I've had my PC build for about two and a half years now, and I recently added a new NVMe drive. Everything was fine until a few days ago when my GPU started giving me trouble. Both of my monitors lost contact at the same time, and the only fix was to reboot manually. Last night, my PC wouldn't boot at all. This morning, I laid it on its side, reseated the GPU, and it booted up. However, when I tried standing it upright, it stopped working again. This has happened consistently—booting when it's sideways but failing as soon as I turn it upright. I'm wondering if the issue is with the GPU, the motherboard, or possibly both. I've checked that the GPU is seated well and that the slot lock is engaged.
1 Answer
It sounds like you're dealing with GPU sag or a loose PCIe connection. When your PC is upright, the weight of the graphics card might be pulling it slightly out of the slot, causing the VGA light to turn on and the video to drop out. But when the system is on its side, gravity helps hold the card firmly in place, letting it work properly.
Here are some things you might want to check:
- Make sure the GPU is properly seated.
- Check if the PCIe latch is engaged.
- You could even try supporting the GPU temporarily with a book to see if that helps.
- If you have a different PCIe power cable, try that too.
- Lastly, consider testing it in the second PCIe x16 slot. If it boots there, it might mean the top slot is failing.
It’s probably the GPU sag that's causing the issue rather than the NVMe or the PSU, but I'd love to see your PC specs to help narrow it down further!
Here are the specs:
- MSI B350 Pro-VDH
- KFA2 RTX 3060 Ti
- AMD Ryzen 5 5600X
- EVGA 750GT