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I bought a used Gigabyte Windforce R9 290 OC graphics card off eBay recently, and was wondering whether it in fact was broken or I am doing something wrong. I am not able to seem to get it working.

If I have the graphics card in the computer, the installer doesn't seem to load (black screen), so I take it out to install. Then I make sure I update & upgrade everything. I then tried rebooting with the GPU installed but again a black screen. I tried downloading the AMD proprietary drivers from their site, tried both their .deb & .run files and neither actually installed (likely as I didn't have the graphics card installed). So I booted with 'nomodeset' to try and get in to install drivers. This worked, although at some tiny resolution and random green flashing (like a semi-transparent layer of green). I installed the AMD for Linux (.run) driver fine, so disabled nomodeset and rebooted. Black screen again. I re-enabled nomodeset, this time it booted at the right resolution (1920x1080), except there were green flashes, especially on animating windows (haven't tried any games yet).

I tried installing Windows 10 on the computer without the graphics card and it worked fine, so installed the graphics card but then ended up with a low (1024*768) resolution, using the default Microsoft drivers. I managed to install the catalyst drivers and it work fine, but with green flashes again except much rarer (once every minute, not every time I resize a window).

My specs are:

  • i7-4790k
  • Gigabyte Windforce R9 290 OC
  • Samsung 850 EVO 500GB
  • 16GB HyperX DDR3
  • EVGA 600W PSU

Thanks in advance!

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  • In the end none of the solutions both here, on reddit and after contacting another guy worked :/ so I just ended up sending back the card.
    – domdomegg
    Nov 9, 2015 at 17:30

2 Answers 2

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I am using an R9 270 by Sapphire, so this may or may not apply to you. I installed the driver by using 'additional drivers'. I typed 'drivers' in the Applications search box and 'additional drivers' popped up. It found fglrx AMD/ATI proprietary drivers, clicked install, then rebooted. Everything is working great. If this doesn't work you you (like you get black screen upon bootup,) you can try pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a terminal then try sudo apt-get install fglrx. then sudo reboot.

(If you ever use Ctrl+Alt+F1 to get to a terminal and need to get back to a GUI (assuming your GUI is working properly) you can press Alt+F7)

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I think all you should need to do is add the ATI repository and then run sudo apt-get update

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    How would I add the ATI repo? I can't find a link anywhere. Sorry if I'm being dumb, but I'm new to Linux :)
    – domdomegg
    Nov 5, 2015 at 22:50
  • memoryleakx has the hot tips. Using his reference because I'm used to doing it through openSUSE's YaST tool. First: sudo add-apt-repository ppa:xorg-edgers/ppa then sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade then sudo apt-get install fglrx-installer i have no idea how to make line breaks in minimarkdown
    – StackAttack
    Nov 7, 2015 at 0:52
  • Oh and reboot after all the install and it should work
    – StackAttack
    Nov 7, 2015 at 1:15
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    @StackAttack Can you please edit your answer to include these more verbose instructions?
    – Daniel Foré
    Nov 8, 2015 at 0:23

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