Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S2:E1

this here is another viewer's broken gaming pc it does not post for whatever reason we're going to try to figure that out in this video welcome to season two of fixer flop stay with me to get rid of that annoying windows activation watermark head on over to vip scd key and purchase a windows 10 pro oem key for a fraction of the price of retail just use the secure payment method like paypal enter your product key into your pc settings window and say bye to the watermark and be sure to use our offer code skgs for a sweet discount so for those who are new to this playlist welcome this is fixer flop and you're actually on season 2 right now there's an entire other season that's already been fully published on this channel you can check it out in the playlist season one is packed with 20 episodes of really interesting stuff i think you'll find it both entertaining and informative now the premise of this series is rather simple i offer to fix or attempt to fix viewer systems in and around the orlando florida area for free we don't charge them a dime not a single penny the caveats are they have to be okay with me taking on their systems for a few days which should be understandable especially if it's a very serious issue that requires a lot of troubleshooting and when it comes to software that can take a whole lot of time and they also have to be okay with the fact that i film these videos and monetize them this is how i make my money here on youtube at least this side of my income is from youtube and i don't feel like offloading any of the costs associated with the the labor and things that go into these videos over to the viewers because they're already gracious enough to loan me their systems for a few days to make said videos so i think it's a pretty good exchange and we can help folks out in the community and at the same time i can make money on the back end so it tends to work out but uh the other thing is i don't really know what i'm getting myself into whenever i bring one of these into the office i know ahead of time kind of the symptoms that are being displayed by each of these builds but i don't know what it will take to fix any of these systems and that's what makes this interesting i think for the average viewer i'm as in the dark as you are so let's kick things off with the original email and description of what to expect with this one hi greg i've seen your youtube series and i'm wondering if you could help my story is my friend had given me a website pc part picker where i could build my own pc and the site would tell me if i would have any incompatibilities or issues i added everything i wanted made sure no issues were found there were none so i bought all my parts put it together turned it on and got the no signal screen i decided to compare my parts to my friend's parts and it was nearly identical besides the cpu power supply and ram i tried as much as i could buying new monitors thought the monitor couldn't handle the graphics i wasn't right unscrewed some areas of the pc upgraded the cpu the motherboard size specified cpus i didn't have in there that were supported but when i bought the new cpu and added it in the pc turned on but i got the same results and i still get no signal i'm nearly at a complete loss i can't be aimlessly spending any more money buying things and getting the same saddening result i would like to start working and i need this computer to work for my job this pc has never shown me a picture from the beginning so i haven't even added windows onto it if there's any way you could help it would mean so much to me well that's why i'm here i appreciate you giving me a chance to fix this again i can't guarantee anything but you did make a two hour trip just to get here and drop it up then you had to turn around and drive two hours back home and you're gonna have to do the same thing again to pick this thing up so i'm gonna i'm gonna do my best to get this sorted for you we're gonna figure out what is wrong with it now in order to troubleshoot properly we need to make sure that we can replicate the symptom described by the owner in this case it is again a no signal or a no post we shouldn't get any picture when we try to turn the system on specifications for this one are pretty straightforward ryzen 5 3600 we have a b550 max i believe it's a b550 might be a b450 max anyway it's uh it's an asus tomahawk board we have an rx 5500 5500 xt it's an a gig card 16 gigs of ddr4 and i'm not sure what wattage power supply but it's an evga unit obviously the case is pretty self-explanatory from a company i believe called golden field do we have do we have a golden field here in the states anyway i think it's a very balanced system especially in early 2022 when it can be difficult to find any graphics card for any decent price the 5500 xt weights against the 3600 quite nicely also a bit of insight for those who are new here i have never turned the system on before so my reactions are as raw as they get i don't know what to expect again well i don't know what to expect i should say i know that the system more than likely will turn on we'll see lights the fans will spin but we won't get a picture out because that's what the viewer described so we've got the switch at the rear turned on click the power button okay everything sounds good so far i hear the disc start up sounds like it's a hard hardest drive in there it works am i being punked so i went back and looked at this email and i recall meeting this viewer i asked where the display cable was connected and i was shown a video of the cable running from the monitor into the motherboard now this is a very common mistake i've seen a lot of people make this mistake especially first-time builders and look ryzen's really hot a lot of people are building amd systems and that's good it's a good thing it shows that you care about value the problem is it's not really a problem if you know how to mitigate it properly and a lot of these ryzen cpus don't have integrated graphics right and it's one of the reasons why amd is able to keep the cost down but what that means is you can't plug a display cable from your monitor into your motherboard you need a discrete card for picture out and some people think that just because you have a discreet card in the board that means that you can still connect your display cable to your motherboard but that's not the case if you want to use your discrete card for picture out you have to connect your display cable to that discreet card it doesn't work the other way around there might be some weird work around but i've never heard of it you need to plug it directly into your graphics card if you want picture out and you want to use the car as your primary display device and i don't think that was done here i asked specifically if this was done because i saw the video i said did you also try plugging your display cable directly into your graphics card and i was told that yes this was done but i don't believe it was done and if it was done then maybe the cable that was used was bad because clearly things are working just fine here now look folks i can't guarantee that every episode in this playlist is going to be crazy intuitive we're gonna have to dive deep and dissect a bunch of different components it's just not how it works whenever you have a random build come in with an issue it could be a very simple fix could be very complex fix and that's part of the mystery that's part of the suspense why i enjoy making these videos so much so i wish i had more to show you in the troubleshooting stage what we can do though is turn this into another informative type video uh where we install windows 10 i won't go through the whole process because we have plenty of videos in fact a very recent one a month or two ago that we you know showed the step-by-step process for uh but we'll also cable manage a bit i'm not sure what it looks like behind this motherboard tray but uh i've been around the block and most of these need a bit of work so some cable management tips why not so first let's tackle the obvious the fact that there is no operating system loaded on this boot drive i'm not even sure how many drives we have in this build we'll find out for that we're gonna need one of these right here it's a usb stick in case you were wondering and actually you don't even need a usb stick you could load the media yeah i just broke it you could load media creation tool on pretty much anything that is large enough and that you can connect to your build i've actually used an sd card before because i was having issues with the way that the usb drive is being detected by the build so yeah even an sd card will work we'll plug this into the back of this viewer's motherboard power on the system and we'll get to installing windows now this is the only drive detected it sounds like there's a hard drive in this build and i think that's what this is i just want to verify that there's no other drive in here because if an ssd or something is in here that's where we'd prefer to install the os because it's going to be much snappier overall aha i'm going to check this given the components in here i'd find it surprising that there wouldn't be an ssd in here for at least at least a small ssd for a boot drive or something you want to have something snappier for that this is connected with power but it's not connected through stated data so that means that there's really no real connection going on here this is receiving power but it's not actually doing anything it's just kind of chilling there setting up a bonfire and singing kumbaya so we'll get this connected and we'll make sure windows is installed here that's more like it we'll select drive to and we'll let it install and now what i'll do instead of running through these problems myself i'll let the owner do this and i'll also include a windows activation key for windows 10 pro so we'll be set there the last thing i want to do is tackle a few cable management things might as well while it's here all right take that back before we get into cable management a bit more backstory here because this is actually day two of working on the system i've had a lot of other stuff going on and i sent a message to the owner yesterday when i discovered that everything worked just fine i said hey there if you recall in our conversation in the parking lot when we met i asked if you'd tried plugging an hdmi cable directly into your card i brought this up because in the video you showed me your display cable was plugged into the back of your motherboard this would result in the no no signal issue obviously because there's no integrated graphics processor in the 3600 that's in here i said the first thing i did when i powered the pc almost connecting hdmi cable into the graphics card from the monitor and i got a picture right away i said so there was nothing wrong with your build in the first place it's likely you were just plugging your display cable into the wrong port and then the response that i got was hi greg i genuinely thought something was wrong with the computer itself so sorry for wasting your time and causing an inconvenience it's a little embarrassing back in september i had switched out two different monitors and ended up getting the same results even with different hdmi cables both new and old plugged into the card and the motherboard at different times but based off of this i guess it really was just a case of plugging things in incorrectly again i terribly apologize for this i can pick it up at your earliest convenience any day so i highly doubt this person's hdmi cables were bad maybe one but two i don't know it sounds like this person tried multiple cables to no avail so i'm not really sure what was going on all i can really speak to is what i can see here right in front of me and it's important that we stay consistent here if this was a business and i was being paid for this i would have to show this person that hey the system works right in front of me i've literally had to change nothing so i'm not sure what you've got going on at your house but something you're using is not functioning properly more than likely the the cable and if it was multiple cables that were bad maybe it's got a bad batch i'm sure it's happened before it's very rare but you never really know i'm not sure what cable was used either it wasn't specified i mean just a conventional hdmi cable purchased from amazon or from best buy or whatever so maybe that was why maybe the cable wasn't plugged all the way in that's happened before as well and again obviously if you're plugging into the motherboard and you have a discrete card and no igp you're not going to get any picture out there either now to the cabling things look pretty good i'm going to be very picky though just because i want wanted to be some substance in this video since the system as it arrived works and i don't think i i don't think i'm being taken advantage of here i don't think that that was the goal of this viewer because the trip to get here was like two hours for them and i don't think that they would drive two hours on the off chance they get a new case or maybe a new kit of ram i mean the kit of ram in here is already great the case is fine looks like it was chosen intentionally for the color obviously i make it clear up front i don't give out free graphics cards unless there's like a very special circumstance just because i struggle to get these um and so it just doesn't make sense for this person to drive two hours for nothing i genuinely believe they thought that they had an issue but that aside again we're gonna fix some things because like there's you know just some stuff we could clean up here at the front and then of course at the rear we're gonna completely redo cable management back here firstly it's kind of bothering me that the sata cable is just kind of tucked and wrapped around the top of the basement it's just because of the way that the port is angled there are a few more ports though higher up on this board and they'll look cleaner so i'm going to move these to the side i always like to finesse these stock fan cables as well you can kind of tuck these in and around the cooler itself and then you can use this north heatsink here for vrm mosfet kind of tuck things in like that it's not going to hurt anything it's not like this cable is going to get too hot sometimes actually you can use these little standoffs to mount the cooler to keep these cables nice and tucked you don't want to see cables if you can help it obviously you don't want to compromise the integrity of the system while doing so but uh something like this is not gonna hurt anything so look at that much more concealed now very clean another pet peeve of mine and this one is totally subjective folks actually most of this is if you just don't think that cable management has any value at all then by all means stuff everything in here and create yourself a rat's nest it's probably going to be fine and shouldn't affect temperatures too much to be completely honest with you i just don't like the way the daisy chained pcie cables look like this where you've got the extra one kind of slinging off to the card here and then this one's just dangling what i like to do is pull the primary connector this first one and we'll take this connect it to the card then i'll take the second connector and zip tie it to the primary cable and that way this looks a bit more uniform it doesn't stand out and look as dangerous and you'll obviously still see the cable here but uh yeah this just i think looks quite a bit better from the side this fan cable here has a molex adapter which is pretty ugly and this rubber grommet is a bit too far away to tuck this in and fully conceal it what we can do though is reroute this cable through this rubber grommet which is located a lot closer to this fan header that looks much cleaner much more concealed now behind the motherboard tray my goal is to get smaller cables routed underneath larger cables the larger ones tend to be a bit more resilient they're thicker they're harder to manage overall and so i like to use those to kind of press down on the smaller cables that are a bit more versatile i also try to stick to horizontal and vertical lines only i know that's again very subjective it's kind of picky but i think that looks really clean when you take your right side panel off to work on something to add a component or what have you it's nice just seeing clean lines they're easy to work with now since this was already cable managed somewhat i'm not i'm not trying to knock on this person's cable management skills but uh they are a bit yeah i don't know it could be a bit better i'm going to start fresh so i'm going to clip all of these zip ties this isn't a modular power supply so we're just going to have to make do with the excess cabling we have a decent amount of space between the power supply and the hard drive cage to stuff the excess so yeah it's not going to be perfect it never really is with this kind of unit but they're still great budget units you get a lot of uh a lot of value out of these 5 and 600 watt bronze units from evga let's see these fan cables you know i noticed this case doesn't have a lot of zip tie points there's like two let's see there's three here and there's a couple more on this side but we have nothing over here there's nothing that really sucks and all right i think we are ready to go let's try cutting these zip ties back and let's see how she looks this one cable here yeah that was a bit awkward there was nothing really to route that with apart from itself oh i gotta cut that one in there and then we've got one here i used a small cutout right above the motherboard tray to run a zip tie through got to improvise sometimes with these cases and uh yeah i'd say that looks pretty darn good if i do say so myself it's never going to be perfect with cheaper cases like these but one thing i do really like that was included with this one is the fact that you get a little uh a little cover panel am i doing this right i have no idea how to install this i've never really worked with this case before i think it maybe slides in kind of sort of like that i think so captive thumb screw there captive thumb screw here that is super clean well that's it folks it's literally that simple because nothing was actually wrong with this build at all what a way to kick off fixer flop season two right i really didn't know if i had known that this had nothing wrong with it i never would have accepted it in the first place i mean i i want you guys to see serious issues because those are the things we can most learn from right whereas in this case maybe you got some cable management tips out of it maybe uh just the fact that you need to check your hdmi cables and dvi cables and what have you and where you connect them so let this serve as a psa for those who are new to building gaming pcs especially if you have a discreet card installed that something that looks like this could be smaller could be larger could require extra power other than what's already sent through the pcie slot if you have one of these installed with very very few exceptions you should always connect your display cable to this card okay if you don't have one of these then you have no other choice but to connect to your motherboard so that's pretty straightforward but if you have one of these and you intend to use it for gaming and other things like it plug your display cable into this monitor should or into your graphics card it should run from your monitor to the graphics cards what i'm trying to say uh not from your motherboard to your graphics card then to your monitor no no that's not how it works monitor to graphics card or monitor to motherboard in the event you don't have a graphics card again with very very few exceptions one of them is mining but we don't talk about that here we took care of cable management things look a lot better now especially behind the motherboard tray but even from this side here you can see things are a lot cleaner we've got cleaned up daisy chain pci cables we cleaned up the cpu fan header our fan cable we cleaned up a bit of stuff over here as well and then we also cleaned up the sata cables made it look just a bit neater it didn't take much effort at all i'm not saying that what i did was like you know required tons of effort it really doesn't and that's why it bugs me so much when folks spend this much time building custom pcs if they don't spend an extra five minutes cleaning things up you know especially if you have like a tempered glass left side panel or even a panel with i don't know acrylic it could be an older case cheaper case as long as it's not totally sealed off just take the extra five minutes and do what we did here maybe go above and beyond this and make it look so good with that if you enjoyed this video be sure to let me know give this one a thumbs up i would appreciate that if you live in around the orlando florida area and you have a broken system one that probably has a hardware related issue i choose those over software ones because nobody wants to start a screencast in an episode that just that's boring swapping parts is much more entertaining and it's frankly easier it's more fun i think those are the best fit for this playlist then uh go ahead and submit a form it's linked in the description we've moved away from email so if you're sending emails for these inquiries now you're behind the game we don't respond to those anymore because we were just getting inundated with them and frankly a lot of them weren't even applicable they didn't even there were folks living in the uk or some other part of europe or asia or whatever not there's anything wrong with living over there but i don't have the time or the money frankly to deal with the shipping and the cost associated with it it's just a mess it really is i have folks that say oh i have an 800 system i'll happily cover shipping both ways oh by the way i'm from the philippines take your system down to your local courier and ask them how much it would cost to deliver a 50-pound computer across the pacific ocean and more than likely through the panama canal and the gulf of mexico to florida maybe ship it by air i don't know how that works in some of those countries but however you ship it just ask them how much it would cost ballpark you don't need specific numbers just just a ballpark number it's going to be a lot it's probably going to be more than the system's worth and that's why i say no even if you live in the con 48 it's not worth it i don't want to deal with the liabilities associated with shipping maybe something breaks if ups breaks it are you going to hold me accountable you're going to try to sue me well hey i told you that you should have gotten insurance on it oh you didn't get insurance okay well it still makes me look bad because i'm dragged into the mess and i don't want you guys having to deal with that either so you know i think it's best for both parties that we just stick local for now maybe at some point i'll buy a van and i'll drive around the country that's still in the back of my head and i probably will do that at some point i just had my wife just had a baby girl and i don't want to be away from her during this time so maybe next year well yeah maybe next year 2023 i'll buy a van and we'll see what we can do in other parts of the country but for now orlando florida or around that area to be willing to meet me in person submit a form if you have a hardware related pc issue and i will be happy to assist however i can if you enjoyed this video thumbs up consider subscribing thanks for listening to my long and drawn out rants at the end of this one i will catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for learning with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 365,321

Keywords: fix or flop, fix a pc, pc fix, how to fix a pc, fix or flop season 2, computer, fix pc for free, gaming pc, how to troubleshoot, troubleshoot dead pc, broken pc, how to build a pc, pc gaming, broken computer, Dead pc, pc wont post, computer cleaning, pc wont post no display, pc wont post no beeps, viewer pc, viewer's broken pc, broken gaming pc

Id: y8Wo4YlqJZs

Length: 21min 13sec (1273 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 09 2022