Hi, thanks for your follow-up!
Cool GTX
OS details ?
Windows 10, 21H2
Cool GTX
Nvidia driver Details ? (before you installed 472.12)
I was just going with latest geforce experience gave me. The last I went was 526.86. Guess I'm going to skip 526.98 onwards since now I got GTX 670 as secondary card and latest driver supporting it was 472.12. There's
a "newer" driver for GTX 670, but it doesn't support the 1080, so I need the latest that supported both GPUs.
Cool GTX
Did you run Nvidia driver "Perform a Clean Install"
Yes. When I rolled back to 45x.xx (stock OS drivers) the configs corrupted then I needed to wipe configs. Since then I installed drivers checking this mark.
Cool GTX
Have you run DDU to cleanup old drivers?
No, I skipped running DDU. I understand what's at stake here, that left overs might have been left, etc. But as I said, the DVI or HDMI connectors don't work even if they are the only connected devices at boot time (from complete shutdown). For that matter, I also switched the BIOS, and it still didn't work on those ports.
Cool GTX
Nvidia Control Panel, is "power management mode" - set to adaptive?
No, it is default, "Optimal power". For specific heavy games I select "Prefer maximum performance".
Cool GTX
Could be a GPU failure on those ports that stopped working .... did you buy the extended warranty?
Yes, I really think it is an issue in the board. The screens once returned to work, then out of a sudden, right in a spike of GPU usage (loading a game) they poofed away, so probably heat spike cut something loose in there.
I was hoping to get hints on where should I look in the GPU for the DVI/HDMI related components.
No, I didn't buy extended warranty, the GPU is past due its warranty, EVGA already turned me down.
As soon as I find the thermal pads I bought some time ago I'll take the GPU apart and replace them along with new grease. The stock thermal pad is all melting down. There's probably some hotspots around the padded parts.