Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S1:E19

This here is another viewer's broken gaming pc and have a bit of a confession to make this is actually one of my pcs I guess I'm kind of sort of a viewer of my own channel I wanted to stick with the the same title of course for this playlist but uh yeah I kind of sort of took advantage of the opportunity to create another one of these videos but the fact of the matter is I have no idea what's wrong with this thing I really have no clue I was in the process of setting something up to run some benchmarks and in the middle of it all the system refused to post I I don't know why now a bit of backstory this build here has been repurposed several times in fact if you remember back to our ryzen 5 g sponsored video in this case this platform essentially housed that apu now obviously I've removed that since then because I've got a discreet card in here now it wouldn't really make much sense to have a 5600g in here with a powerful graphics card like the 6600xt even though it's not crazy overkill 68 or 6900xt territory it's still a really good card especially in 2021 if you can find one for a decent price and right now most of them are being scalped to living hell the other thing I replaced here was the cooling solution for the cpu so now we've got a 120mm aio and if you recall from our this is what a dead aio pump looks like video well this is it essentially this is how that build looked when we tested the dead pump scenario and since then the only thing I've really done is install graphics drivers that's literally it I haven't touched anything else I wanted to install graphics drivers because I wanted to stress the graphics card uh in something like three mark times so I obviously want the most up-to-date graphics drivers for such a test and upon rebooting the system which kind of did on its own the system refused to post I really don't know what's wrong with it actually I should clarify it posts but then we get no picture out after that it's it's a it's a really weird one i'll have to show you I really hope we can fix this thing I also hope that you have a chance to learn a thing or two assuming that whatever ends up being the fix is something you haven't seen before and it might be that's the joy of this playlist you never know what you're going to get stay with me oh maze is hosting a chance to win a wicked fast tesla model s plat by supporting a non-profit and their mission of empowering millions to take action against environmental and social issues for a mere 10 donation you can be entered for a chance to win one of the fastest accelerating production cars ever made that's 400 miles of range this is an electric car after all zero to 16 under two seconds and the quarter mile and under 10 all with instant torque from electric motors this model s plant is ready to rip up the road if I do say so myself with taxes and shipping included for u.s winners and again all it takes to enter for a chance to win is a 10 donation you can also make a positive impact on the environment where charity reverb seeks to eliminate millions of single-use plastic water bottles at concerts and eliminating tens of thousands of tons of co2 through their music climate revolution campaign so to potentially win this loaded tesla and support reverb and their charitable endeavors at the same time be sure to visit omaze.com forward slash greg sells you can also find this linked in the video description I'm going to make it a point to not treat this video any different than I would any other episode in the fix or flop playlist the only real caveat here is that this is my system not someone else's I do know the symptoms and they are repeatable no matter what I try no matter how many times I reset I cannot get this particular symptom that I'm seeing and you'll see it in a second to disappear also for those who don't know what this playlist is about we reach out to folks in and around the orlando florida area and offer to fix their systems for free so long as they're okay with us filming these processes we don't charge them anything we can monetize these videos and I don't feel like offloading any of that cost to them I just prefer them to be happy maybe spread the word and we get other people submitting inquiries about having their builds fixed and we can continue making these videos so you know the cycle repeats that's the idea anyway and even if I was charging there's no way I really could justify charging myself that's a bit weird so I do know the symptoms but that's as far as I've gone I figured why not make a fixture flop video because I'm as in the dark as you guys are at this point so here's what happens power on the system and everything looks fine at first now there is a debug a series actually of debug leds at the top right of this board i'll show you those up close here in a second but the system posts right we get to that that's great now it says preparing automatic repair because I've reset this thing so many times let me get my keyboard so we get to this point we click restart and you know the computer does what it normally does at this point I would expect it to post right there's nothing wrong with the system in fact again I was only installing a graphics driver before all of this happened so I know the system works we used it before in the aio video it's the exact same build and uh yeah you just get this a black screen no I mean like you know if it really shouldn't be this complicated if you install graphics drivers on a system that has no previous graphics drivers okay and you restart your system you would expect the system would work right but we don't get that here instead we get a very confusing debug led notification I don't I don't know what this is maybe someone else knows I can't find this anywhere in the motherboard anywhere else online in fact I've looked all over forums to find this exact symptom it's a no avail so I'm going to reset the system so you can see how the debug led cycle so that light there that red light is a cpu light that white light was the vga light and that green light you see there is the boot light that's what you want to see that's good stuff but then we get to this part here where the bootlight shuts off and yeah nothing still nothing still nothing by the way screen's black and there we go amber led orange led whatever color you want to call it it just flashes now that led indicator is for dram of all things what the heck why would dram be causing this specific issue now I've tried multiple monitors multiple ports including these display ports over here we get nothing and while I would normally try plugging the hdmi cable directly into the motherboard this cpu the ryzen 5 2600 assuming again it's a 26 I'm not sure if the 2600 or 3600 but either way neither of those chips has an integrated graphics processor which means we'll get no picture out no matter what so if the only thing I did prior to experiencing this issue was install graphics drivers is it possible that my graphics card is to blame should we swap this out first I think what I'm going to do first only because we've got the debug led telling us that it's the blame I'm going to switch out dram you can't go wrong with corsair vengeance lpx memory we'll try just one stick in multiple slots to see if that fixes the issue by the way this build was using two silicon power ddr4 sticks these were actually pretty cheap which is why I wanted to throw them in our budget 5600g build at the time it'd be a shame if uh this was to blame but alas with this dim that we know works in slot a2 as a standalone ddr4 stick we still get the same issue blinking ddr4 amber led and same thing for the dim in slot b2 so we don't have a case here of a dead memory channel and we're still stuck with this black screen after the system post again i'd be a little less concerned if this happened before the system post like maybe we've got a black screen the whole time like it never turned on but it does and then it doesn't so is this software related that's what I'm really not looking forward to it would obviously make sense right to assume that something software related went wrong especially after installing graphics drivers graphics software I suppose no one should really be surprised by that but why is the dram led light blinking the way it is I don't get it it's obviously not ddr4 related because we swapped out those modules with perfectly working ones in fact we just stuck to a single dimm in case there was a dead channel and still nothing but if it is software related how on earth would we get around this I mean we can't get into the operating system to fix what is probably wrong with the operating system which is why it's not booting so what I think this is because it posts and then the screen goes black is it's trying to initialize the boot drive and for some reason it can't I suppose we could try clearing the cmos but I don't really think that's gonna this doesn't really have to do with any bio setting I mean whatever we can try it I don't think it's gonna work if it does I'm gonna feel really stupid a few moments later still nothing so what are we gonna do here we can't get into the operating system so we can't change software settings or software settings that are os dependent maybe we could just swap the graphics card I don't really know what that's going to do we do obviously have at least I think we have radon graphics drivers installed we should have them installed because that's the last thing I did before the system craft itself but swapping to a gt710 though it's far from optimal will at least give us a chance to get into the operating system if we can get there we can then ddu and start fresh I think that'll fix the problem long term I just I don't really know what else to try at this point I could also try putting the 5600g in here just booting from integrated graphics seeing if that works so we'll try the discrete card first because that's a little easier and then we'll move on to the apu if we need to let's disconnect supplemental power slide this card on out and slide our puny gt710 in which again we've confirmed works will this work that is the big question I'm hoping that whatever drivers supposedly corrupted this card preventing it from working properly are exclusive to this card the fact that we switched to nvidia here might yeah there we go that's it so there's proof and I'm still kind of baffled by this there's proof that just by using amd auto detect and allowing the drivers that amd says you should install to be installed it's possible you might end up with a black screen and if you don't have a secondary graphics card laying around or maybe you don't have an integrated graphics processor in your cpu you could be sol and that's that's really not good um it's not a very common thing this is probably the first time I run into it that I can recall but I I just I don't know I'm at a loss for words it's a very strange issue for something software related to mimic hardware symptoms you might be willing to bet that a lot of folks troubleshooting this exact issue we're experiencing would have concluded this graphics card was bad and I'm not saying that to try to toot my own horn or put myself in a certain light I'm just speaking very matter-of-factly here most people aren't going to go this deep into the troubleshooting they're going to see that the card is not sending a picture out when the windows boot volume is loaded and they're going to conclude that the graphics card is bad now there are a few telltale signs that should dissuade you from concluding that it's graphics card and that's what I want to talk about here so if you experience something like this in the future you'll know where to look this board has again those four debug leds for whatever reason the dram led was the one flashing when we got the no picture out scene that you would see after the post you would expect that the vga light would be the light to flash in this scenario right I mean it ultimately was the graphics card right or at least the driver associated with the graphics card because swapping it to a gt710 fixed the issue you have to understand what these debug leds are designed to do they are there to test the integrity of the hardware they are not there and there's no way that they could ever test the software baked into a boot volume because these drives I haven't been initialized yet right which is why when you turn your system on right away you're only getting vga drivers you're not getting the the full like 4k you know crazy high refresh rate experience that you would when you boot into windows because by then your graphics drivers have kicked in they don't kick in before that because your boot volume hasn't been initialized and that's where your graphics driver is installed so because the vga light wasn't flashing that should tell us there is nothing inherently wrong with the integrity of this card physically hardware wise everything is fine and we still get picture out when we post which means that something is happening when the windows boot drive or boot volume is initialized what is on the boot volume that would suddenly prevent this card from working the graphics driver right so when the graphics driver kicks in we suddenly get no picture out that should tell us that it's the graphics driver itself to blame and not the cards so you have to think a bit intuitively about this before just quickly jumping on the bandwagon that you know your card is dead oh my graphics card died I need a new one how many times you want to bet that's been to blame here when in reality the cards were just fine so what we're going to do is ddu everything we're going to completely new graphics drivers of any kind and then allow the system to shut itself down and then at that point we can safely swap back in our rx 6600 xt so we have amd selected it's important we see radon graphics here this is what we suspect is to blame and we're going to want to click clean and shut down because remember we still have our gt710 in here now I'm crossing everything I got this works otherwise I will be at a total loss just um at a dead end at this point if this doesn't fix the issue we're probably gonna have to just swap the drives out I don't know what else to do we know it's not motherboard or cp related it's not power supply related it's just uh graphics drivers and the graphics card okay that was really quick wow all right so it works now let's um cross our fingers when it comes to reinstalling graphics drivers and hope we don't totally fry our system so this software is really cool because if you're not sure about what uh driver to install this will kind of suggest it for you as you can see rx 6600 xt we've got the recommended I'm assuming this is the driver version here and we're just going to click install same as last time and all right that's great I always uncheck this and we'll click restart let's hope we don't have the same issues last time now that is what I'm talking about well over 100 fps and 1080p and dirt 5 uh this is how i'd expect this system to perform and we actually can get it to perform now because we were able to get a successful graphics driver install this time around still not sure what exactly happened the first time I didn't do anything differently you saw what I did it's a very straightforward installation process but yeah for whatever reason it didn't work the first time and hopefully if you run into this in the future this video will show you how to get around it unfortunately unless you have an apu in your rig this will probably require another graphics card that's why I keep this gt710 handy because it's so cheap and it really helps it really kicks in in cases where your cpu doesn't have an integrated graphics processor and all that's left to do now is swap back in our original kit of ddr4 wow how eventful I'm really glad I decided to make this a full-fledged fix or flop episode I know I'm not again a conventional viewer I'm not doing this for someone else in the area but hopefully this was still a learning experience for some maybe just entertaining I definitely learned a thing or two I've never had an issue that I can recall with amd's auto detect tool I never have and I've used it for almost every amd graphics card I've put into a system with the exception of the few that are sent before public release I have to use beta drivers in those cases but it's it's a shame that this happened with the autodetect tool but I think it's a very rare isolated thing it's likely it might have been corrupted by some other program that was on the drive who knows the fact is ddu got rid of it for us and we fortunately had an extra car to throw in to allow us to get into the operating system we didn't need to reinstall windows that would have that would have sucked so if your system posts you get a picture through your graphics card but then when windows starts to load up from your boot drive your screen goes black might be a sign that your graphics drivers nuked all right that's the conclusion I'm drawing from this I think once we narrowed down what the issue probably was it was fairly easy to fix we just needed that gt710 in there can any other graphics solution would have worked including I expect an apu so if you had a 5600g in here or a 2400g or whatever you could have just booted directly into that and then you could have swapped your graphics card back in once you ddu'd but uh you have to get into your operating system in order to display driver uninstall so it's kind of a catch-22 there and that's again another reason why I recommend just having a really cheap burner card if you run into issues like this often maybe you're building pcs quite a bit for clients or just for yourself or family members having a cheap graphics card will come in handy if you suspect that the card already in your system is to blame or maybe again like in this case you just have a faulty driver for whatever reason it just decided not to play well with the card in the system and to get around that you have to remove the card so that the graphics driver doesn't see the card and create whatever issue it was creating so yeah things became quite clear at least for me once we got around the ddr4 led blinking thing I don't know that that totally took us in the wrong direction we swapped ram for really no reason but uh it was quick it didn't take too long it didn't take too much of our time in the troubleshooting process so it's not like it was a huge loss there and it was more or less narrowing down what could be to blame I suspected either the graphics card or the ddr4 based on the symptoms we were seeing but uh once we narrowed it down to the card we could have just stopped and if we had stopped at the card we would have wanted to rma the card right it takes several days two weeks it's just a big hassle if your card's not broken why would you want to rma it so doing a bit more investigation thinking a bit intuitively about how this card is behaving how we get picture out for the post but we don't get picture out when the boot drives initialize tells us that it's probably not the card itself but whatever software is on the boot drive that's trying to initialize or take advantage of the card that being the graphics driver in this case dduing easy as that once we had the gt710 in there fix the issue now what more can I say if you guys enjoyed this one be sure let me know in the comment section below give this one a thumbs up consider subscribing if you haven't already and I suppose i'll catch you in the next one we do I think have one more fixer flop episode in season one and we'll be kicking off season two pretty soon probably right after christmas probably early january we'll start season two a fixer flop we do have many entries in the queue so i'll try to load up as many of those ahead of time so you don't have to wait too long in between episodes my name is Greg thanks for troubleshooting with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 248,670

Keywords: fix or flop, fof, fix or flop season 1, s1e19, no picture, broken pc, broken computer, how to fix a pc, broken gaming pc, gaming pc no post, no post computer, gaming pc, tech, pc gaming, black screen, how to build a pc, computer, pc gaming for beginners, credit, Pc gaming setup, how to, how to troubleshoot pc, how to troubleshoot, how to troubleshoot windows 10

Id: 5nogDWFBlwI

Length: 19min 4sec (1144 seconds)

Published: Sat Nov 27 2021