The RX 6600 XT I ordered off of Amazon for the 2012 Mac Pro arrived last night, and a few minutes later I had it installed in the PC I prepped for video card flashing… I use an older Intel Desktop Board for this because of the amount of info it gives when messing with hardware…
The board has two sets of firmware in case you mangle one while fiddling, has power and reset right on the board because it’s test hardware, shows the boot process on the green 7-segments next to the ram, and the row of green LEDs at the bottom show the status of major components (the one in the middle shows the status of the video card), and most importantly it has an LED skull with blinking eyes for hard drive read/write!
Anyway, the machine wouldn’t boot with the RX 6600 XT in the system. Everything halted with post code EB which is where the system looks for video BIOS / firmware on the bus – and it found nothing.
This usually means the card has been reflashed with mining firmware, which doesn’t require video output so it’s disabled. In fact anything not associated with compute is usually disabled for crypto mining.
Crypto mining essentially turns electricity and video cards into imaginary money, so getting a used mining card is generally more miss than hit as it’s been run harder than it was designed to, 24 / 7, until it either had a problem or was replaced with something faster.
Now, while I could most likely fix this card by flashing the original firmware back onto it, the fact that the seller clearly didn’t even test it before slapping it into a used static bag and chucking it into a box didn’t leave me with much confidence.
So I just requested a refund, put the card back in the used static bag and the box, and headed over to the local UPS store to send it back… The UPS Store closes at 19:00, and while I got there at 18:34 they were already closed for the day, unfortunately.
So I’ll send it back after work today.
And I ordered another RX 6600 XT from Amazon. A brand new, never been used one… Of course it was a hundred bucks more than the used mining card – but at least it will work.
Hopefully.
Nothing is guaranteed with Amazon… I’ll probably get some cheap Chinese knockoff card. :/
Listening to "Taste Like Venom" by GUNSHIP