Phil's 6900XT Died... Here's what we think happened...

I'd probably just replace the BIOS chip. I have a dead 6900XT PCB that should have 2 perfectly good BIOS chips on it.

RIP....just in time for the 6950. Coincidence? I THINK NOT! (well played Phil)

Board level repair for a bios chip is pretty straight forward for anyone with board level repair skills. Usually the troubleshooting is the tuff part, trying to determine the failed component, and you've already done that.

"Adamant IT" on youtube has several videos showing where you can replace a bios chip if you have the gear (micro soldering, chip flashing device, etc), that would make a fun 'watch jay learn how to do this' video

I would love to see what an RMA would look on this card. Would they send you a new one or just replace the BIOS chip? Have you thought about replacing the BIOS chip yourself could but an interesting experiment now that the card is not trustworthy.

I definitely get a hold of the manufacturer let him know what happened and just see if an RMA is an option it would at least be good info for anybody else running that card

Bad ICs happen. This seems like a situation where you could just RMA the card, but failing that, it's totally possible to replace a BIOS ROM IC. You order a new one from Digi-Key, Mouser, etc. and then replace the dead one (gotta figure out which one is which) with hot air and a preheater (and flux, solder, et cetera, obviously). I'm pretty confident I could do this, if I had the card in my hands.

Flash the quiet bios on the performance bios. You could have some stuck bits that aren’t taking. If it works then flash the performance bios back. Note: This is a problem I run into a lot with PLC’s.

The bios chip actually worked fine, at least on 3 of it's connectors to the motherboard, you were able to successfully program it. The motherboard has a problem reading it, which is a different pin. You might be able to fix it with a reflow or redo the soldering properly but you'll have to find the correct one. Or you could find a donor card that's broken because of some other issue and swap chips. In either case, you'll have to resolder the bios chip to fix it.

Id run the RMA just for giggles n haha's. See what they do about it incase this happens / happened to other people out there. Be nice to have peace of mind knowing what the issue is as well as knowing if there is recourse for repair / replace.

I ironically had an issue recently myself where my AMD drivers "uninstalled themselves", and when I ran a catlog of the entire system and just kept attempting to recreate the issue, I caught windows 10 itself deleting the drivers and replacing them with the microsoft release of the drivers, *and it would do this during startup!* So I only caught it when I hooked my backup/game server hosting computer to monitor the activity in this one from boot-time... Worse yet, windows defender was putting my screen capture software into "quarantine" there for a long while until I disabled defender and switched to another anti-v. It appears that microsoft caught my rant about it on twitter earlier this year, and hopefully they're still actually on it enough to make sure this isn't something in the OS that's tampering with the card and drivers again.

"F*ck it, we'll do it live!" That is an EPIC reference. LMFAO!!!

If the utility doesn't work, use a ch341a programmer. Brought back my bricked 5700xt, sooooooo good.

Love the videos, Jay and Phil. Thanks for being around and keeping the videos going!

Thanks Jay you have been a really good inspiration, and watching your vids has taught me a lot. Please keep posting and thank you.

Damnit, Jay. As of October 1, 2019, Toshiba Memory is now KIOXIA. Unfortunately, our lineup of consumer flash and storage products are no longer available in the United States, but we will continue to offer support for Toshiba Memory and OCZ SSDs. Here you can research warranty information and get support for your legacy products. We thank you for being a loyal customer all these years. You can still look forward to seeing KIOXIA SSDs in laptops, PCs and data centers everywhere as we continue to uplift the world with “memory.”

I just finished my first full custom build on Sunday and went to Micro Center to do it. Wouldn't've even gone there if it wasn't for some of your videos!

It would be really cool to see you play around with 3D printing a new shroud for the cooler on that card. Or possibly just see what ridiculous mods you can do to it that you wouldn't normally do to a GPU for fear of breaking it.

I have the Sapphire Nitro + SE and it's been powerful, quiet and efficient - the sales guy at MC recommended the Sapphire card over the PowerColor cards because of quality and reliability, I'm glad I took his advice.

Even if stuck on a single BIOS, you can use a flash programmer like an EZP 2019 to flash it onto the hardware chip. If it's not the BIOS chip, it's probably a component that initializes the chip, like power-on signal.