Broken AMD Computer Diagnostic

hi my name is carrie holzman and today i'm going to share with you a pc repair now this has been brought into my office i haven't yet had a chance to take a look at it i thought let's just turn the camera on and and film it maybe we'll both learn a little something along the way the case might look familiar to you this is a cooler master storm as i recall but this is not the one i built no no no no no the one i built is still being happily used problem free by the customer who ordered it no this was built by somebody and there's a number of things i see about it that i don't like one is the sheer amount of dust the other is there doesn't appear to be any screws holding this panel in i don't know why that is there's some hair apparently they have a dog that would be my guess it's not for my dog although that is a little bit of a challenge sometimes to make sure my customers don't get dog hair in their computers let me step around what do we got in here oh we have a mess we have well there's a few things right off the bat i can tell you about the system one it's an amd system that's clear from the heatsink two we don't have very good cable management which is a shame because this case actually does have decent cable management around the back three i see they put a sound card in here in a video card but the video card should be on the top port the reason for that i'll explain in a little bit but basically just because it fits in the case of your video card doesn't mean it's in the right place or it it will work but it's not going to work effectively or efficiently so right now he's got it in a times 4 slot that's going to be my guess at it the top slot is going to be an x16 what does that mean well if you could do something four times as fast 8 times as fast or 16 times as fast which way would you want to do it if we're talking about performance and i assume we're building a computer in order to get performance we would want this video card in the 16x pci express slot not the 4x pci express slot of course you can look all that up to get the technical definition of what that means but all you really need to know is times 4 is slower than times eight which is slower than times sixteen the sound card is just a times one so i'll explain a little bit more about this as we go along but let me go and take the other panel off now here we go again i don't know what the what the confusion is with these panels this nobody bothered to seat the bottom of this in and then i'm guessing they then couldn't make the holes line up to put the screw in i'm guessing that's why the screw is missing there is only one screw that's it i guess i should be grateful i've got it let's take it out and there is a ton of dust in here lots of dust so apparently they use this for some time there is some cable management back here they left a wire tie in remember what i said about these wire ties there's metal in here and part of this metal is exposed and if that shorts out against the back of the board it's not going to be good times they've got a fan that's not plugged in they probably didn't need it um i think the first thing i'm going to need to do i don't know how you can tell how dusty that is but um the very first thing that i do for every computer that comes into my shop you know what it is let's go take care of this so that we have a clean area to work with him well that took a lot longer with the leaf blower than most systems i have to blow out usually leaf blower's pretty quick about it but this thing this thing was jam-packed it was really hard to get at and one of the things i noticed when i was out there and maybe you caught it too i should have saw this right away this power supply isn't upside down that's partially why this cabling looks so terrible cabling's coming out of the the side of the power supply that's facing this panel and the fan is up here instead of down below where it should be bringing air in and by flipping it over it would also put those cables up against that back wall where they would more easily be hidden and out of the way remember i mentioned people don't take this little cover off it's very common there it is right there it's got the the corsair logos underneath it so holding the camera with my right hand while trying to remove that little sticker with my left is an exercise in dexterity but uh let's go ahead and just uh take a look around the back here and see what we've got going on we've got a missing slot cover here now none of this is going to make the system not work it's just there's a reason why these slot covers exist and if you're not going to have something in a slot it's a good idea to put the slot cover in there that's going to keep bugs it's going to help to keep bugs out it's going to keep children's fingers out or sometimes kids they like to stick things like marbles and stuff in there and that can cause all kinds of harm certainly anybody who remembers having vcrs around children very young children knows what i'm talking about video card needs to go up here this card needs to go down there power supply needs to be flipped around i like to put the optical drive on the top one of the ways i justify this is if you look at the way dell and hp and acer and all the big asus all the big pc makers all put the optical drive on top so to me that's the way it looks right it's going to function just as well and so i'll probably move it around just to give it the old carry touch you know uh as for oh that does not sound good yeah there's some dust in there i guess it's causing that um that's just if you remember on the on the cm storm case you've got your usb and uh headphone stuff right up in there it shouldn't squeak like that but you know something to consider if you're gonna buy one of these cases is if it does get dust in there like this one you may have to live with that you might love the case the first year you have it and then you end up with something like that you don't know how to fix it i'm not even sure how to fix that i probably won't even address it since it's not a functionality issue he's got a mechanical drive in here it's a seagate barracuda two and he's got a solid state drive in here which looks like it might be an intel branded no it's crucial it's a crucial m4 solid state drive it's got four banks of ram here the four banks are all filled and i think the first place i want to start i mean one of the things that bothers me just looking at it is this is a modular power supply and for some reason he's using molex connectors with sata adapters instead of just using the proper sata cable again it won't stop the system from running but you're just putting more things in you that you than you need it makes the cabling look terrible and it can often make things harder to diagnose you're giving it one more thing to go wrong if if either end of this cable comes loose you add in another point of potential failure then we've got the connector here to the main board i'm going to take off and the cpu power let's go ahead and remove that so you might be asking why did the customer bring this in for repair well i haven't turned it on yet but from what i've been told is that it overheats and shuts down i haven't verified it but i could certainly understand that with the amount of dust it had and they've got these velcro wire ties which are a good idea but i very rarely um ever thought that they were functional in a in the field but this is definitely the wrong the wrong plug that he plugged in here he should have selected a different one this is his cable going from that front port here to the sound blaster card and of course this video cards here let's go ahead and pull power out of the video card and the first thing i want to do is get this power supply out of here so i think we'll just disconnect everything so that we can pull the power supply out and get my hands in there you know unlike that uh shuttle case you saw that wasn't shuttle it was a bit phoenix was it a bit phoenix prodigy case or something like that it was very hard to work on that case at least this case we can get our hands in there and it's it's not so much of a struggle but so much is wrong with it may end up having to just rebuild the thing it just might be faster so let's go ahead and get this power supply out he's got a good power supply here it's a corsair hx850 it's probably way more power than he needs he probably would have been good with a 500 watt power supply that doesn't have this this length to it um but it should have been put in as i mentioned in this direction with the fan facing down he's also got the the filter is missing down here but the filter is in the next one over maybe we can swap it out so he'll have a filter there is a spare modular cable i guess he was keeping it there so he'd have it in the future instead of putting it away properly he's got the wrong connector for his front port audio hooked up he's hooked up ac 97 and this should be using hd audio a modern computer and i do believe this is modern i think this is within two years old i'm gonna guess it's a gigabyte ga 990 fxa ud3 motherboard and i do like gigabyte boards but when you when you do this what this guy or whoever this person was who did this when you wrap cables around each other you should look up how an electric motor works um you don't want to wrap cables around each other that's why we use nylon zip ties you want these cables to all run parallel to each other you know if you've got a fold one up that's fine you don't want to wrap cables around another cable um you're effectively creating a coil and it can create all kinds of weird things happening so best to not even get into that habit and furthermore it didn't really look all that attractive anyway so it didn't it didn't set out to accomplish i think what they were trying to do and a package of nylon zip ties you go to walmart you can buy a package of 100 of them for about three dollars and you won't use all 100 of them on one build i mean that would be one heck of a build so this is a good time for me to just kind of straighten these cables out see what i'm working with i'm gonna go and take the video card out and see what we got we know it's you know it's an msi video card oh it's running away let's go ahead and hit the retention lever release let's pull that out there we go this is well we still got quite a bit of dust in there what is this you know one of the things i don't like about some video card manufacturers like msi when they do this nonsense is this is an nvidia card and the only reason i know it's an nvidia is it's got this logo on it right here but it doesn't tell me which one there's there's no indication we've got like serial numbers and part numbers and whatnot but no real indication of which chipset this is so we'll figure that out a little later and i'll have to get the canned air out and and clean that fan out whatever this computer is being used it's clearly in a in a dusty environment i'm going to take the sound blaster card out next remember i haven't even turned this computer on because there's no point in me turning it on at this point i know it's not right so i don't need to waste my time now this may surprise some of you but this is a pci express plug right here and this is a pci express plug and you say well there's a big size difference well yes yes there is what you need to know is that even though geez i'm going to get this cable out of the way too i want to show you in here you see we've got one two three four different pci express slots right wrong we actually have one two three four five six pci express slots and a pci slot this motherboard may be older than i'm giving it credit for now that i notice it's got the old pci slot on it but i understand the logic of the person who built this who said if i put this here or here there's no room for my video card but why couldn't you put it right here did you know you could do that well you can it's a pci express slot now you're wasting a a times four slot in this case but whatever it doesn't matter sound blaster is going to run at times one speed that's why they're called psa express slots now the pci express slots that are only times one they don't need all the extra connectors for data to travel through because they only have one lane of data to travel times four has four lanes for the data to travel the connector needs to be a little bigger right at times eight would need eight lanes and a time 16 would need 16 lanes and for each lane you need another set of connectors so the engineers who designed the pci express bus said what we'll do is we'll have just a single pci express one lane slot and then we'll do 4 8 and 16 all on the same size that way we don't have a uh we're not flooding the market with a bunch of different types of sockets and confusing customers so the bottom line is this sound blaster should have gone in my opinion it should go all the way to the bottom that's where i would put it i actually put it right down here we've got this uh slot cover in the way so let's take it out and right down here the long slot right here that can go right in there and we'll put the screw back in to secure it down right that way your video card video card can go in your top pci express slot you always want it in the first one now this motherboard has two pci express 16 spots and you might say well what difference does it make if he uses the first one or the second one it makes a difference the first one's always faster and even the motherboard manual will tell you that i know for a fact that the motherboard manual on the ga 990 fxa ud3 motherboard says if you want the best optimization plug your card in the first 16x slot but he didn't plug in either 16x slot this one's a 16. this one is a 4. this one is a 16 and this one is a four the one i plug the sound blaster in so this card should go right up here where he's got he's got the slot cover in the wrong place i'm going to move that slot cover up one and i'm not going to put the video card in just yet because i was told it was heat related um let's go ahead and we're not going to use this top one so let's let's put that up there sometimes it helps to have an additional set of hands to do this and i i am trying to do it well trying to stand out of the way while i'm doing it so you can see what i'm doing but i just want to put that right there there we go and let's lock it down perfect okay now that i should be able to plug this in to that topmost slot nothing interfering and i will be able to notice that when i do go to plug this in it's going to cover up the area here where we're going to plug in our sata connectors now that's the next thing i want to check boards that that came out like this had sata 3 instead of 2 we definitely want to make sure the solid state drive is on a sata 3 connector a sata 6 gigabit per second connector in order to get receive the most benefit from that again you could plug it you could plug this hard drive into any of these sata ports but only the right ones are going to give you the optimal speed so that's why it can be misleading when you build a computer and it turns on that you've built it correctly just because it turns on doesn't mean that you've you've built it 100 correct that the machine may not be operating as fast as it could if for example your video card's not plugged into the fastest pci express slot you've got available if your solid state drive is not plugged into the fastest sata port you've got available and it doesn't cost you any more money to plug it into the right port so why not and that's where we talk about enjoying the build process and really understanding why you're doing what you're doing it's not just a matter of of just plugging things in if it fit it's the right one in many cases that's true they've really made the connectors a lot easier and i've said this before building a computer is a lot like adult lego and for the most part if a connector fits you've got it in the right spot but that doesn't mean you've got it in the most efficient spot i think i think i've cleared that up now because we're dealing with heat issues another thing i want to look at is i want to pull this heat sink off and i can see that there's still a bunch of dust jammed into this radiator and i don't know how much thermal compound was used if they used what was stock that came with it or if they put something on so let's take this off and see what it's hiding come on there we go do you see any thermal compound there is some but what it looks like let me hold that up here again what this looks like to me is that at one point this had thermal compound and it's been removed and put back on removed and put back on and nobody has has replaced it so this i'm glad i pulled this apart this is why i pull this apart i have to be able to look at this this i should not be able to read this right now there's very little thermal compound on here you should have a very thin layer of thermal compound and the cpu here is an amd fx oh boy it's really hard to read this is all the thermal compound that came off almost nothing it's it's not enough again you want a very thin layer of thermal compound evenly spread around the cpu there are some people are very passionate about thermal compounding i'll be doing a video that that addresses this myth of whether you spread it on or use a piece like that really it doesn't matter it won't make more of a difference of a degree or two one way or the other and these cpus are designed to run up to 100 degrees celsius so i would suggest to you that if your cpu is running below 100 degrees celsius you're within the operational range of the cpu i would get a little nervous honestly if it was in the 90s but if you're comparing a you know your friend's computer is running at 57 degrees celsius and yours is running at 64. who cares it's just perfectly normal don't worry about it you can speculate about air bubbles in the thermal compound or using arctic silver versus using you know some other thermal paste but you'll be lucky to see a difference of a degree or two at the most now the next thing i want to do is i want to get this thermal compound this old stuff off of this heatsink so if you follow me right over here to my coca-cola machine we're going to grab a paper towel and you just want to wipe on this and get this stuff off of here as best we can i don't want to waste q-tips and rub me alcohol but i don't have to i will use that here in a minute but just to get the old stuff off you don't have to be it doesn't really matter what technique you use you don't want to scratch this up if you can avoid it minor scratches are okay their thermal compound will fill in the gaps but it's best to just um something smooth like a paper towel is fine some people think a paper towel will scratch it but again those kind of surface scratches are what thermal compound is used for so there's no worries there but again i'm not in the paper towel business so if you know a better technique there technique that you're more comfortable with feel free to to use it i'm just trying to educate the the newbies on why we do it this way it's not rocket science it's pretty simple stuff and then we can take all this stuff off of here it's like scratching a lottery ticket you know that little stuff you get now i can clean it now they do sell thermal compound cleaning kits but i think it's a waste of money personally completely denatured alcohol is the best thing you can use in my experience we used to use completely denatured alcohol when we would clean vcr heads or reel to reel tape heads or cassette tape heads or eight track heads anything where the tape was meeting the surface some of the i think it was called ferrite that would come off onto the head and then it would affect the quality of your audio and you wanted to clean it with something that wouldn't leave a film behind now rubbing alcohol will do in a pinch it does leave a slight film behind and there are different strengths of rubbing alcohol i was at walmart and i saw they had one that was like 74 one was like 86 percent don't quote me on those numbers but you get the idea the higher the alcohol content the less film you're gonna have so having it completely denatured means there's there won't be any film at all these are ordinary everyday q-tips uh we're not dealing with a car's paint job so you do not have to use a microfiber cloth or anything like that but there are people on the internet that will tell you otherwise but they might be microfiber cloth salesmen i'm just going to try and get all the old thermal material off of the copper part of this heatsink and we are not going to reapply any thermal material to this heatsink we apply it to the cpu only because if you apply it to the heatsink you'll never know where it's supposed to go and if you apply it to both the heatsink and the cpu you'll have too much so too little is bad too much is bad so we're just one as thin a layer as possible and you want to go both directions and get that as clean as you can possibly get it we also can use this right directly on the motherboard and we can wipe away all this dust that's around here even the edges of the cpu not that that really matters but we're in here how often do you get a chance to get in here and clean it the spot between the cpu and the memory is very dusty and just running that along there it's not going to hurt any of your electronics using either denatured alcohol or rubbing alcohol just make sure that you see it evaporate before you turn the system back on it should evaporate right in front of your eyes otherwise you're using way too much but even if you use way too much it should still evaporate pretty quickly so the same process we're going to use the rubbing alcohol i'm sorry we're going to use the denatured alcohol here on the cpu and you know that cpu looks pretty clean from when i wiped it with my finger but you can still see how much stuff is just coming off of there so it doesn't the human eye may not pick up the little specks but as you wipe them all up and they collect together it can make quite a little pile here really show you how dirty that cpu was so there we go if you're wiping it dry like i just used the other end of the q-tip and it still came out dirty that tells me do it again so i'm going to repeat this process and dip the the q-tip into the rubbing alcohol i keep calling it rubbing alcohol into the completely denatured alcohol also if you leave this bottle open and you walk away after a few hours you might find it's all gone away depending on how full or how empty your bottle is it will evaporate so you do when you're done you want to put the lid back on that and tighten it down sometimes you can pick up denatured alcohol at a pharmacy you might also be able to pick it up at a home improvement store or someplace where they sell paint thinners and things like that you do not want to use nail polish remover you do not want to use paint thinner or acetone you only want to use what i'm talking about in the videos sometimes people ask questions and they'll say like with the leaf blower can i use an air compressor did you see me use an air compressor no well that's probably a reason why i don't use an air compressor so no i don't recommend an air compressor well could i use a vacuum cleaner on reverse did you see me use a vacuum cleaner on reverse well no well then i don't recommend it i recommend what i show i i thought that was pretty clear but apparently it needs to be said i don't want to hinder you from asking questions but i do want you to think about why i'm showing you what i'm showing you and if you can't do it right then i'm not going to recommend you do it at all now it's the fun part this is the part that really upsets the uh the nerds on the internet so all i'm gonna do and normally you would lay the computer down but just so you can see what i'm doing here i'm just gonna put a dab of this uh what is this arctic silver five i do like the arc silver product but in a pinch like i said it doesn't make more than a degree or two difference now i've got just a peach piece of clean scotch tape on my finger and what i'm gonna do is i'm just going to run that thermal compound all over the cpu i should not be able to read the cpu it should be a nice thin layer as even as i can get it we're not launching rockets here we are not uh dealing with life or death and the cpu should actually protect itself in an overheat situation by shutting down so what all we're trying to do here is make sure the cpu is evenly coated a lot of people believe that only the center needs to be coated and it is true that the center is the critical part because that's where the heat the majority of the heat's going to come from the center but the whole point of this metal heat shield is to spread that heat evenly across it and for the heat shield to work as efficiently as possible we want to draw all the heat off of it whether it's from the center from the edges and we want this thermal compound to be able to do its job as efficiently as possible now that looks like a nice even layer to me and try not to get it on the surrounding components because it's really messy and then we can take this little piece of scotch tape got blurry we can take that little piece of scotch tape every time i point at it it gets blurry and we're just going to throw that in the garbage so we kept our hands clean and kept the system clean and with the thermal compound on there now i'm a step ahead of myself i want to clear this heatsink out there's too much gunk in there so let me grab a can of air now before you spray this out you want to make sure none of the dust gets on your thermal compound so make sure you do it away from the machine and i'm going to stand over here just so you can see me ordinarily i would take this outside but i want you to be able to see what i'm doing in fact i want to turn this sideways i'm going to turn it completely around because i don't want any chance of there of the dust getting in there but i want you to see how much comes out of this check uh okay that looks a lot better you should see my kitchen floor and while i'm making the mess i might as well go ahead and clean out this fan as well and we'll do this for your entertainment pleasure uh this is another way to clean it out go in through the exhaust fan area and then you'll see the dirt coming out of there the can is getting cold doesn't that look a lot better now so that's why i say you want to hit the when you see me even using the leaf blower i'm going to use the leaf blower on the input and the exhaust side of any fan because dirt builds up on both sides this is a little bit difficult to clean i think in a perfect world i would take this cover off and actually get down in there but it should be a lot better than it was simply with all the stuff we saw come out of there now i have to get a vacuum cleaner and clean up my kitchen floor before my wife comes home okay well that was a lot messier than i thought it was gonna be and to be honest i wish i had done that first before i apply the thermal compound but it's going to be fine there's really no dust on the counter at all and because i turn this around it should be fine but it if i had to do it all over again i would have done it in a different order but there's nothing wrong with letting the thermal compound sit out exposed like that it doesn't hurt anything and let's go ahead and put the heatsink back on there we go and lock it down and let's go ahead and plug it right back in cpu fan right up here on the top and you know this this he put a fan up here that fan could come out uh he's got it facing the right direction though he's got it blowing air out which is good he's got this one blowing air out and this one should be blowing air in it is so all the fan orientation is correct i know i want the sound blaster card there i'm not sure which hard drive is connected where and i'm about ready to do the test fire but i'm not going to use any of the customers hard drives i'm going to disconnect those and i'm going to use a spare hard drive that i have lying around and windows 7 allows you to install it in trial mode for 30 days so when this thing comes on i'm going to be grabbing a copy of windows 7 a spare hard drive and just disconnecting the customers two hard drives here and i'm going to install windows 7 and then i'm going to run some benchmarks on it and get it as hot as i can get it things like prime95 uh we'll try and get the video card really hot with um something like uh 3d mark let that run in benchmark mode you know a dozen times or something have it run 12 or 20 times and may even turn the air conditioner off in the house if it's especially if i'm going to leave for a while and let the room get really hot and see if when i come back if the system stayed on or if it turned itself off if it stays on then the next plan will be to disconnect my drive and hook the customer's drives up run the same tests if the system shuts down i know it's a software problem and not a hardware problem at the very least i know i've straightened everything out so i just i want to do that first before i start any diagnosis because i already knew that stuff was wrong right out of the gate all right now we're into day two of this repair uh yesterday i started at nine in the morning and i finished at two in the morning so it was a long long day of computer work and videos so one of the advantages that i have now that i've been able to post that video up of the first half of this repair is i can address some of the comments that were made and some of them are very good so let's let's talk about that one the cpu is an fx 8350 what's amusing to me is people will say well you can read the cpu it's very clear when you zoomed your camera in on it what you don't understand is i have several cameras and for me to zoom that in i have a camera that's a smaller camera with a smaller screen and i can zoom that camera in but i still can't read what it says and it's not that important to me you know it's more important that i move the video along so you guys can watch it in 1080p and on a big screen and you can see that cpu this big but to me the cpu is even smaller on the screen than it is in real life and it's very dark in the computer case it's hard to read so yes thank you for reading it but understand that you don't see i don't get to see what you see after the video has been through production so you might think about that it might be a reason why i couldn't read it uh the second thing was this graphics card that i grumbled about that it doesn't boast what model it is at the very top here again when the camera zooms into it again the screen is much much smaller and the screen isn't showing me 1080 even if it did your eyes can't really see 1080 unless the tv is like 32 inches or bigger anyway but that's another argument for another day but up on the top here it says n762 gigabit oc so that tells us it's two gigs of ram gddr5 it's an overclocked from the factory card and it's an nvidia 760 but if you look at the evga cards they'll say 780 760 big right on the front and even if msi could have put a little sticker here you think they'd have been proud to say that this was a particular model but it's almost like they they put it in really fine print on the back of the card where you're never going to see it and that's to me like a company is hiding something like they're ashamed of it so that's always the way i interpret that the company should stand proudly behind its products and boast them on the product itself not obnoxiously but you know there's plenty of room here for them to put 760 gtx 760 whatever and other comments in the chat room are that the 760s just a rebranded 670. i haven't verified that but sounds about right i do remember something like that being done uh the case i called it a cooler master storm the reason i called it a cooler master storm as it says right up here on the top of the case right up here it says storm s-t-o-r-m so see people said no no that's not a cooler master storm it's a cooler master storm scout too all right whatever man whatever i built with one of these cases there's a lot of cases out there i see lots of computers every day so the specifics of any particular case that i'm going to be very familiar with are the ones i see most often so i thank you for those corrections and for pointing that information out to me you saved me a little work of having to go back and look it all up myself there's little nitpicking things that i didn't point out like the exhaust fan on the back is actually upside down this should be the the cooler master name should be right side up and read and easily read it's nitpicking that's really no big deal it doesn't affect the performance or any anything at all other than maybe where the cable comes out of the fan yeah see the cables coming out of here way up at the top and so if this was flipped 180 degrees would be coming out down here so there may be a reason for that other than the aesthetics anyway let's get on with the repair uh i do appreciate the comments uh the majority of comments thus far been fantastic and thank you for that and let's uh at this point what i'm going to do is just put everything right the way i think it should be so i'm going to i'm going to get rid of this microphone for right now okay well here's where we're at i've got windows 7 home premium installed because the certificate of authentication for the operating system they've got is windows 7 home premium and that's what i've learned they've got 32 gigs of ram in here but you see windows home can only see up to 16 gigs of ram that means that the other 16 gigs and however much money this person spent on it hasn't been available to them so once again there's a situation where things are installed right but not configured properly so they're not getting everything out of the system that they paid for granted the pro version is about forty dollars more than the home version but that's one of the differences then when i look at windows update this is also interesting there are 198 important updates to download and eight optional updates and then there'll be updates to these updates but right now there's 206 updates and windows 7 still has five more years of support and every month new updates come out so when you do a clean install of windows 7 put aside a couple hours to get all these updates and you need to do that first and foremost it's very very important anytime you do a new install that you get the windows updates installed and that's one of the reasons why i will do a system image using a program like acronis to take a picture of the hard drive a virtual picture of the hard drive once it's been activated all the updates are installed all the drivers are installed and that way if you ever have to do a reinstall all you do is restore the image and it takes it back in time to the day you made the image and then you just have to put your updates on since then i'll make another video about that something else i forgot to mention when i was talking about the coolers the cpu cooler and thermal paste i mentioned the the break point temperature of 100 degrees celsius that's true of most video cards and intel chips however again in the comments that corrected me this amd fx series starts to throttle itself down at 70 degrees celsius so the best thing you can do in my opinion is make sure your temperatures are 60 degrees celsius or below if you're running an fx series amd this is one of the reasons why you don't see me use amd cpus they do tend to run hotter they don't have the threshold for heat that intel does they don't have the performance overall that intel does and so basically and they use more power which is why they run hotter which means they cost more money to run so you might be saving money or you think you're saving money when you buy that amd processor but over the course of running it i mean if you pay your own electric bills you'll be paying it back and then some versus buying the intel which would run cooler and cost you less money to run but be that as it may as a technician it doesn't matter to me which chip a user brings in for repair they all repair the same there's no behavioral difference it's like if you have a car with a chevy engine and a car with a ford engine you know they all have pistons and spark plugs they're all more or less the same but anyway one last thing and it's it's almost to the point where it's getting funny one of the reasons i make these videos is so i don't have to sit here and tell people and argue with people about things i can show it to you on the camera so that it's completely indisputable and one of those things is using the leaf blower or when you saw me using the canned air to blow these fans out and there's always one in every crowd that says well you just ruined your fans you spun them too fast you didn't unplug the fans and now you send voltage down to the motherboard and if you've watched my videos you've heard me talk about this time and time again and i will continue to drive the point home as long as it takes for people to get it and for the people who just aren't getting it they're just going to get blocked but i want you to see that all the fans are turning cpu fan is fine the video card fan is fine and furthermore if i lean into it they're almost dead silent there's a slight hum coming from the cpu fan but it's pretty quiet i'm not even sure if the microphone can pick that up but it's not in any way shape or form loud and this is proof you know if the leaf blower breaks the fans and i've been using it now for i don't know watch my videos why would i do that and if using the if disconnecting the fans before blowing them out would cause damage look at my videos i've been doing it for years where's the damage but um i'm sorry to disappoint those who who have the theory and no experience but i'm here with the experience and i'm video recording it for evidence so that and in the hopes that the people who are reading this nonsense online will see this video and say wow i actually saw it with my own eyes and for those that are even skeptical then actually go out and perform the test yourself and you will see uh it's just not possible to generate enough electricity through spinning the fan to cause any harm it's almost immeasurable if you put it on a on a meter to read the the voltage it's not that easy i would i would love to just run off the grid you know with uh my own little fans spinning but no windmills are very large very large fan the blades on a windmill but as long as a as an 18-wheel truck at least that's what i've seen on the freeway and those things you need lots of them to generate power so uh there you go i mean there's your proof right there so i'm gonna go ahead and i'm gonna put all these updates in and then i'm gonna run prime95 and i'm gonna run 3dmark and i'm just going to burn in the system and see if we have any problems with it and then i'm going to have to contact the customer and find out if they want to go ahead and replace their operating system with windows 7 pro so that they can use all 32 gigs of the ram that they purchased so let me go ahead and start these updates here i'm just gonna i'm not even going to take the optional ones right now i'm just going to say take the take the important updates and that is probably going to take a while yeah there's over one gig of data to download and 194 updates and that's our first round and this isn't that critical to do when testing but i like my test to be as thorough as possible so i want to make sure all the updates are on i want to make sure all the drivers are in and give the board everything that it needs to operate efficiently and then i'm going to push the heck out of it and see if i can get it to crash lock up or shut down for heat but everything so far it's running perfectly and then once i verified everything is working then i can clean up all this wiring and make it look nice and neat and you'll see this is the spare hard drive i pulled out i've disconnected the customer's drives and now i have to talk with the customer so i'll be back after that all right it's time for another update the good news is i just got off the phone with the owner of this computer and found out he did not build it a friend of his built it the power supply was an upside down for no particular reason this does not sit on carpet i verified that with the customer i also found out what the symptoms were as for the details of what was causing the all i heard was that it was overheating i do believe that was caused by the dust however he did say that the fan could get very loud when it was working so i have talked him into having me put in a cooler master hyper 212 evo cpu cooler which you've seen me use in videos before and um we're also going to change his operating system we're going to wipe out he's got a solid state drive here and i've confirmed with him that he's got everything backed up that he needs to back up we'll leave the you know whatever data he's got on the mechanical drive the two terabyte drive i don't need to touch that so we're gonna wipe this drive well here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna wipe this drive clean i'm gonna install windows 7 professional so that he can access all six 32 gigs of his ram rather and then i have to download all the updates again and then i can do the performance test to see if i can re recreate the problem you know once i've got the hyper 212 in and this is going to be done late at night it's going to be too dark to film it but i will turn the camera on once it's all said and done uh hopefully the next time you see me all this wiring will be cleaned up the new cooler will be installed you can watch any of my previo many of my previous videos i think there's at least two of them two or three of them where i show the process of installing the 212 evo and it just so happens i have about three of those in stock so everything i need to get this job done including an oem copy of windows 7 professional are all in stock so hopefully we'll get this done at some point tonight and be able to get it to the customer tomorrow or get it back it's on a real strong time crunch for me all right here's another update this is now day three of this repair the computer spent most of yesterday running prime95 i wanted to see how hot it would get with everything uh cleaned up and if it would shut off from overheating and it did not shut off from overheating but it did get very loud so we went ahead and removed the stock heatsink and back plate and replaced that with a hyper 212 evo which ran into the next problem which is the ram is too tall so the fan can't sit flush so i thought well i'll just raise the fan back a little bit so the majority of the fan still blowing over the radiator and now the side panel won't go on because the fan sticks out too far so the only solution to this is to either buy lower profile ram which at 32 gigs is going to be very expensive or to change the cooler yet again which is going to be expensive because it's going to have to go to a water cooler or well at least if to me it would go to water that's the only other thing i have in stock that's why i say that there's obviously other air coolers that can be purchased but this has to get done today so the only other option would be to put this fan on the other side and have the air blow out this way now that's not ideal but it'll still be better than this and i'll have to run it through some more prime95 testing to make sure we won't have any heat issues but the video card's got its own enclosed fan cooling where it's bringing air in from the bottom and shooting it out the back the power supply is bringing air in from the bottom and shooting it out the back there's a front case fan here that when i remove the cover was completely uh just smothered in dust so what i ended up doing rather than trying to clean that fan because it was really bad is i took the fan off the top and swapped it out for the fan in the front now apparently what had happened from what i'm told is this system was ordered from friend and when it arrived through shipping whoever shipped it parted broken loose and the whole inside of the case was destroyed and so the friend had to replace pretty much all the parts and in doing so he replaced the two front fans they must have been damaged i don't know how but that's the only explanation i can come up with so there's only one front fan now and then he took another fan and put it up here which was never plugged in and there's a button on top of this case that's supposed to turn the lights on and off on these fans these fans have red leds on them and this one works but these two well the other two rather there's only one here supposed to be two up front um they're supposed to have two cables on them one goes to power and one goes to the switch for the leds so they're not just regular ordinary fans they did buy cooler master branded fans but it's only got one cable so there's no way to turn the leds off on these fans so that switch only works to turn the led off on the rear fan and you see how the rear fan is clear plastic and this is solid black plastic they're both cooler master fans are just the wrong ones for this case so another mistake in hindsight i really should have just taken this whole machine apart down to bare metal completely cleaned it and then reassembled it uh it seems like every time i take a few steps forward i end up having to take a few steps back that sounds like lyrics to a paula abdul song anyway um i started some of the cabling cleanup as you can see i will probably end up having to just keep these two cables right up front because it's not really going to do me much good to run them out the back and then take them out through the side and the back is starting to get really crowded back there with cabling and i'm afraid if i do that it's going to make the back panel hard to put on but the good news is there was a spare cable that was if you remember it was down here it wasn't plugged in and there was another one that had this adapter on it to plug into the optical drive for sata power and what i figured out was by running the the one connector that's got all the sata power plugs on it through the back and moving the solid state drive from the bottom to the top i also moved the let me turn this around i moved the optical drive up to the top which actually wasn't in my benefit in this particular case but the good news is let's keep turning it around to the other side i was able to take this one cable this one power cable and run it into the back of the hard drive then into the back of the solid state drive and then back around and up into the optical drive it's cleaner it's using you know one less cable that didn't need to be used you can see the the wire management is starting to get there i've done a little bit of it and i think it'll look really good this is that little connector i was talking about that turns the leds on and off that's a unique connector for this case so if it was me i would have wanted to put it back to stock i was going to fix this little door up here that was squeaking but in taking it all apart and putting it back together it just stopped squeaking now it's working like it's supposed to i have no explanation for that um so what i'm going to do right now is i'm going to flip this fan to the other side i'm going to start cleaning up some more of the cabling and then i'm going to go ahead and run it on prime95 again and let it cook for a couple hours and then we'll check the temps and the noise levels uh this should be much much quieter now and you know in a perfect world this fan would blow out this way and this fan also is exhaust so all the airflow would be moving in one direction by flipping this fan to the other side understand that uh it would really probably be in my best interest to turn this fan around and have it bring air in but i really don't want to do that uh i want to see how it's going to work the other way first just by flipping this fan and nothing else otherwise i could theoretically reverse the direction of the airflow by having this one blow in this one blow this way and this one blow out the problem is hot air rises so it's really not going to benefit you to do that so i really only want to modify one fan and not all three and there's no doubt from what i've experienced so far that uh this cooler is much much quieter than the stock amd cooler here so i think that the owner of this computer is going to be very very happy with it when he gets it back let me go ahead and take care of this i'll be back in just a second with all of the updates and hopefully the completed system all right we're right about in the middle of day three here and i am finally done with the computer i've run it through a number of tests and uh the hottest i can make the cpu on prime95 is 69 degrees celsius which puts us right below that breaking point of 70. and that's pushing the cpu for an hour and a half straight on all eight cores hardcore uh i don't think the the owner of this computer is going to push it that hard honestly and everything else looks pretty good i've got uh 3dmark running on it now just to double check the graphics make sure everything's working correctly it does occur to me earlier on when i said that he had the wrong front port audio connector hooked up it wouldn't matter because the internal sound card isn't being used we're using the sound blaster card instead but to that end they also whoever configured this computer didn't disable the internal sound card so it may have been active or not i don't know sometimes if the bios is set to auto it may detect there's another sound card and automatically shut it down so in other words the headphone jack and the microphone jack that's part of the case aren't they are hooked up but they're not being used because they're plugged into the motherboard audio because he's got the sound blaster card he's going to use these front ports that come with the sound blaster card now this person writes music it creates music and that's why they need a better sound card that comes with the motherboard some people have asked you know what's wrong with the sound on the motherboard nothing if you're gaming or you're listening to music that's a great but if you're a music creator you definitely need more than that you can see my other build the digital audio workstation where we get into some even higher end sound cards than the sound blaster this is a fatality fatalities uh is is a professional gamer you can look him up he's a pretty interesting guy had an opportunity to play against him very briefly before he handed my butt to me he's very good now let's take a look how is this being delivered to the customer you remember what this looked like when it was open when i first opened it here's what it looks like now here's this side of it i did decide to go ahead and wire wrap these wires rather than try and bring them out the back because there's still no way to really hide them you see i've got the fan on the cooler mounted here and that's why i tested for heat i wanted to make sure that that wasn't going to create any heat issues flip it around the other way here so you can see the other side you remember what this side looked like before here's what it looks like now so it's much much cleaner than it was before and i also updated the bios on the board he had bios version fa so yes there's a letter f like frank and the letter a like apple it's hexadecimal sometimes they do that the latest bios is is fd but that's a beta bios i don't want to put beta on my customer system so the last official release was fc so i installed bios fc which means the system boots up a little differently the graphics that come up has changed gigabyte change their logo so that's noticeable when it boots up i really don't know what benefits that brings but it didn't hurt anything as you remember the computer came to me with only one screw holding the panels on you know i'm not going to send it back that way but unfortunately i don't have the thumb screws in black i i have like two that will leave me one short so i figured out how i'm going to do this i'll put these panels back on so let's grab the most difficult panel to put on first and you really should have the computer off when you're doing this but i believe i can do it we're going to put that panel on like so and look those cables are so neatly wound up that there was no resistance in putting this panel on and this is traditionally the most difficult one to put on and if i just turn this around a little bit what i'm gonna do is on this side which is the side a user typically won't open i'm just going to use regular computer screws not the thumb screws but at least they'll be black and they'll match and if the owner of this computer finds or has those thumb screws laying around somewhere then they'll be able to just swap these out real easy so we're just gonna go ahead and put one in here and one down here and let's go ahead and turn it back around and get this other panel up now this panel with the window also has a place for two fans now if you recall this computer had a fan that was installed on top that was never plugged in i would have installed that fan here and have it blow over the video card to help keep that video card cool that's what these are for he's not having any heat issues but if if he was going to add fans to try and make a difference in the cooling of his system i would add a fan here or here or both depending on how much noise they make and how they're gonna look and have those blow right over the video card i think that would make a a notable improvements a noticeable improvement i should say in the temperature of of the video card when he's really working it i don't think it's necessary in my opinion a lot of folks who are worried about heat put in way too many fans on most systems you don't need more than three fans most systems now when you're overclocking and pushing a system beyond its original design capacity that's a different scenario but if you're doing that you should need to take advice from me so that just comes with the territory of experimentation so again put this final panel on here so that this customer can finally get their computer back and have it done right for the very first time since they've owned it you see that's just going to slide right on there you can see the cooler right through the window and then i've got the two thumb screws here they're not exactly matched but they're close enough so we're going to put one in down here and one up here and that's it this computer get some paper towel spray windex on the paper towel not on the computer and then wipe it down and it is ready to be delivered hope we got a little education out of this one certainly not here to make anybody feel bad about the building process it's a great opportunity for us to look at the way somebody has assembled something and try and figure out why they did it that way what they were thinking and explain why it's wrong so that we can all learn from it that's really the goal of this it's not the again it's not to put anybody down just to examine what went wrong and potentially guess why and of course to put it right it's put right now and i think it's going to work flawlessly for many years to come for this customer and if not you know i'll hear about it and you'll know if you see it again in a future video and you know i want to emphasize that my videos are not intended to turn anybody into a technician because you can build a computer does not make you a technician any more than if you watch a cooking show and follow along to make a souffle that does not make you a professional chef we're just trying to show that you can do it and if you enjoy it and you want to learn more about it then you can go on down that path to be a technician so i do realize that a lot of people come to that conclusion hey you know i built my own computer or i fixed a problem in my computer now i'm a tech it doesn't quite work that way as you can see here in this example so if you follow my steps in my build videos you won't have the problems that i had to address on this system to begin with but that doesn't mean that you're a technician but after you work on you know a few hundred computers then you can pretty much feel free to call yourself attack it is a self-proclaimed position but i hope you don't use it lightly that term is is uh something i'm very proud of and i've worked very hard to call myself that so uh you can imagine how i feel it'd be like i hand you a camera and you take a picture and go look i'm a photographer now it's kind of insulting to people that have been studying photography and apertures and lighting and framing and composition for years and years and years but i do want to encourage you to learn it and i want to set your expectations on what it's like it can be a lot of fun and it can be very interesting and it's exceptionally rewarding so i hope that we got some benefit of all that through this experience and i thank you for watching i'll see you next time bye for now hey guys this is just a quick follow-up video to the repair video series that i just completed at least i thought i completed it i want to address a few concerns people had or a few questions uh one is that there's a lot of stuff that was cut from the video because it either wasn't filmed very well or just trying to speed things along so one of those things was the motherboard had some missing screws and i'll show you the video it just doesn't look very good and it wasn't a big enough deal and nobody should be surprised at the way that system was assembled that it was missing screws the other thing had to do with the cooler and why i decided to put the cooler on in a push configuration rather than a pull configuration now some of you may not know what i'm talking about but it's very easily explained this is the cooler that i use this is an identical one and it can be configured so that the fan can blow air through the radiator in other words it'll push air through the radiator or you can turn the fan around and have it suck air or pull air through the radiator now i've never had the occasion to ever put a pull configuration into a cpu fan i've used obviously if you've watched my past videos i've used push configurations and i've used push and pull but i've never used pull only and because i don't have any experience with it it really doesn't matter to me if somebody posts a video or writes an article online stating that it doesn't make any difference i don't believe that i do believe it's going to make a difference and every bit of cooling was very very important to me on this computer case and without testing it myself i'm not going to make my customer the guinea pig just because i saw a video online or an article online and i would hope that you wouldn't do that either to your customers what you do to your own personal computer that's fine you're the only one that suffers the consequences but i'm held liable and i hope anybody who works for a profit to fix other people's computers is held accountable for the work that they do and i take a lot of pride in that so it would have been very interesting to run that test and that would have been a perfect machine to run the test on if i had more time to do it but instead i decided to stick with my experience and i hope you do the same i hope that you're not taking any information that you read off google or that you see from these youtube videos as gospel until you've tried it yourself and you've been held accountable for those actions so that you know if you do it to your own computer again it's you're the one who's going to be inconvenienced from it because there's a lot of information on google and there's a lot of google experts out there but real world experience is really all that matters when you're doing it for a living if you want to think about being a professional technician it's it's great to get some base knowledge from google and youtube or the internet in general but the bottom line is you're nothing replaces actual experience i've tried to explain that in past videos that you know i can't explain what hot means i you just have to burn yourself there's just there's no other way to fully comprehend the meaning of that word the same with riding a bicycle i can't explain nobody can explain how to do it you sort of get on it and kind of wobble around a bit and you have to sort of feel it it's something you feel and until we evolve to a point where we're able to communicate effectively what something feels like especially when we talk about things like integrity and pride morals and ethics these are things that words just don't do enough to convey so i went with my experience and i've never had the occasion to ever install a pull only configuration so i wasn't going to make this customer my guinea pig especially remember this customers in another state so i stuck with my own personal experience now that doesn't mean it can't be done it just means if you do it it doesn't work don't call me you make your bed you lie in it and if you do it it works great wonderful still don't call me but anyway um the other thing i wanted to mention is that the cpu was running in that configuration when it was idle at 22 degrees celsius and here's a screenshot of that there's actually a number of screenshots i did not use in the video for a number of reasons the program i'm using to measure the temperatures is speccy speccy is free and it's available from the same folks who do c cleaner they're called puriform and specky's not really a program that you run constantly as you're gaming and such to monitor your temps it's really designed for technicians it's not something that sits in the system tray in other words it's it's right there it's its own window as you can see in the screenshot and of course i always use the portable version i never install it i think that about covers it i've not heard back from the customer yet but i ideally in a few months or maybe a year or something i'll get back in touch with this customer maybe even when i'm out in the state visiting i'll get to uh to go out there and see how the system's holding up he saw the video he was happy with it and you know maybe get a chance to talk to him on camera and see what his thoughts are on the matter because it's his his machine and um you know all the work that i did on it was clearly not really what was needed i mean i felt it was needed because i was putting my name behind it but i boo i do believe that the system shutting down which obviously is going to prevent him from being able to get any work done was the major issue that could have been resolved simply by blowing the dust out of it everything else could have been left alone but i do believe i've improved the performance of the machine it certainly looks a lot better through that case window being able to see the video card i believe it's cooling a lot better and by running it on the prime95 test with the covers on it of course it it only got to 69 degrees celsius now 22 degrees celsius to 69 is a huge range but the system never shut down it may have been throttling i don't know speccy never went into the red on reporting the temperature so the cpu may have been throttling down but from talking to this customer they're not paying attention to any of that they're just trying to get work done if the cpu is throttling down they have no idea it's happening if the cpu was you know if the computer's turning off they notice that and it prevents them from getting work done so i i believe understanding the customer is very very important when you're working as a technician and what's important to the customer takes precedence over what's important to you as a tech when it comes to what's the customer's end goal what is the customer expecting when they get back this customer was expecting a computer that will not turn off in the middle of using it what he got back was a system that was basically completely cleaned and rebuilt and the wiring was all cleaned up we had a better cooler put on it it's going to be quieter which he didn't ask for but when i brought up the noise he did mention you know now that you mention it the noise is kind of a problem by changing that cooler up so we got more than what was expected that's how you're always going to have a happy customer you as the technician set the expectations and then you meet or exceed those expectations and your failure to do so is your own fault and if you have an unhappy customer it's because you failed to meet the expectations you yourself have set that's a key for pretty much any business and and it's very important when you work on clients computers that you understand that it's not your computer and it's not important what you think is important with regards to how you go about fixing it or whatever is what you're going to be held accountable for and if that system has to come back to you three or four times because you read something online and it didn't work out in this particular case you're held accountable to that because they're coming to you for your expertise otherwise they could just google like you did and do this stuff yourselves so just a few closing thoughts on that and appreciate all the kind remarks and comments that have been left on the video i hope that this helps explain some of the reasons on why i did certain things the way i did them and i will see you again next time thanks for watching bye for now

Channel: CareyHolzman

Views: 604,081

Keywords: careyholzman, careyholzmanlive, careyholzmanrepair, electronicsrepair, electronicrepair, computerrepair, computerslowdown, slowcomputer, fastercomputer, fixslowbootup, DiagnoseDeadPC, DeadPCDiagnosisandRepair, RepairaDEADComputer, diagnosecomputerhardwareproblems, troubleshooting, troubleshootingpc, diagnosis, fixing, repair, computerrepairtools

Id: m0ibfk71Fu0

Length: 77min 38sec (4658 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 13 2015