I've built a new PC based on Asus TUF x570 Gaming Plus MB(bios version 1202) with Ryzen 7 3700X, 32GB of DDR 4-3200 RAM. I installed two OSes on it - Windows 10 build 1903, and Ubuntu 19.10. The problem manifests itself in both.
Basically I first tried to use a MSI GeForce RTX 2060 Ventus 8GB OC card. It worked fine until I tried to install the GeForce driver on windows, or tried to enable NVidia drivers on Linux. Windows basically crashed completely with black screen. Linux crashed but came back to life after it unloaded the driver. Some errors from Linux are: "NVRM: RMInitAdapter Failed". After trying various things including:
- looking very carefully with a dentist mirror that the cards are seating properly in the slot - everything looks fine, but still I triwed reseating them.
- changing PSU to 1000W one
- reinstalling windows and Linux
- different versions of NVidia drivers
- resetting bios settigns
- updating bios
- removing my M2 SSD to make sure it is not messing with anything.(there are no other devices installed)
I thought this must be an issue with a GPU so I bought the second one of the same type. The second GPU behaved exactly the same. So I returned them and bought a Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 Super Gaming OC 3X 8GB - same thing happens.
However, if I place the GPUs in the second PCIe x16 slot (the one that has no contacts in the right side of the slot) the GPUs are working fine but at PCIe x4 speed.
I'm not sure what else to do. I'm planning to return the ASUS MB and replace it for a Gigabyte one next as I suspect it is the motherboard as it doesn't even have a way to disable PCIe 4.0 in the bios. People I talked with in the shop claim all those GPUs work fine on their x570 chipset based boards - but they all have Gigabyte and MSI boards and they lock PCIe to 3.0.
Is this a failed motherboard? Should I exchange it for another ASUS TUF with expectation it'll work? Or can this be caused by the CPU perhaps? I believe first 16 lanes of PCI are connected directly to the CPU. Is it possible I have a dodgy CPU? (It was new and unopened, but who knows, it may be faulty).
Any ideas how to troubleshoot it further?