Computer Repair: Diagnosing A Computer With Two Different Problems

well they're hold on that's interesting this is a machine I built right here built September 2019 the machine like many others you see me build here was then packaged up and mailed to the customer now this customer isn't that far away I think they're in California and the customer sent me some screenshots of the they said the computer ran fine for about a week and then it started to display weird graphics on the screen it start up like it won't even boot into windows anymore so this is the Milwaukee m4 driver that I use the screwdriver and again it's uh oh this is interesting two screws they're missing so the customers had the panel's off customers had both panels off and put the screws back so what I'm gonna do I'll take the one there's only screws at the top customer did not put the screws on on the bottom I don't think I need to take this panel off now we're missing two screws from one panel I've got spare screws it's the customers computer they're welcome to take the panel off if they want I'm not quite sure who advised them or if anybody advised them to do that and it looks like they had added I'm not sure what's happening here there are three SATA cables and several power cables and this graphics card looks a little twisted so before I even turn this on I am NOT going to power it on with the card sitting like this it suggests with the card sitting like this it suggests to me it's not fully sitted it seated sit it it's not fully seated into the slot correctly it looks like half of it is out of the slot and I can't tell I can't tell because everything's in the way so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pull the HDMI cable in the power cable from the video card and I'm gonna take the video card out and examine it because I don't want to if it's not seated correctly putting power to it could short-circuit it and damage it so let's see if we can get this out it is a weird warp on this card very strange well generally it won't come out on an angle you sort of have to bring the whole card out at the same time there it is and there's no clasp it's it's completely missing what was I moving that's very interesting to me what I'm referring to right down here you'll see this plastic clasp at the end of the graphics card or the end of the PCI Express slot and the one up here is is missing yeah there it is there it is and it looks like it's not broken it looks like it'll snap back in and again if it's not absolutely required to have this so I was moving it it must have come out here it is oh thank goodness thank goodness it's just just clicked right back into place all right so let me plug it back in and we're gonna run off the onboard video on this just to verify if we have a ram problem we should see the same symptoms with regards to the system not booting and then I'll plug the graphics card in if everything works and then see if everything still works and then we determine do we have a graphics card problem or do we have a RAM problem we can run them test a t6 and check the RAM there is a lot of RAM in there the more RAM you have the higher the likelihood one of those modules has an issue the RAM modules may not be seated all the way down so I just want to push down on them and make sure they're fully seated okay so the no signal is the monitor saying the computers not turned on right so we're gonna turn it on now switches in the on position now hit the power button fans are coming on lights are lighting up so that's interesting isn't it just keeps resetting itself Wow okay that's all I need to see I'm not gonna let I'd do that forever because again if there's something wrong it could be causing damage if we leave it on that way I want to make sure the power supply cable is fully seated both here and on the top because that can cause a problem if they're loose I mean just pull on those cables and make sure they don't pop off and let me go let me do this I've got a a flash drive here with the mem test a t6 software and when you have a machine that's behaving oddly in fact it wouldn't even hurt you if your machine is behaving fine to make a bootable mem test flash drive which I have a video on and this is absolutely free for you to do this it'll just take your time and doesn't take very much time once you've created the flash drive plug it into any available USB port and instruct your computer to boot from it and you don't have to hit any buttons it just starts to run on its own so for me on this machine I think f12 will get us to the boot menu if we can get that far we'll see I mean I get that far and it's powered up but it's not going anywhere so before we run into too many conclusions here there's a couple different ways we can attack this my first instinct is to start removing Ram modules so I want to make sure the motherboards completely drained of power by hitting the power switch when the power is disconnected which in this case I've flipped the switch to the off position I want you to know that this could literally be anything it could be the motherboard it could be the envy me drive it could be the power supply it could be one of these cables literally everything is suspect at this time but what I'm gonna go for is the most likely culprit and RAM is the most sensitive component of the system and he's got a lot of it so I'm gonna take three RAM modules out so all we have is one one Ram module I don't care what slot isn't it doesn't matter to me I'm not interested in performance I just want to see if I get the machine to boot now if that happens to be the bad Ram module it's also important if we still don't boo that I swap it with another one that way I will have effectively checked off for you with me just trying to be efficient here so let's see if we're gonna get a boot this time some motherboards won't boot if the RAM is in the wrong slot but I don't think that matters on this board I think you can so we're getting exactly the same symptoms right now so with that in mind we have a couple of different venues we can go down a couple of paths as we can go down so here's what's going through my mind right now now the customer may have gone into the BIOS and messed around with something in there and we can reset the BIOS it's easy to do that to could have a bad power supply and it's super easy to grab into the power supply just replace the motherboard power you don't have to put in power on anything else and fire it up outside of the case see if the motherboard boots up three there could be an issue with the board itself and that will require taking the board out of the case of setting it into a test bench which I have using my own power supply remove anything off the board remove the nvme Drive just to see we can get the board to boot so how do you decide which one to do next well it's a combination of what's most likely and what's easy what's fast and easy resetting the bios it's a pretty fast and easy thing to do so I think I'm gonna do that next the problem is I'm not sure where the BIOS reset is on the board but every board has got one and you just have to find it so I'm gonna grab my flashlight and somewhere typically near the battery on the motherboard will be a jumper to reset the BIOS and the clear BIOS is right here we'll just put that on there and I want to unplug it and you can even remove the battery if you want to be ultra ultra make sure you've really cleared it out like it'll reset your clock and everything and then I can even try turning it on with the jumper on and it won't even the system won't even turn on right now with that jumper in place that's normal for some other boards to do that it's refusing to accept any power well the BIOS is in a cleared state so if I remove the jumper which is right here if I take this off right and now I try and turn it on still not coming on make sure I've got to plug in all the way take my flash drive out of here so now it's starting to come back on it may take a little bit longer as the BIOS has to recognize the hardware that's in the system and there's also a possibility oh look at this here we go we've already gotten further it's restarting which may be normal we'll give it a minute to figure out the hardware that's installed and it's loading Windows right now alright we've got a blue screen that came up here and this may be a results of RAM there's something's happening here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna plug in the mem test and we're gonna go back to the original plan which is to test the RAM I only have one Ram module installed for all we know that could be a bad Ram module there's only one way to know and that's to test it okay so I'm seeing something that I didn't notice before that's really really bothering me right here against the side of the computer the customers put very strong magnets with a screw on the end now there's nothing inherently dangerous about this other than the fact that it could break off especially in shipping and these little metal magnets if they break off there they've got a little weight to them and they're very strong they to put five of them together like that and there's no reason that you should have to do this there's I can't imagine any reason why anybody would do this again no right and no wrong here just different unexpected but what do I know this is weird there any other surprises that got by me that one you know I did inspect this before I turned it on and I did not see that it's hard to look for something when you don't know what you're looking for you know okay interesting just just interesting unexpected different that's all that's all I'm saying all right let's flip back over to see if we can boot let's do f12 I hit it in time BIOS has been reconfigured good good good and we want to boot to the UEFI USB which is mem test and then you don't have to hit any keys at this point it'll start and run on its own you just have to be patient it should you all right so we're already running on pest past number two if you look down at the bottom in the middle of I keep saying the bottom but in the middle of the screen it says finished past number one cumulative error count zero that's all I need to know that's a good memory module far as I'm concerned it doesn't need any further testing so I've shut it off let's go back full screen iron so you can see me again now I got to get that envy me drive out of here in this big heat sink is in my maybe in my way I'm gonna try and remove it without taking the heat sink out because I'm lazy that way the more things we have to manipulate the greater the likelihood for damage whoops you know mistakes happen so the screw to remove the nvme drive is right up in here and I should be able to access it the great thing about this moving cooler is the the way it lifts away from the board so it doesn't interfere with RAM and it looks like it's not interfering with the nvme drive install okay so everything about this build is expensive this is a samsung 970 Pro plus and I'll have to put a link to this build video because this is a very high-end an expensive computer hmm there's something else I just noticed this edge this is this is supposed to be tucked in I should not be able to stick my screwdriver down this groove there should be no groove here so this side panel has not been replaced properly the side panel has tabs and those tabs fit in so that this piece becomes flush with this piece so it's all one flush piece the fact that there's a groove there it doesn't impact how the computer works or how reliable the computer is but it's not done correctly I think this was if I'm not mistaken I think this was contributed or donated to the channel for one of the veteran giveaways so we're gonna use it temporarily it's an old Samsung 850 Pro SSD and it's enough for me to install windows on it fresh and clean and we'll see if windows installs without any errors okay here we go now in theory I shouldn't have to select f12 the only thing this thing this computer should be able to boot to is that flash drive because I've removed the nvme Drive which is the only thing that could boot too so in theory the Windows 10 install should start and it has as predicted so I will just click Next and install now Windows is installed it's good now I want to grab Windows updates that's gonna automatically activate Windows for us it's gonna reassign the product key back to this machine and it's going to ensure that Windows updates apply properly that's why I'm not gonna be using any slipstream updates or anything like that I need to know that it can go out and get updates the way it will when the customer gets it not the way it works in the shop you know what I'm saying I have to replicate exactly what it's supposed to do in the wild and not take any shortcuts when it was update let's see if we're still missing anything here so so far the machine is not exhibiting any unexpected behaviors everything's working exactly as it should now remember as fast as this machine is running its gonna run faster when we convert the we put the nvme drive back in as our boot drive but before I do that I want to make sure I don't have a graphics card problem so we're gonna everything's good I don't need to take it any further I could optimize things but I'm not gonna bother right now because it might all be for nothing so I'm gonna go ahead and shut this machine down which it just turned off will go back to fullscreen on camera one here so you can see me and see what I'm doing please note I am unplugging the power connector and I'll hit the power button I just want to make sure this thing doesn't have any residual power and the capacitors before I plug this very expensive graphics card into it make sure that that clip is in the open position now remember I'm gonna have to get back I'm gonna have to pull this card out to put the nvme drive back in and I'm prepared for that it's worth it to me to check everything before I reassemble yeah the card has a weird bend to it that's very strange I'm not gonna put the screws back in it because I'm just gonna take it back out so we'll leave the screws out of it for right now for that purpose because I know what's coming back out that's just fully seated I want to remove the HDMI cable from the motherboard but where we were using the graphics chip built into the CPU and now we're going to plug in to the NVIDIA GeForce r-tx 20 atti we're gonna turn the system back on again which means I have to plug it back in first Carrie I'm gonna hit the power button you'll see everything's starting to spin graphics card fans are turning it's firing up so so far everything seems perfect well there hold on that's interesting so what we're seeing here is a graphics card issue that happened when the driver installed it may not be a problem or it could be that's not normal it's certainly something that we need to further investigate before we worry about putting the nvme drive back in etc so I'm gonna go to Nvidia comm and we're gonna go to drivers what kind of drivers do I want I want GeForce drivers and what I want to do here well I don't know why this defaults to notebook that's very strange I want to change the standard driver to the DCH driver we didn't take too long and let me get my flash drive and we'll throw a graphics test on here here we go this part is taking longer than it should I feel like I'm something should have happened by now so we may be looking at a graphics card issue here I'm gonna give it just a little bit more time it does seem like the test has locked up it never takes this long something is not right so the next thing I will do is move this card into a different slot there could be damage to the socket it's highly unlikely it's more likely given the obvious Bend on this card something is like a cold solder joiner connection is broken and that would explain that behavior it's one of those where it's not completely broken right it still works sort of yeah we're locked up here let's get the task manager test managers not coming up and I can't seem to close it okay that's all I need to know for right now I'm gonna go ahead and shut the Machine down so there is definitely something wrong with the graphics card the first thing I noticed was the weird symbols that appeared as the driver was installing that's certainly not normal the software loading does take a little bit it shouldn't take that long and furthermore my inability to close it suggests that it was locked up if I restart it and it works that doesn't reassure me there's nothing wrong with the graphics card I've done this test enough times in fact did this same test on the same hardware when I shipped it and didn't have to restart it to make it work so there's clearly something wrong with the graphics card at this point now I will have to talk with the customer I will talk to get an RMA to Nvidia to have the card replaced and then we'll follow up when the new card comes in we'll continue this process EVGA took a card back sent me the other card as soon as they got my card or the customers card the same day they shipped the other card back to me so it was a total of about 10 days from the time I shipped to them to the time the Box arrived at my door so I did not send the card back to EVGA in this packaging what I did is I put the card into a big anti-static bag that I had from a motherboard put the card in there I put it into a box I had received the day earlier from Amazon that allows me at least two inches of packing material across 360 degrees around the product which is what they require I actually had about three and a half to four inches of packing across the top of BOM and what EVGA sent back was this okay there's no cables there's no cover over the PCI like when it's brand new there doesn't appear to be any plastic on it at all and we're just gonna plug it in there's even even the covers up here which are usually there aren't there but who cares don't need them in theory this should be a real easy fix now that we've got the new card plug this in there goes locks in let's power it up fans are turning switch the input over to number two here we go we're booting okay so we've got the Microsoft basic display adapter we need to load the r-tx driver from Nvidia I've got to drive around the flash drive I don't know if it's gonna use the same driver and I guess I can try it because I don't have otherwise I got to plug it into the internet so let me just plug a flash drive in my utilities flash drive and see if this driver will work right here not sure okay here we go you finished installing good good let's close that back to my flash drive PC testing software let's go back to the heaven benchmark if you recall before when I was running the heaven benchmark software it would render that dragon out like before the test and it would just freeze all right here we go bring that up click run so what it would do before and we can look back at the original video when I was benchmarking this is it would render this dragon just like that and then it would freeze it would not go past this point let's see if we get past this point now they would just stay oh here we are we're already perfect now we're benchmarking and everything looks good now so we did in fact have a bad graphics card the owner of the computer insists that that graphics card was acting up and that's why he shipped it back to me when he shipped it back to me he didn't pack it correct that X didn't pack it correctly and he did not pay for the insurance and the card was bent that is the order of events unfortunately most manufacturers will go well the cards bent obviously it's broken that's not our fault we're not gonna warrant yet EVGA did not do that EVGA made no mention whatsoever of anything other than thank you we received your card your new card is in the mail that's it that's why I pay and recommend my customers pay that extra ten fifteen dollars for the EVGA card because chances are they're never gonna have to contact EVGA but in the rare occasion what it happens which what we're witnessing now they got my back they got my customers back and they protected that $1100 investment and it makes me want to buy more of their products and recommend more of their products you know much EVGA is paying me zero just like everybody else there's no sponsors here but there's a certain value at a peace of mind when you're dropping that kind of cash that fifteen or twenty bucks or whatever it is ten or fifteen bucks versus eleven hundred once you hit a certain point it reasonable to pay that little teeny tiny bit for that insurance in my opinion especially when you're running a business who just got loud that's not what's happening right now ooh there's not good oh wait a minute something else is wrong all the fans just went to a hundred percent and it seems to have locked up so I'm gonna reset it and we're gonna run the test again and see if this same process repeats itself no issue to panic there could be more than one thing wrong with the system we've overcome one obstacle now we're going to move on to the next one so we're gonna do this test again okay fans are starting to ramp up but we're still okay ah there it goes again now now some of you may be like ah damn but I'm going yay good I'm glad that happened it's consistent consistent problems are easy to know when you fix them so I'm gonna start by hitting a switch on the back of the power supply and power that down I'm gonna take my flash drive out I'm going to unplug this graphics card and take it back out I want you to follow the logic and the reasoning on this I'm going to keep myself from the small screen cuz I'm gonna come right back so grab my screwdriver I'm just gonna pop this graphics card out what I want to do is I want to run the same test but I want to run it off the onboard graphics built into the CPU because if it passes that tells me that it's only crashing with the graphics card in it and that's going to point me either to a motherboard or a graphics card in most cases so I've plugged into the onboard video turn the machine back on now clearly it's not gonna perform jaw-droppingly frames per second but it should still do the benchmark and complete it without crashing if it still crashes during the benchmark then that tells me I've got another piece of hardware that's broken click run now the same test when you think about this logically this same test would not run twice in a row and all we did was pull the graphics card so logically must be the graphics card right not necessarily the graphics card has got two sources of power coming from it one is the motherboard and one is the power supply okay now I'm ready to test flip the switch on and here we go now we're back up to the test I don't even hear this computer I mean it's completely silent I don't know what's changed front and rear fans are running CPU fan is running okay f9 to start the benchmark here we go guys starting to ramp up fight it back down there we go so definitely not a power supply issue we've replicated the exact same scenario which is again a good thing this is what we want to see we want consistency we don't want intermittent so the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna pop two sticks of RAM out of here any two sticks doesn't matter just gonna pop two of them out I'm not even gonna put the old power supply back yet because it means I gotta take things back apart and to pull two Ram modules is this fast just pull one pull another this is 64 gigs of ram so we're gonna drop it down to 32 we're gonna repeat the test again you can see how time-consuming this can get all I did is pull two sticks of RAM out and it's completed the test even though the RAM passes mem test 86 you are seeing this right so now what we're gonna do is we're going to shut the machine back down we're gonna take the two RAM modules out we've got with the other two in the other one okay here we go again now it just passed the same test all we did is take out two RAM modules swap them with the other two and then swap together to back so it doesn't look like we have a bad Ram module so Ram is good do we have a bad socket so close this now to determine if we have a bad socket we can do one of two things we can put all four Ram modules back in again ultimately just shifting the two sockets which shouldn't matter because they're all the same and we should either get the error or just maybe the RAM wasn't seated well you know through shipping and through settling so huh when it comes to these sockets it's entirely possible that a Ram module wasn't fully seated so here's what I'm gonna do next okay so I'm gonna so we're gonna go back to four modules and it's just a hunch I have that this is gonna work that it's something as simple as the RAM not being all the way down very simple problem however if it crashes one of these two sockets I'm plugging into now could be back so if that happens I'm gonna go right back to the original plan which will be to take these two out I just plugged in and take the two that were already in and shift them all over one socket just to verify it's a socket and f9 to start the test look at that the test completed 100% so I want to run the test again let's hit f9 let's benchmark it again I'm happy I found the problem right I'm happy I don't have take a motherboard out I don't have to delay this back to the customer I'm happy about that I just really want to hammer the heck out of this machine and torture tests because I'm imagining I send it back to the customer in 4 weeks later he says it's happening again which is the last thing I want to happen so I just want to beat the heck out of this machine in testing before I send it back to the customer and that means in order to test it accurately I have to put everything back the way it was back off the you know on the original power supply hooked up the way it was originally hooked up I sort of have this fan on crooked but that has to come off anyway and let's fire this up hit the switch first let's fire that up turning turning turning good good let's run the heaven benchmark first so f 9 I think there we go so we're benchmarking okay so that's not crashing anymore let's run some utilities here okay so we're gonna look at our temps this this left side here is our current temperature values on all the cores on the CPU these are the minimum values down the middle and these are the maximum temps we've hit so far since I guess running the software since I started the software so I'm gonna run prime95 we're gonna run that for 15 minutes we've been hitting 85 maximum after 19 minutes I normally don't let the test run this long but it hasn't exceeded 85 that was encore for hit it temporarily it's at 81 now bouncing between 81 and 83 whole package resting at 85 centigrade which is 185 degrees Fahrenheit so we still have a 15 degree headroom here which is fine this is about the maximum I really want to see now if I take this let's move this over here and watch how fast this cools off as soon as I stop this test say okay watch these temps look how fast they drop but the system has stayed quiet throughout which is good and well it's doing that let's close this out let's run some more tests let's go back to that flash drive with my testing utilities on it and let's run Cinebench r15 okay there's our final numbers there with Cinebench we can close that I want to run the heaven benchmark again okay so we're good here benchmark run here we go let's go back to main camera one full screen because I think I don't know what else I can do to this computer it's just running great let's shut it down the system feeling much better about it running all those tests and it just flies through everything I think it's gonna be okay to send back and I'm sure the customers anxious to get it back so I'm starting to think just this whole time knowing that the customer opened this machine up and added those cables and lost the screws and had these magnets and did other stuff it's very reasonable to think that they could have bumped into that RAM while they were in there by mistake and just that little bump not enough to knock it out of the socket but just enough for maybe one or two connections we're sort of iffy on their you know sort of sometimes they were connecting and sometimes they weren't and the my biggest regret is when the customer called me with the problem I should have had him removed two of the RAM sticks and get back to me and if you said it's still happening I'd say take the remaining two out but the other two you took out back in they let me know this is a very simple test the customer could have done could have saved us both some time and money if it would have worked you know if if in fact there was nothing wrong with the graphics card that's all the problem was don't think it's coincidence that the problem happened after he opened the Machine up I'm not gonna say the customer caused the problem it could be completely coincidental but it's logical in my mind that a simple mistake like that even I can do that and not realize I did it all right guys thank you so much for watching I'll see you all very very soon and until then bye for now

Channel: CareyHolzman

Views: 29,734

Rating: 4.8631053 out of 5

Keywords: Carey, Holzman, Computer, Repair, computer, pc, repair, diagnose, replace, rebuild, mend, psu, power supply, heat, thermal, fan, gigabyte, corsair, tech, technician, tutorial, lesson, free, DIY, how-to, instructions, easy, show, what, how, when, why, Weird, Problem

Id: KGkXjgaYNaE

Length: 38min 12sec (2292 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 11 2020