Sorry if there's a better community to put this in.
Basically title, I have a 9070xt and whenever I turn my PC on, the GPU turns on (RGB and fans), but I don't get any post or display to either of my two monitors. I only know the rest of the PC is working because I can ssh in. According to fastfetch my GPU is "mesa llvmpipe". After taking the 9070 out and putting my old 6700xt in, everything seemed to work fine.
I brought it to a PC shop just to see if everything still worked. The 9070 worked in their machine, and it also worked when they put it back into mine. I didn't touch anything, brought it back home, and now it's back to it's previous behavior.
I already have a new psu on the way (550w made sense when I first put the system together) but I'm not actually sure it's causing my current problem because it worked at the PC shop.
Any help or insight would be appreciated and I can update with more information if required
550W is woefully inadequate for a 9070XT (and even your old 6700XT), though I doubt that’s the source of this problem as power consumption shouldn’t be all that high during boot / basic desktop use.
Does your 6700XT work consistently and reliably in this system? If so, the 9070XT is likely to be the issue.
Unfortunately, problems with computer components can often be intermittent.
In terms of symptoms, “no display” can manifest in a few different ways and a key differentiator is whether or not the monitor gets a signal. Some might display an OSD message that they aren’t receiving a signal. Some have a status indicator light that changes states depending on the presence of a signal. An LCD monitor staying on (main power / signal light on, backlight staying on) but on a blank black screen is often indicative of a defect in the graphics card (usually memory)
Others have offered speculation that there is something going on on with your software environment, I would expect you to at least see the motherboard manufacturer’s logo if that were the case.
I think people generally overestimate how much PSU they actually need, though.
Since I'm running a 3090 and a 32-core Threadripper, among other things, I picked a 1000W power supply. Reasonable enough.
But I also have it plugged into a UPS that shows current power usage, and the total input power of the PC is ~250W at idle, ~650W at full load, and I've never seen it go above 700W at all, ever. And that's including accessories that aren't going through the PSU at all. An 800W power supply would (in theory at least) be more than enough for even my ridiculously overbuilt and power-hungry system.
Maybe there's something to be said for having an under-stressed PSU with significantly more capacity than you'll ever use? It won't have as much heat stress. Maybe it will run more efficiently at a lower percentage of its maximum load. If it for some reason loses some of its capacity over time, you'll still have some wiggle room left. And, of course, it's always nice to have a bigger PSU if you're doing upgrades later, making it less likely that you'll need to replace your PSU to do those upgrades. But still, I think a lot of home-built PCs out there are using a much bigger PSU than they actually need.
Plenty of folks do have their systems overbuilt - in fact, I see far more builds come through my shop with excessive power supplies rather than the opposite.
Power efficiency is a factor that varies based on model, rating, and load:
In this case, though, we’re talking about using a 550W power supply with a card that will readily use a little over 300W at load with occasional spikes that might reach as high as 400W. OP Probably has a fairly efficient CPU or maybe doesn’t have their card at 100%, but it is cutting things close and I’d expect this power supply to suffer excessive wear over time.
The 6700 was reliable back when I daily drove it worked fine when I tested it a few days ago.
The monitors seem like they're trying to get a display (orange light turns white) but ultimately don't get anything
I get the feeling that you have a failing 9070XT and that the symptoms are only presenting themselves intermittently.
When the card displayed at the shop, did they run any kind of 3D graphics workload / stress test?
They did not