Hi all,
Recently I have noticed that a single red LED is flashing on one of the three power connecters, the far left one. I need to turn off my PSU at the switch to make it stop blinking.
This issue has only started recently and only appears when playing games.
My PSU is a Corsair RM850x, I use three separate PCIe power cables as recommended by ASUS, the card is running at stock with the latest bios.
You can see my full computer specifications in my profile.
Appreciate any help.
Beauzinga
Recently I have noticed that a single red LED is flashing on one of the three power connecters, the far left one. I need to turn off my PSU at the switch to make it stop blinking.
This issue has only started recently and only appears when playing games.
My PSU is a Corsair RM850x, I use three separate PCIe power cables as recommended by ASUS, the card is running at stock with the latest bios.
You can see my full computer specifications in my profile.
Appreciate any help.
Beauzinga
Beauzinga wrote:
Hi all,
Recently I have noticed that a single red LED is flashing on one of the three power connecters, the far left one. I need to turn off my PSU at the switch to make it stop blinking.
This issue has only started recently and only appears when playing games.
My PSU is a Corsair RM850x, I use three separate PCIe power cables as recommended by ASUS, the card is running at stock with the latest bios.
You can see my full computer specifications in my profile.
Appreciate any help.
Beauzinga
It may also PSU over load or cap not provide sufficient capacity load. It also depend how your internal peripheral drawing power from PSU, and not much juice left from PSU. 850W PSU my not sufficient power to drive 3090 let alone OC variant. But some of them claim it sufficient enough and debate goes on. It all depend the part and peripheral within your system power drawing from your PSU.
Long story short: I narrowed this down to the power connectors. Making sure they are all well-pressed and perpendicular to the graphics card made it impossible for me to reproduce the red blinking lights with any of the other variables that were involved during diagnostics.
Hi.
This stuff started happening to me too this week. I am with an Asus ROG Strix GeForce RTX 3090 OC Edition (bought in the start of 2021 still at the minimal-margin + MSRP) and a Corsair AX1600i (bought in August 2020).
Look, things have been running smoothly most of the time, and I've had the red blink a few times on a SINGLE power port on the card. I mistook it for 'the plug got loose', because it resolved every time after I (shut everything down, and) unplugged and re-plugged it. Now that I've seen that video where NVIDIA explains the feature, I know it's the low voltage that triggers the blink.
That is the trivia. Now, this week, the blink started being there on every gameplay, on the middle plug only. However tempting that may be, I can't ignore it. So, I tried this:
- Re-plugging the power to the graphics card; failed
- Trying other ports on the PSU; failed
- For testing, I used maxed-out Cyberpunk 2077 and the 123% power limit on the graphics card. This hits 465+ watts in total power draw on the graphics card.
The problem persisted specifically on the middle power port on the card. Hmm. I looked at what GPU-Z measured. Indeed, there was an interesting detail.
Indeed the port nr. 2 did have the lowest voltage of them all after all. Maybe it's the cable? I did swap the cable, and PSU port as well, but then I rushed a bit and have done one more thing that might have been the cause. While looking at PSU's stats, I noticed that it was in multi-rail mode, which is not how I intended to use it. At my fairly beginner's tech awareness level, the single-rail mode is the best way to equalize power delivery across the PSU, so I selected that too.
I could not reproduce the red blinking in the last hour, and indeed the voltages are away from that 11.7 V.
I will let you know how this develops. However much I don't want to go there, I think I should switch back to multi-rail mode and see if the red blink comes back and what are the voltages when it occurs. It could as well be that the PSU got reset to multi-rail, and is unable to keep things stable in that mode for whatever reason.
Update: I couldn't break it as easily in the multi-rail mode. That leaves two known suspects (there could be more that are unknown):
- 1: The cable. It's a single-line original AX1600i's cable. Just so I mention it: every power port on the card has its own cable, coming out of its own plug.
- 2: It could as well be that some power ports on the PSU are giving in. See, this PSU has a history. Its OCP (or similar) was triggered three times back in the beginning of 2022, when I inadvertently shorted my Mobo. The PSU smelled, and some things did melt in there. Its self-check did pass, so I didn't try to ask for repairing it / replace it, but it's fair to say it might not operate fully up to the spec. No other evidence of that so far, however.
- Something else that tips things to the other side is that I had problems with these original PSU's cables before the incident with the mobo. One cable/port stood out by allowing for a very shaky voltage. Up and down up and down, wtf. I did go through other checks as well, but the voltage problem was again resolved back then by just using another cable. I am running out of cables, though, but this power cable swap might as well been again the right fix. The PSU does pass its self-check after all.
All in all, if you can help it, I suggest that you do not ignore the red blink. Fire up GPU-Z, and look at the voltages at the power ports. The voltage that matched up with the red blink was 11.7 V over here. Maybe you can notice a pattern on your end? Keep measuring and stay curious! Also, check if there is an angle to play in the the single vs. multi-rail setting for your PSU.
N.B.: The self-check for AX1600i is to have only its power cord plugged, and to press that small button for a short time. The green light means self-test pass. Amber would be yikes. Check the manual.
Update 2: Now the pin 1 exhibits the same issues. So, perhaps it's not even the cable, but the PSU isn't able to carry it (anymore). After those stresses at the start of 2022, something might have been degrading internally, and the PSU might have reached its time. Will keep you posted.
Update 3: Nay, nothing really helped... until I started tinkering with the connections between the cable and graphics card connector (of course, all powered off and off power). I did my best to align the connectors to be as perpendicular as possible to the card, and that resulted in pretty stable voltages. So far, so good. The red blink is gone.
