 9070 XT was also tested in another computer with a Core i9-10900K, where it failed to post as well. At one point, after moving it back into my system, it unexpectedly posted and reached the desktop, but the computer crashed while installing the graphics drivers. After removing the incomplete installation with DDU, the card occasionally posted again after being removed and reinstalled, but it always crashed during driver installation. It has not worked since.
The card has now been tested in three computers with four different power supplies, while the other components work with different graphics cards. Windows Reliability History reports a hardware error. The card does not have a dual-BIOS switch, and I am wondering whether this could be a corrupted VBIOS, damaged VRAM, a power-delivery fault, or a cracked solder joint.
Has anyone seen a graphics card behave this way, and is there a realistic diagnostic or repair procedure worth trying? The seller does not have the original receipt, so an RMA may be difficult and expensive.
3 Answers
Check Windows Reliability History or Event Viewer for hardware-related crashes, and make sure the card was also tested in every suitable PCIe slot. That said, testing it in three computers with several power supplies is already strong evidence that the card itself is defective. Even if it occasionally displays an image, crashing during driver initialization points to a fault that software cleanup is unlikely to fix.
With the card failing to post in multiple systems and the other GPUs working normally, this is very likely a hardware fault rather than a Windows driver problem. A corrupted VBIOS, damaged memory or power circuitry, or an intermittent board connection could explain why it briefly worked and then failed. I would first ask the seller for a refund or return, since board-level repair can easily cost more than the card is worth.
Trying Linux could help separate a driver problem from a hardware-detection problem. If it boots, run lspci to see whether the card is detected, then use suitable diagnostic tools to check the firmware and memory. You could compare the VBIOS checksum with the correct firmware and consider reflashing it, but only if the card is consistently detected and you can verify the exact model and firmware. A bad flash can make the situation worse, and this model does not have a second BIOS to fall back to.
I can try Linux, although the card usually fails before the operating system loads and does not post at all. That makes me think this is more than a normal driver-installation issue.
Reliability History does report a hardware error. Unfortunately, we accepted the delivery after the initial test, so getting a return or refund may be difficult.