For those who have followed along with my boring PC woes, they started when I decided I needed to throw a serious effort at out FAH team and upgraded from my 1080 GPU to a 2070 Super. One of the justifications of doing so was I didn’t have any USB C ports, and the 2070 Super comes with a USB C port.
On swapping it in, I powered everything up and my VR headset (Samsung Odyssey +) wouldn’t work anymore. The PC sees the HDMI cable, but nothing from the USB. Tried 6 different ports, nothing. Same with my steering wheel, and my Xbox wireless controller adapter.
I decide to be less fancy-shmancy and pull out the 1080 and give my kid a huge upgrade. So now I’m down to just the 2070 and still no joy.
I used to be a computer tech, so my troubleshooting skills are pretty solid. Drivers, moving cards around, adding a different USB card, nothing. I take it as a sign from FSM that I should upgrade my motherboard and CPU since there is clearly an incompatibility.
$600 later and I’ve got a shiny new Ryzen 7 3700X running in a 570 mobo and 32gb of 3200mhz RAM. Full system wipe and fresh installs of all relevant stuff. Same problem.
So yesterday I decide to be truly brilliant. I take the devices that won’t work and plug them into my kid’s computer, my Surface, and my Macbook. Guess what, nothing works with them. Thinking back, what do they all have in common? I plugged them all into that USB C on the GPU, and they never worked again.
Now I’m pissed and I look for a sacrificial device to test my theory. Digging through my stuff I find a garbage controller. Plug into another port, works. GPU USB C, nothing. Back into previous port, nothing. That device is now completely dead as well. Something is wrong with that port and it is killing anything plugged into it.
The steering wheel has a nice reset procedure that puts it in bootloader mode. That doesn’t do anything, neither does plugging it into the PS4 which it used to work with.
So final verdict, I have a murderous USB C port on my new EVGA 2070 Super card. And it took out $375 worth of equipment I care about, and some more things I really don’t care about. Damn it. The money and time I spent don’t phase me, I enjoy a good upgrade and troubleshoot. It’s that it was all caused by a defective device that piss me off.