Question from Telsi P.:  I have a 5 year old gaming computer that came with a fairly weak video card.

About three years ago I replaced that original GPU with a MSI R9 390 GAMING 8G Graphics Card and it worked great until yesterday when it burned out on me.

And I do really mean BURNED OUT!!

This computer’s case has a see-through side panel and I literally saw the video card shooting flames.

I quickly unplugged the computer and removed the video card. One small section of the card was almost completely destroyed but there’s no damage that I can find anywhere on the motherboard.

The computer starts up fine and runs perfectly using the motherboard’s integrated video. My question is can I just replace the bad video card and everything will be ok?

I’m not all that concerned about the computer itself because I’m planning to replace it fairly soon anyway but I’d hate to burn out an expensive new video card by plugging it into a bad GPU slot.

Rick’s answer:  [Read more…]