Blew up an XFX Black 7970...What else???

[Ssgthollywood]

I'm an idiot...perhaps you can help advise.

It's been a pretty long while since I built my last machine, and a lot has changed. I did tons of research and thought I had my plan together, but apparently I failed in at least one critical area.

In trying to figure out which power cables to use on my new XFX Radeon Double Black 7970 card, I couldn't find but one 8-pin connector for the 8-pin PCI-E slot on the card (I didn't know the 6-pin plus the little dongle for +2 additional pins for the PCI-E connection was what I needed). The 6-pin connection was a no-brainer. Soooo...what I did, in my no-so-infinite-wisdom, was try extremely hard to fit the one available 8-pin power plug into the 8-pin PCI-E. You might imagine this was a very difficult fit, but fit it eventually did. The shape of the internal pins are extremely similiar, if not exact.

As you can guess, when I powered up the machine I had all kinds of weirdness. At first the board's LED indictor stopped on CPU, but that was because I had a memory DIMM slightly out of socket. Once that was corrected it went through and posted okay (I guess), but the BOOT_Device light lit up for about 25 or 30 seconds. The monitor never came on.

I then plugged into the VGA card on the motherboard and it looked like the BIOS was up and running fine. I further confirmed this by installing Win 7 and getting the computer up and running in at least a cursory way (in other words, no extensive stress tests or gaming yet).

My not-so-expert opinion was that I had fried the videocard, and so I replaced it. Here's the question (finally): Any chance I fried out the PCI-E slot or harmed the power supply? I'll have the new card in tonight and don't want to take any risks with another $600 video card.

Here are relevant stats:
Asus P8Z68-V Pro mobo
i7-2700K proc
CM Hyper-master 212 Evo cooler
PC Power and Cooling 910w Silencer power sup
Corsair Force3 GT 120gb SSD
WD 1.5tb Cavair Black HDD
Patriot Gamer 3 mem, 1600, 8gb


Thanks in advance!

 

[ricardois]

probably just the video card have burned, you will just discover if anything else burned after intalling the new one, but there will be no problems to the card itself... don't forget to connect all the 8pins this time...

 

[inzone]

For starters I'm surprised it booted because it sounded like you put the 8 pin cpu power connector into the video card hence the destruction of the card but the cpu does need that power connector.If you fried the slot then the card just won't work and you can try the paper clip test on the psu.

http://dodji.seketeli.com/downloads/shuttle-psu-paper-clip-test.pdf

 

[Ssgthollywood]

Inzone, yeah guess that's right. The two 4-pin atx connectors wouldve been a lot of power to the poor old 7970. Scary, huh? Amazing what newbs can do.

 

[Maximus_Delta]

A good rule for a newb and a lesson learned from this is don't force stuff. Things should naturally fit together... if you are having to force anything in (mean in the literally sense, more than just push home firmly) be it plugs into sockets etc then stop and really think about what you are doing.

Its very hard to blow up anything on a modern PC these days so hat's off to hollywood for finding a way to fry no less than a 7970.

 

[Ssgthollywood]

Best answer selected by Ssgthollywood.

 

[Ssgthollywood]

Yeah, I totally already knew that from my days as an auto-mechanic. But I let the stress of the expensive new build get to me, I guess.

Happy to report the new videocard worked great, however. RMA is a beautiful thing.

 

[Delengowski]

you schmuck

 

[a_tractor]

hahahahahaha. nice you got them to replace it.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey