Hey everyone, I've been trying to make this thing work for over a week and I'm at my wit's end with it...
When I try to plug in the 2080 using VGA cables, the PSU acts like it tripped a breaker (it clicks on and immediately off) and never turns on, no lights from the GPU or error codes from the MB. From there, the only way to turn on the machine is to turn off the PSU and turn it back on again, which it'll fail to do if the 2080 is still plugged in. I've tried 2 types of VGA cables: 4+4 going to 6+2, and I also tried a split cable. 4+4 going to 6+2 and 6-pin.
As soon as I show any video card a whiff of either set of VGA cables, it's the same result: PSU trips a breaker and won't turn on. I have noticed with a 980 and a 1080 I had laying around that using those VGA cables still trips the breakers but causes the power plugs on the cards to smell like burning electronics... no visible damage to either and they both still work, but I obviously stopped trying as soon as I noticed this. I only mention this because I thought maybe the initial cables were defective, hence trying the split cable.
I am currently running on the 1080 using PCI-e cables (4+4 to 6+2) with no problems. Using PCI-e cables, both the 1080 and the 980 run just fine, but when I plug those into the 2080, all 3 red lights very briefly turn on, then it settles on a single red light, and I get no output from the card on my monitor (I've made sure I'm on the HDMI output and I've even tried a miniDP to DP cable). My research tells me a single red light on a 2080 means it's getting insufficient power, but that doesn't make sense with a 1200W PSU.
I've tried 4 of the 5 PCI ports (the 5th one would squish some cables so I didn't do that one), flashing the BIOS to the latest version, updating all MB and GPU drivers to the latest, bought and returned PSUs from Best Buy (750w to 1000w)...
Does anyone have any ideas at all? What could I possibly be missing? The GPU was being used in a SLI configuration up until a few months ago (I might be able to grab the identical 2080 and see if the one I have happens to be broken).
HELP!
Specs:
PSU: Corsair AX1200
Motherboard: ASRock x99 OC Formula/3.1
CPU: Intel Xeon 10-Core E5-2687W v3 @ 3.10GHz (Cooling: Corsair H80i v2)
RAM: HyperX 128Gb (8x 16Gb) DDR4
GPU: EVGA 2080 Ti FTW3