©ASUSTEK COMPUTER INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Whitestar69 · ‎01-12-2021

Hi everyone, just wondering if anyone here has had issues running their 3000 series video card in the 1st PCIE slot on their ROG Strix x570-e motherboard?

My Asus Strix 3090 OC Gaming card will not work properly in the 1st slot but works perfectly in the second slot (at PCI 4.0 x 8). In the 1st slot it takes around 3 minutes to reach the BIOS screen getting stuck at q-code 07 and 97 before displaying that their was some sort of problem and I needed to press F1 to enter the BIOS. Interestingly the BIOS screen refreshes super slow (like 10 seconds to draw the screen from top to bottom)

I have tried multiple BIOS’s on the MB (currently 3202) & updated the GPU to Bios version 2. I also disconnected all devices on the MB except for my 5900x CPU, HyperX Predator 3600 ram (in the recommended slots), Antec 1000w PSU, USB keyboard and HDMI cable but that made no difference. There are no overclocks and everything is set to Auto in the bios. I even cleared the CMOS a few times.

I tried forcing the 1st slot to PCI 3.0 mode & the 3090 did boot into windows without taking 3 minutes to get past the bios screen but the Nvidia drivers don’t recognise the card and Windows 10 runs really slowly. The card “appears” to be seated ok in slot 1 (hard to see) but it does have more flex than when seated in Slot 2. Its also wayyy more difficult to remove the card from slot 1 than slot 2 for some reason.

My old 1080 TI works fine in the x570’s 1st slot (runs at PCI 3.0 x16) while the Strix 3090 works fine in my old Z170I motherboard’s first PCI 3.0 x16 slot (running a 6700k CPU). I have no idea if its a BIOS, GPU or Motherboard issue (or a combination of components).

There are some scratches on the 3090’s connector pins that plug into the MB slot but nothing major (plus the card works at x16 mode in my old MB). Ideally I would love to try it in another x570 MB but I don’t know anyone here who has one.

Has anyone experienced something similar or perhaps has some advice? I am not sure wether to wait and see if a future BIOS eventually resolves the issue or to buy a different motherboard & try my luck with that.

Thanks

KMagic · ‎01-13-2021

Given no one has responded I will offer only one thing I can think to check. Ive had this happen just a few times over the 20 years ive been building and overclocking....... Make SURE the video card is slotted fully into the pcie slot. take a flashlight and check it good. You shold see NONE of the slot pins showing. If you look back at the slot and can see the top of the pins sitting just outside the slot then it is not fully seated. The pins should fully disappear into the slot. Ive had video cards be partly seated and still function but have lots of wild behaviour as a result, and often perform much worse than normal in games, but they wont error or throw a code. If the card is seated then Im kind of at a loss. Weird issue for sure.

Whitestar69 · ‎01-13-2021

Thanks for the reply. Its pretty hard to see the pins due to the CPU heatsink and the massive size of the card. Initially i thought it could be a pin connection issue so i removed the motherboard chipset heatsinks incase they were stopping the card from fully slotting in. I guess I should remove the motherboard from the case & remove the CPU to get a good look at whats going on. I also just ordered a MSI x570 motherboard out of frustration so that will tell me one way or another if the Card is more likely to be at fault.

While searching online I did find a few instances of people with similar issues with different cards but there was mixture of reasons. Faulty motherboards, faulty video cards, BIOS issues and even poorly seated CPU's or CPU's with bent pins (the one thing i haven't checked yet)

KMagic · ‎01-13-2021

Whitestar69 wrote:
Thanks for the reply. Its pretty hard to see the pins due to the CPU heatsink and the massive size of the card. Initially i thought it could be a pin connection issue so i removed the motherboard chipset heatsinks incase they were stopping the card from fully slotting in. I guess I should remove the motherboard from the case & remove the CPU to get a good look at whats going on. I also just ordered a MSI x570 motherboard out of frustration so that will tell me one way or another if the Card is more likely to be at fault.

While searching online I did find a few instances of people with similar issues with different cards but there was mixture of reasons. Faulty motherboards, faulty video cards, BIOS issues and even poorly seated CPU's or CPU's with bent pins (the one thing i haven't checked yet)

All good points. You state however that your previous card works 100% fine in that slot however, which is what really makes me scratch my head. If it was some issue with bent pins on a cpu, you would expect to see issues regardless of video card installed. Sucks to have issues like this, but the good thing it seems is that nothing appears to actually be broken, as you've verified the 3090 works in a different pc. This is a good high end asus board. I just cant help but suspect the card isnt seating properly in the slot. The times I have seen cards not seated the behavior was a super slow system. Gaming performance would run at 1/3rd the FPS as expected, stuff like that, but nothing would actually crash. I would at least pull the heatsink off the cpu so you can verify its going into the slot fully and properly. The important thing is that the 3090 IS NOT damaged if it works in another system just fine, so that should be some relief. I have the same 3090 strix. its a $2,000 purchase that has no stock so having it go bad would be worst case scenario. Please follow up when you find the issue because Im really curious. A 2nd mobo to test will be good. I run an MSI board with my 3090 (Intel platform though) and they work well together.

EDIT: IF you can get the ard into windows, check your system voltage, power draw, power from the pcie slot, power pin voltage and wattage etc. Just see if you see anything off. GPUZ can give you all this info. Open the software and go to sensors tab. If you can run a 3d load try it and see what you see. If its a problem with seating you will likely see some odd behavior on the power draw and clocks. Power draw would be unusually low under load for example, but clocks and voltage may be super high. Ive seen the symptoms so I just kinda know what it looks like now. IF however you do verify the card is slotted 100% then Im truly at a loss. The fact that you have issues even in bios screen to me is really telling. It is not any kind of software issue. Its 100% hardware or bios level issue.

Whitestar69 · ‎01-13-2021

KMagic wrote:
If it was some issue with bent pins on a cpu, you would expect to see issues regardless of video card installed.

It is my understanding that Slot 1, the CPU & 1 NVMe drive share pcie lanes. Slot 2 uses a different set of pcie lanes. I guess that would mean if there was an issue with the CPU its possible there could be some kind of weird resource / communication issue with other devices on the same lane. But i agree with you .. i really doubt this is the issue.

I will give GPUZ a crack tomorrow (if i can get into windows). Even running Youtube causes stuttering video & broken sound so i can try that. The card actually runs pretty well in slot 2 (around 20,000 gpu score in 3d mark) but the fact it sits hard up against the PSU means the temperatures are not great. I can get around this by undervolting the card but that defeats the purpose of having the OC version of the 3090 😄

Whitestar69 · ‎01-14-2021

KMagic wrote:
EDIT: IF you can get the ard into windows, check your system voltage, power draw, power from the pcie slot, power pin voltage and wattage etc. Just see if you see anything off. GPUZ can give you all this info. Open the software and go to sensors tab. If you can run a 3d load try it and see what you see. If its a problem with seating you will likely see some odd behavior on the power draw and clocks. Power draw would be unusually low under load for example, but clocks and voltage may be super high. Ive seen the symptoms so I just kinda know what it looks like now. IF however you do verify the card is slotted 100% then Im truly at a loss. The fact that you have issues even in bios screen to me is really telling. It is not any kind of software issue. Its 100% hardware or bios level issue.

I managed to run GPUZ for a couple of minutes or so in slot 1 before the machine was unusable. GPUz wasn't able to record data every second towards the end of the file as the machine was locking up a lot. I also ran it when the GPU was in Slot 2 and recorded some data. I attached the results in a image.

The only real differences i saw was the GPU clock increased to 2010mhz while the memory clock stayed at 101.3 & also the PerfCap Reason changed to a value of 4 "Indicating perf is limited by reliability voltage." This value was always 16 on slot 2. I also noticed the 3090 fans came on a lot more when it was plugged into slot 1 like the card was under more load though the stats didn't really show that.

KMagic · ‎01-15-2021

Whitestar69 wrote:
I managed to run GPUZ for a couple of minutes or so in slot 1 before the machine was unusable. GPUz wasn't able to record data every second towards the end of the file as the machine was locking up a lot. I also ran it when the GPU was in Slot 2 and recorded some data. I attached the results in a image.

The only real differences i saw was the GPU clock increased to 2010mhz while the memory clock stayed at 101.3 & also the PerfCap Reason changed to a value of 4 "Indicating perf is limited by reliability voltage." This value was always 16 on slot 2. I also noticed the 3090 fans came on a lot more when it was plugged into slot 1 like the card was under more load though the stats didn't really show that.

Hmm. without the card being under a 3d load its hard to see much there. The perf code 4 is coming up because the card shot to max core voltage for some reason. What was the pc doing when it shot up like this? Just sitting idle at desktop? really odd behavior if so. Be curious what you see on the new motherboard. I still would want to verify 100% its seating properly. I wouldnt run the card until I verify its going all the way into the slot. you just need a visual confirmation to make sure the pins are completely disappearing into the slot. If you are pushing it in, and the card is hitting something and the pins are still visible outside the slot a little bit then that would 100% be the problem here.

Whitestar69 · ‎01-16-2021

I swapped out the Motherboard for the MSI x570 Tomahawk and the 3090 is now working fine in slot 1 at PCI4 x16. Interestingly the 3dmark score for the PCIE 4.0 x16 slot is about the same as it was for the 4.0 x8 slot on the Asus MB. I guess the 3090 doesn't need a x16 slot to get the most out of it. Just curious as to what the Timespy graphics score is in your system? Mine is around 20100 with the default GPU clocks.

After removing the Asus MB and the CPU i also slotted the 3090 into the MB to see if it was seated level. From what i could see everything looked ok.
One scary thing that happened was when i removed the Heatsink it was stuck to the CPU (i used some fancy paste/glue). When i yanked on the Heatsink a little harder the CPU was ripped out of the CPU Slot (still attached to the Heatsink) while the CPU lever was still down. I thought maybe i had destroyed the CPU but luckily I hadn't.

KMagic · ‎01-21-2021

Whitestar69 wrote:
I swapped out the Motherboard for the MSI x570 Tomahawk and the 3090 is now working fine in slot 1 at PCI4 x16. Interestingly the 3dmark score for the PCIE 4.0 x16 slot is about the same as it was for the 4.0 x8 slot on the Asus MB. I guess the 3090 doesn't need a x16 slot to get the most out of it. Just curious as to what the Timespy graphics score is in your system? Mine is around 20100 with the default GPU clocks.

After removing the Asus MB and the CPU i also slotted the 3090 into the MB to see if it was seated level. From what i could see everything looked ok.
One scary thing that happened was when i removed the Heatsink it was stuck to the CPU (i used some fancy paste/glue). When i yanked on the Heatsink a little harder the CPU was ripped out of the CPU Slot (still attached to the Heatsink) while the CPU lever was still down. I thought maybe i had destroyed the CPU but luckily I hadn't.

Im several days late. I suspected that swapping the motherboard would likely see the issue go away. I will try to post back with the timespy score I get in my system.

Strix 3090 OC24 not working correctly in 1st PCIE slot on Strix X570-e motherboard