Hi Everyone,

First-time poster here. I ran into a problem after upgrading my rig with an RX 480 today. Everything was working great but then after a 7-hour straight gaming session with Witcher 3 Blood and Wine (which by the way is AMAZING) I got artifacting and then everything went black and the sound cut out. I reboot my PC several times, but nothing would come up. After looking up the error code on the motherboard, I found that it was "No VGA present" so at first I thought the card was dead and I put back in my 750 ti, but it too would not work with the same error code. So I put the RX 480 in the second PCI-E slot and now everything is working just fine. After everything was A-OK I tried slot 1 again and it failed again, so now I'm in slot 2.

I did a Google search to see about this problem and I found several articles about the RX 480 overdrawing power on the PCI-E slot. HOWEVER, I'm not sure I'm ready to pin this issue on that yet, hence why I'm posting. I feel like having the card for just a day and only having a 7-hour gaming session is too soon to cause failure. What do you guys think? Maybe it's just a coincidence? I'm no expert on power draw or what overdrawing would actually do to a slot or even the motherboard as a whole. I also feel like if it was due to overdrawing of power that the whole south-bridge would get messed up and then the second PCI-E slot wouldn't work either, but it does work. I could be wrong in thinking that, though. Anyway, thoughts?

Here are my full specs:

Processor: AMD FX-8350 @ 4.5GHz

RAM: 12GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3 @ 1600MHz

Motherboard: ASRock 970 Extreme4

GPU: RX 480 8GB Overclocked to 1350MHz (turbo) core (+83MHz, no overvolting, stock VRAM speed)

PSU: Corsair CX500 80+ Bronze

SSD: 960GB Sandisk Extreme Pro

OS: Windows 10 (everything up to date)

*EDIT* Many people requested pictures, so here they are, attached. Note the error code "d6" on the motherboard when the card is in slot 1. d6 means that VGA is not detected.

*EDIT 2* With the help of the community we've discovered that the left most side of the PCI-E slot did indeed get burned. This is new damage and it is the reason the slot no longer functions. GPU temperature at the time of failure was only 78C, we'll within normal ranges. In case it's relevant, CPU Temps were 52-54C on each core. This leads me to the ultimate conclusion that the 480 overdrawing on power did indeed burn out the slot. And just to keep count, 3 other people on this thread are claiming to have the same issue as well so far.

Also since many people are asking, YES the tower does have other fans: 1 in the front 1 on the top and 2 on the side panel.

*EDIT 3* To answer a few more common questions: My old 750Ti DID have a 6 pin connector. It was not reference. My overall system draw, measured at the wall via a Cyberpower UPS never exceeded 295w while gaming. Max draw when running something like Folding@Home using max CPU and GPU, however, did hit 380w. This is not something I normally do and I only did it to test max draw moments ago.