About a month ago, I got a decent deal on an XFX Mercury Radeon RX 7900 XT. While everything works fine once booted, getting there can be tricky.
Sometimes on boot, the GPU shuts off - fans stop, lights go out, and there’s no video output. The rest of the system appears unaffected. If I plug an HDMI cable into the motherboard (i.e., integrated graphics), I get output, can enter my LUKS password, and boot normally. At that point, the GPU powers on and functions like nothing happened. I then switch my monitor to DisplayPort and continue as usual.
Initially, this only happened occasionally, but it’s now a regular issue. I’ve left the HDMI cable permanently connected just to deal with it.
I’m running the latest available kernel (currently 6.14.4-300.fc42.x86_64), hoping for improvements, but no luck so far. I also have to manually run sudo grubby --set-default-index=0 after each update to boot into the latest kernel, but that’s probably an unrelated user error
Is there anything I can do to resolve this, aside from waiting on better driver support?
Thanks for the input. I disabled integrated graphics in the BIOS and the PC initially booted successfully - though very slowly, I had a black screen forever. However, with the very next reboot it failed again. I added the logs of the failed boot to the Gitlab snippet from above: Fedora 42 debug info ($4839378) · Snippets · GitLab
One thing I find interesting, is that the system basically “halts” after about 60 seconds (first log at 17:30:29, last log at 17:31:27). That is interesting for two reasons:
I’m 90% sure I waited for more than 60 seconds
I force-shutdown the PC by pressing the power button for 5 seconds. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that should not trigger any shutdown sequence, because it’s basically the same as cutting the power to the PC.
Which leads me to believe, that those logs are not the logs of the failed boot, but the logs of the boot before that - I booted into Fedora to run systemctl reboot --firmware. Which then again makes me question, how do I get logs of the failed boot attempts?
When you added the 7900 to your system did you check that your power supply rating is suitable for the 7900? I had to upgrade my power supply so that I could run my 7700.
I needed a 850W PSU, what is your PSU rating?
If it’s not powerful enough I would expect the GPU to crash.
I guess too low power would mostly come into play during high demand (aka, gaming, AI stuff), but I can game just fine (the Oblivion remake brings the GPU to sweat, but not down )