Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S1:E10

this here is another viewer's broken gaming pc it turns on i believe for a few seconds and then shuts off again so for those who are new to this playlist the goal is to fix viewer systems for free in and around the orlando florida area we've had folks drive in from tampa some from jacksonville even one all the way from miami which is like a three or four hour drive depending on traffic the catch is that i cannot guarantee that your system will be fixed which is why i'm very wary of folks driving very far to to get to me because if i don't end up fixing it well you kind of did that for nothing but if it does sound like something i can fix especially if it's hardware related then i'm usually okay with it so if you do live in central florida maybe even south florida depending on how far you're willing to drive um you can reach out to me my email's in the description and i'm looking for new uh builds to fix every day that's gonna be a new build i should say it can be an old build like this one uh as long as it doesn't work and it's not necessarily software related i don't like dealing with like oh my frame rate dips occasionally it stutters this and that like most of the time they're just going to tell you to reinstall drivers ddu swap cards if you have a card that you can swap with or try integrated graphics see if that fixes the issue or just reinstall windows i i really don't like dealing with software because it's just often a rabbit hole that just never ends you can spend days trying to troubleshoot software to no avail but if it's hardware related or it sounds hardware related those are the ones that really pique my interest because i can troubleshoot hardware in literally minutes and i hope that videos like these provide plenty of pointers for those who might be in similar boats as these viewers we're able to monetize these videos thanks to sponsors like those in our pre-rolls as well as companies like be quiet the supply s hardware and pay us for that exposure so i'm very thankful to those companies that keep us going keep the lights on and as a result i don't need to charge viewers anything which i think is i think it's the right thing to do if you can if you can't provide a service like that and you're able to monetize on one side of it you shouldn't also monetize on the other especially if we're talking about maybe a few hours of labor and um and when we swap parts and things like graphics cards and motherboards a lot of that stuff i'm sent for free anyway so it just it feels wrong to charge people for things like that so um i'm grateful to the sponsors that uh that support us and allow us to provide these services free of charge two viewers in the area that said this system here like i said does not turn on if it does turn out it turns on for a second or two and then that's it it cuts right back out as far as i'm aware it doesn't even post it doesn't stay on long enough to get to the post screen or the bio splash page so we've got some digging to do i think you guys will enjoy this one stay with me to get rid of that annoying activation watermark hop on over to vip std key and purchase a windows 10 pro oem key for fractions of the price of retail just use a secure payment method like paypal receive your key in seconds and activate your os here bye bye watermark and be sure to use our new offer code skgs for a sweet discount now before we get into the troubleshooting process i do want to address a couple of things that i'm sure crossed your mind when you first saw this system for one yes the cable management definitely needs some work now phoebe pointed out in one of our previous fixer flaw videos that it's possible these owners were just swapping things out unplugging plugging things back in and that's why these systems look so rough to begin with but i i can tell you that most of the time that is not the case in fact since you guys have brought that up i've been asking folks if this is how their system normally looks because i do want to address it and fix it if we can in these videos even though it's not necessarily part of the fix or flop idea the the core of what these videos are about i still want viewers to end up with systems that leave the office better than they come in and cable managing literally takes minutes so we're going to take care of that form the other thing we're going to do is swap out this case now this is actually a pretty cool classic half case from cooler master so airflow is pretty decent you can see there's plenty of space in here but i think the case needs an upgrade and that's where our product sponsor be quiet comes into play so this here is the silent base 802 wow this like barely fits in the frame uh if you're an avid viewer of the channel you've probably seen this case a few times we have upgraded a few viewers with it but it really is just a tried and true mid tower first off it's invertible which is really cool you get tons of hardware support in here and you get these interchangeable front and top panels you can swap these out for mesh counterparts that are included so if you prefer better air flow over a silent factor you can do that in the 802. anyway even if we can't fix the viewer system it sounds like it's fixable but even if we can i'm still going to swap him out with this case here it never hurts to revive especially an older build with a new case now remember the owner of this system states that it turns on for a few seconds and then shuts back off want to keep that in the back of our heads when we run through the troubleshooting process the other thing specifications for this rig definitely underwhelming i mean in 2021 this is like a lower end build i think even the owner of the system would admit that it's got an intel pentium processor in here uh and an rx 580 i'm not even sure if it's a four or eight gig i'll see if he's got the the sticker the label actually i can see straight through here it is the it is it is an eight gig model wow eight gig okay cool so it's an eight gig 580 uh and then we've got uh i'm not sure what size what capacity hard disk drive it is but it's a three and a half inch hard disk drive and a two and a half inch sata ssd okay with that let's get into the troubleshooting phase the first step in my troubleshooting playbook is to attempt to replicate the issue described by the owner this is no different than if a mechanic takes your car for a test drive after you complain about a misfire right they need to diagnose it themselves they need to be able to see what is wrong in order to properly diagnose the issue if you don't see the issue they're describing and you notice something else you need to contact the customer ahead of time and say hey i'm seeing this other issue is this something you've seen before if they say no i don't i just i usually just give them back i i like okay i don't want to touch it because then they could come at you later and say hey well this new symptom occurred while it was under your control while i was in your possession and that's not the case it was probably damaged further in shipping possibly or if you had it in your car and you were driving to meet me and it got tossed around a bit who knows maybe your friend threw it in your car because he just didn't know how sensitive these things were it's happened before right and i'm sure it'll happen again you need to protect yourself and your interest and your business if you're if you're operating uh under a business and um and this is one of the ways to do that so we're gonna power the system on we have the switch at the rear taken care of now we need to click the power button here nothing okay that's weird we're not even getting lights i'm like triple checking that i have the cable plugged in because i don't even see i don't see lights anywhere i don't even know if this board has led indicators on it but oh i saw it for a split second it powered on and then immediately powered off i think we can get the lights on top of the pcie connectors in the graphics card to light up just for a split second and then turn right back off so we'll flip the power supply switch back into the on position we'll click the power button there you go actually the entire system lit up for guys it's fractions of a second actually this just off the top of my head seems like a short potentially something miswired i'm hoping that's the case because that would be a much easier fix than having a dead card or a dead motherboard now i've checked pretty much every major as well as minor connections so front panel connectors look to be fine the 24 pin 8 penny ps up top the dual eight plus six pin for the graphics card those are all connected properly and it's not like it could be an issue on the power supply side because this is a non-modular power supply i also as a precautionary measure cleared the cmos that's not the the fix i kind of knew that going into it though typically if your system's shutting off immediately clearing cmos isn't going to do anything i just do it just to rule out this slight chance that it is because it's so simple to do so at this point we're going to go ham and start disconnecting everything that is not vital to the functioning of the platform so non-vital components include the storage drives it includes most fans we'll leave the aio connected as well as the pump because we want we want some circulation there in case we do restore power the pentium i believe in here does have an igp so we can also disconnect the graphics card although even if it doesn't have an igp we can still rule out the card being the issue by removing it and seeing if we do get sustained power to the platform the only things we're really going to leave connected in power to the 24 pin and the 8 pin eps up top right so essentially what we've done here is strip this computer down about as far as it will go functionally so we've got the platform which is cpu motherboard ram and the power supply if we still see the same symptoms exhibited at this point that means that more than likely the issue is not related to our discrete graphics processor and it is not related to the storage drives and other things that we just removed the entire point of troubleshooting is removing potential causes until the point where you've narrowed it down so far that you've got just a single component isolated and from there you could go even further and say okay well what on this board is bad you could say that maybe there's a blown mosfet or maybe there's a controller that's died or or whatever a super leaky resistor could be anything but my goal is to narrow it down to the component because i can get replacement components from manufacturers rather easily and a lot of this stuff is really not all that expensive to replace if it's quite old you can find stuff on ebay rather cheap the exception is of course this bad boy right here you really want to cross your fingers and pray that it's not this thing that's bad so with the system reconnected to power we're gonna flip the switch at the rear to the on position and we do need to jump the two uh power pins on the board now because we disconnected front uh front cables i believe power is these two here oh okay yep i saw it for a split second again it lit up and then it turned right back off that is very very strange let's see if we can get that to show up again nope not anymore so yeah this looks almost identical to what we saw with everything else connected i suppose that's a good sign in in one regard it's not the graphics card that is causing this issue and that's probably the most expensive component in this build next on my list then power supply and ram ram is a very easy one and we've shown this in several other fix-a-flop videos if you have two dimms stick with just one interchange them try different slots verify that it's not a slot issue which would be i guess a board issue there make sure that you don't have a dead channel that would be cpu related more than likely and make sure you don't have a dead dim and you can do that again by swapping these two out if you have a friend that has the same kind of ddr4 that your system uses you can try his ram as well if you can verify that it works ahead of time i have verified in at least off camera here that it's not a ram issue because we're getting the same symptoms as before it will just power on for a micro second and then turn off in this case it's not even turning on which that's the other half of it sometimes it doesn't even turn on at all so it's not ram that means we're going to be swapping power supplies and with cables and units swapped around i know it looks kind of cringy this unit just kind of hang in here bear with me we're going to connect the power cable to the new unit the one that we know works i've verified this in a previous video actually we've already built with this we're going to actually the power is already on and we're going to try jumping the power pins again oh that's it that's it that fixed it i can hear the pump turning and the led uh leds in the board are lit now that is okay that simplifies things he needs a new power supply so on that note after disassembling his entire rig and cleaning especially his motherboard which really needed that there was quite a bit of dust above the cpu socket so we took our electric duster to it i'm not as thorough here as i typically am on my pcdc videos but this isn't a pc dc video and honestly his system wasn't super dirty it was a bit messy but nothing catastrophic we're gonna be reassembling all this into the new case in case we're upgrading him with that's the be quiet silent base 802. but look for us need to replace this power supply in this process because the old one doesn't work anymore at least it's preventing his system from turning on there's probably an internal short and we're going to do a bit of uh additional investigation into that later in the video so stick around we'll connect to our psu tester see if it tells us we have a bad rail or anything like that we'll also remove the housing of the unit and see if we can spot any physical defects so that will be coming in toward the later end of the video but for now we're going to be assembling this stuff into the silent base 802 here we go so this here is the beefcake and i want you guys to see just how easy it is to swap out the top and front panels here goes the top panel look at that super simple magnetic just snaps into place and here's the front panel you just push up to remove and simply drop this one in to finish the job there we go it's literally that simple so now we have a case that's much more airflow focused much like his old case want to try to stay true to that he chose that case several years ago and i'm assuming he still has a preference for airflow now and the 802 gives you that flexibility you can find it linked below now i'm sure most of you have already seen plenty of pc builds including from our own channel this is not meant to be a pc build guide so i'm just going to kind of skim through this now this being an matx motherboard and atx case with seven pci slots we're gonna have a bit of dead space down here and i think the solution that uh that we're gonna roll with here is a vertical bracket uh this will allow us to turn our card sideways so that it hides the empty space we're gonna have a bunch of cables reaching up from the basement here so it's gonna look a bit awkward uh just having that kind of dead space there so we'll be able to cover it up by turning the card sideways here and this will again kind of um trick out his build a bit make it look a bit more modern we'll get his ram installed and we'll connect all of his front i o wiring we'll get this aio installed next let's see if i can get these screws to thread in got her all tightened up green light here on the storage drive so just slide this hard drive bay into position there we go the power supply we're going to replace his old broken one with is a 750 watt 80 plus platinum unit from antec and we'll just slide her on in nice we will clean up cable management there we go nicely done slide on the right side panel nice now we've got the graphics card this is going to be a tad tricky with our vertical mount i always want to connect the riser cable first wow this build is looking so much better already and the last thing to do is connect supplemental pci power i'll straighten these cables up just a tad at the rear but we are good to go wow this looks like a totally new build but everything in here is the same we didn't swap anything out except for the case and that's how big a difference something like this can make now of course we did turn the card vertical as well but i only did this because i wanted to hide the fact that this was only an m80x motherboard in here that empty space is now totally covered by this card which i think is the icing on the cake for aesthetics we cleaned up cable management he was missing a few screws in his aio block or his cpu block in the i o he was also missing a few screws holding this rear exhaust fan for the radiator as well i'm not sure why those were missing but i went ahead and added those made sure that you had new thermal paste the build is pretty much ready to go let's plug it in and make sure that it posts so let's get the system plugged in and flip the switch at the rear and we should just be able to push the power button up front here's hoping for a post this more or less confirms our findings earlier right that it was this was a power splash because the only thing we changed in this entire build was that psu and there we go there's our uh there's our post screen and we should be loading into an operating system here soon just want to confirm that his two drives are connected and that is a good sign also just a heads up these fans are supposed to stop spinning when the graphics card is not under load these fans have no need to spin because the gpu and the memory combined aren't putting out enough heat to require active cooling so that is perfectly normal i always find a few people saying oh you forgot to connect the fans we didn't even disassemble the card but it is good to go we also synced up the lighting for the aio it was turned off by default but we used the integrated controller at the rear and to switch this to match the white leds in the graphics card shroud now it's time to investigate this power supply a bit further and for that we're going to use our psu tester from passmark we have used this and actually a few other fixer flop videos in this playlist and it comes in quite handy it's more or less a piece of mind check it's not going to be like super detailed into what it says but it is certainly helpful to have if you suspect that the power supply is to blame it'll tell you if your rails are good it'll tell you if any one of these cables isn't sending the correct power so all we've got to do literally is just connect the power supply to the unit like so we'll also connect the cpu cable and we'll connect the vga cable pcie in and with the psu connected to the wall we can hold down this power button here and it should start reading some stats okay we're getting a beeping noise already so 12 volt looks good ripples look fine those are a pass timings are in check and this all looks good here oh power sequencing okay so the 5 volt rail possibly something wrong with the 5 volt rail so i've drained the psu caps you want to do that before taking one of these apart and if you do not know what you're doing if you're unfamiliar with electronic in particular power supplies high voltage things you do not want to be opening one of these up it's just it's honestly not worth it that's why you don't see me clean these in a lot of the pcdc videos that i publish it's just i i don't want to encourage anybody especially those who don't know what they're doing to open this up so this housing should just yep should just slide up like so want to be careful because the fan is still connected to the housing so we'll disconnect the fan move that off to the side pretty sure the fan is not what's causing this power supply not to function properly i really should clean this a bit but i'm going to be looking very carefully for any defect on this pcb you see these two very large capacitors right here just a couple of things you don't want to touch inside one of these power supplies even if you think you've drained it properly i'm not going to mess with that you can see there's a lot of dust buildup especially on the underside of this board and i was looking very closely at it there's a lot of hairs and things in there i don't expect this to short anything but just for good measure i'm going to try cleaning this up i'm going to clean the other side of the main board as well try to get in between some of the the smaller smds and things and uh once we clean it up i'm just gonna try again to see if we can get this thing to work if not i'm just gonna call it i mean these power supplies are rather cheap anyway you might be able to claim warranty with this but i'd rather just replace the unit outright so he doesn't have to wait too long for a manufacturer to respond and with the unit looking much cleaner now than it did when it arrived i'm going to reconnect it to power [Applause] something doesn't smell right you know that fried electronic smell that's what i'm smelling i can't pinpoint where exactly it's coming from but something is definitely fried in here somewhere on this side of the board anyway i could probably continue investigating i could whip out my uh my volt meter and my multimeter and just try to narrow down what specific component it is much of this is beyond me i've taken a few electronics classes but um i'm not that kind of engineer so i try not to dive too deep into this stuff because it's frankly not my wheelhouse and there are plenty of people who know much more about this than i do i can say though that something is definitely fried and i know that smell i have been around that smell many times in the past unfortunately and uh yeah this thing is toast at least in my hands it's toast and in my opinion it really doesn't make much sense diving deeper into this spending more time because at the end of the day this unit to replace it's only going to be about 30 or 40 bucks well a bit bummed that i couldn't really show you much in the way of a power supply defect i was hoping we'd see something physically wrong but i i could just smell it that's not something i can obviously convey by a camera but it's one of those things again unless i got my multimeter out and started probing and i have to look up voltages for certain areas of the board that board in particular um it's just not something i'm willing to spend a bunch of time doing because it is such a cheap unit that said though the upside it's a huge upside the viewer system is now back to full and working order this build is super quiet and that's thanks in part to the purewings 2 fans included in the 802. we only kept two of them in here there's a third one that you get with the case but we removed that to fit the aio here at the rear so yeah the system is all good to go and i'm excited to be able to report back to the owner that he'll be able to finally game on it again it's been like i said a little over a month i think since it's been up and running and uh i can't wait to see the look on his face with that if you guys enjoyed this one be sure let me know by giving this one a thumbs up i appreciate it your viewership is such a huge support of the the channel this playlist in particular the other playlist that we've been starting up um the the viewership has just it's just been phenomenal it's very encouraging and it allows me to continue doing things like this with viewers in the local area maybe at some point i'll be able to kind of travel around a bit and help others in other states other parts of my state even that is a long-term goal of mine i've even thought about the possibility of like buying a van and just driving across the country and meeting people in in parks and things public places and being able to work on their systems and clean their systems in my van um i think that would be like the coolest thing ever it's just like uh fixer flop and pcdc on tour like that but just you get to meet so many cool people and and now i have to tell them sorry you're not local i can't help you and that's what i've been saying a lot to people who've been reaching out about participating in the fixture flaw playlist if you're not local there's not much i can do i cannot i just don't have the time to try to troubleshoot with you over the air um it's just yeah my time is is pretty limited as it is especially doing things like this the pcdc videos take up a huge chunk of my week unfortunately but those videos are some of the most popular on the channel so far so that's why i continue doing them that and it is a nice little therapy fix for me as well so with that again thumbs up consider subscribing if you haven't already and leave a comment down below letting me know what you want to see next my name is greg thanks for troubleshooting with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 620,824

Keywords: fixing a broken pc, fix or flop, pc doesn't turn on, how to fix a computer, pc gaming, computer, how to build a pc, gaming pc, broken pc, computer turns on then turns off, pc doesn't boot, pc no post, credit, college, apple, finance, how to troubleshoot a pc, how to fix computers, pc gaming setup, fix or flop greg salazar, tech, fix or flop pc, this could've been bad, broken gaming pc, how to fix a gaming pc, s1e10, Episode 10

Id: JrJaAnoDcTY

Length: 22min 34sec (1354 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 11 2021