Radeon R9 troubleshooting: just dead?

[quest for silence]

No hurry mate, I've a garret full of unused things, so I guess I may store it quite a while.

Think also if you can rescue it somewhere near you (I mean Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Romania, Austria...) handily.

[Jon Gerow]

And you don't have another graphics card you can throw in the PCIe slot to see if it's a dead card or a dead slot.

If GPU was destroyed the fans shouldn't even start, right?

Definitely not true. Electronics dying is rarely "all or nothing".

That sounds like those people that assume the PSU is working fine because it "turns on and powers on the PC".