Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S2:E10

this here is another viewer's broken gaming pc and uh well you know where you are we're gonna try to fix it now this build is nicely balanced i'll go through the specs very quickly ryzen 5 3600 the gpu is a 1660 super looks like from msi we have an x570 plus wi-fi motherboard and i believe it's 16 gigs of corsair vengeance ddr4 this is almost exactly how i would expect a build in this price range just personally i love the 3600 i think it's a great value cpu even with the new intel stuff out now you can still find these used for uh pretty great prices the graphics card's really the only like toss up you know depending on when this was bought it could have been fairly expensive but all around just given the performance potential of each of these components i think they work really nicely together unfortunately it doesn't work so you know you can have the best components in here doesn't matter if the thing won't turn on and the gist of this one is it turns on but it does not post the owner says the lights turn on the fans spin it looks like everything is functioning properly but we don't get a picture out to a monitor which is i mean that's that's no good right you can't use your system if you can't actually see what you're supposed to be doing on screen so i i was you know kind of asking a few questions in the moment when i went to pick this up uh it does seem like this is not a bios update issue the reason i say this because if there's a ryzen 5 3600 in here and the motherboard is an x570 i don't know of any bios that removes zen 2 support uh so these two should actually work natively together um so i don't think it's a bios problem could be a graphics card problem that's that's my biggest fear here because this card is still quite expensive um you know if everything else is spinning that doesn't really suggest that it's a power supply problem might be simple wiring so we're gonna have to run through our usual checks i don't see a doctor debug indicator on the board so we don't really have any help in that regard remember with these systems i'm as in the dark as all of you i don't have any inside knowledge apart from the symptoms i just told you i don't know anything else about this and so that i think is a really valuable aspect of this playlist it's that you and i can both kind of go through this together and you'll see me make mistakes that is kind of the point of all of this that's one of the reasons why i wanted to call it fix or flop i might not get it right every single time and even if i do get it right in the end i might not take the most efficient path to get there and so it's as much a learning experience for me as it is for all of you which is why i say thanks for learning with me at the end of most of these videos uh but i think that's again very valuable and hopefully going forward whatever this issue ends up being as well as in previous episodes and future episodes you'll be able to kind of hone in your search to the problem at hand much quicker than you otherwise would have if you hadn't seen these videos i'm hoping that's the case with this one as well depending on what it is and i'm excited let's jump into it all right you ready stay with me if you're looking for the coolest posters from a stylish brand check out disc plate these are high quality metal prints that are super durable and super easy to mount you hear that that's metal not paper metal just use a protective leaf and magnet both included and you can hang these things pretty much anywhere i'm a huge formula one fan so i just had to get a hold of some of these circuit prints i think these look so cool they're xl's but you can get them smaller and they'll just be single prints if they're smaller as well you can choose between millions of cool designs available on their website cars comics games anime you name it oh and did i mention display plans a tree for every poster sold i have no doubt you'll be very happy with your purchase so check them out today click the link in this video's description to see some of my favorite displays and get a hold of my special discount code which will automatically apply at checkout it's a great deal and only available for a limited time so right off the bat with the system there are obviously a few things that we can easily address and this is just beside the point right with the the posting issue we can fix cable management for sure there's a lot of just loosey-goosey cables in here that we can definitely clean up um so that's just uh that's just an extra that we can throw in it is a bit dirty we'll take it outside blast it with our leaf blower maybe just take our electric uh duster to it i think that will do the trick here so now but the most obvious thing is cable management there's just tons of of loose cables all over the place it wasn't uh managed that well to begin with so that that will make a world of difference um i think i think other than those two things right the only major issue is the the post problem and i i kind of already see what i think could be the problem i just noticed it i'm going to leave it as is and we're going to try turning it on and then we'll address what i think it is right after that so with all that out of the way let's get into the troubleshooting process you guys know the routine by this point we need to power the system on first and foremost make sure that the symptom that is described matches what we see here in the office so we've got power on here at the rear and let's attempt to power the system on up front yep so everything lights up fans are all spinning it looks like it should be posting but uh it clearly isn't and that is exactly what was described by the owner just checking to make sure there's no doctor debug oh there is there are a few leds on the board i'm curious what those say so i know this would be almost impossible to see there are four leds on this board on the top right hand side and the bottom one is actually lit up it's an amber color and that led is for a dram apparently which means it's going to be one of these two modules interestingly enough i want to take a minute though to address what i immediately saw as a potential concern which actually isn't deramulated at all there is an extra two pins here on the side of the six pin that makes it an eight pin in total a lot of more powerful cards have eight pins or dually pins this extra two pin is sitting slightly out i mean it's in there but it's not all the way in and i thought that could be the issue but i guess it's not we'll go ahead and just connect that all the way through and then power cycle see if it fixes it again i doubt it at this point nope uh that did not fix the issue okay so let's focus on the memory i am going to clear the cmos first i think that's the most logical thing to do it's very simple very quick and if this is potentially an issue with uh that memory frequencies maybe there's a profile do cp or whatever that is just not vibing well with the remaining components then clear the cmos will reset those to base frequencies and base timings which should bypass the issues right that's why clearing the same os is important so let's do that i don't see a dedicated clear seamless button here at the back there might be one somewhere in the front of the board uh nope i don't see one so uh we'll just do the good old-fashioned jumping the pins method so there are a couple pins here labeled clear tc clrtc i might also see them labeled clr cmos something like that this here is to reset the clock or the um the the the bios it'll reset all your bios settings i should say and all we need to do to take advantage of these two pins is turn the system off at the rear so now the system is off we don't need to unplug from the wall although you could if you wanted what this is going to do is allow us to jump the the pins that run to the battery and the battery on the board of course isn't really dependent on power from the wall so that's why this works with the system off and we'll hold this here with a screwdriver obviously conductive one for about 10 to 20 seconds and then we'll let go and we'll power back on then the cmos should be cleared now if this doesn't work the next thing i'm going to do is swap out some memory modules i'll also try just receding the ram that he has in there because it just might be improperly seated looks like they're both in but you never really know uh yep same amber led for dram so clear the cmos did nothing i'm just going to take my hand and press on both sides of each dim these are these are all the way inserted so yeah it's not an issue of mounting i think what i'm going to do is pull one of these out and try with just a single actually we'll take both out we'll try with a single stick that i have in my arsenal because i know that mine work and we'll just try it in slot a1 here which is this first lighter gray slot so now let's power on and see if the same amber led comes on wow right away right away so it's not memory related at all in the sense that it's not it's not either dim it could be the slot that we're in though if we have maybe uh maybe we just have a dead memory channel so we can try different slots let's see we'll try the innermost slot here which is actually b1 oh oh that's weird okay on this board actually a2 is the furthermost out slot that's really strange a1 is this inner slot you're supposed to populate b2 and a2 first when i said this slot here i called it i think a1 but this is actually b2 and they have asterisks next to the next to the slots to show you which two to populate first we're obviously going to deviate from that because uh well what we're doing now is not is not working so we'll try slot b1 and right away same issue dram amber led still going up okay so maybe it's just channel b that it doesn't like so we can try a one this is a1 right yep this one is a1 so we'll try the third slot from the left at this point it's literally just a game of musical chairs just rolling out the memory uh memory slots dims see if this works nope same thing it's also also amber led okay so uh it doesn't like any ram at all oh no it worked it worked now oh and it went back it went back not good okay i went it went back to the amber it's never done that before though maybe maybe it's just cycling that might be what it's doing i think it's just training oh and boot we have a boot light so yeah wow there is a post so that's it now folks uh it's it's saying that we're trying to diagnose something here because we've reset the pc so many times but this is perfectly fine so i imagine this will boot into windows now it looks like this person has a dead memory channel which is actually not the first time we've run into this problem with the ryzen 5 cpus what we could do to roll the step real estate even further is just swap the cpu so if we put another ryzen 5 3600 in here or whatever it could be any other ryzen compatible chip for this motherboard in the socket and then power it up uh and that that cpu had nothing wrong with it i guarantee you these would work in slots b2 and a2 and and that's how you would ultimately conclude that it's the cpu to blame and not the memory um we've already done that i believe in an earlier fix or flop episode i mean i guess we could do it here just because otherwise this video is going to be a bit short so yeah why not i'll show you right now we'll swap it out with uh a ryzen 7 or something so here we are then this is a ryzen 7 3700x one of mine that i know works i've used it in plenty of builds in the past and as far as i know it has no defective memory channel so we'll swap this into his build and then we'll put his modules back in the original slots they were in and hopefully we'll get a post this time it'll show you again that it is the cpu to blame that is currently in the system and not the memory now checked the back of the cpu here just to make sure this wasn't a hardware problem sometimes you have a bend pin or a missing pin or multiple of either that can cause some serious problems there actually is one bent pin on the back of this thing i wonder if that's the issue it's going to be incredibly difficult to see this on camera but there is a bend pin somewhere around here and it's it's it's best to find these just by looking at the chips from the side so you should see straight lines going all the way through like aisles in a grocery store and if you notice anything out of place any of those pins are bent that could be your culprit i found that the best way to bend these back because you want to be very careful if you snap one of these pins it's it's you know good luck soldering just to take a sewing needle you can see it barely fits between each of these rows of pins and then just pull up gently and that'll help straighten out any bent ones you might have to come at it from a different angle as is the case here combine it from the top don't push too hard if you feel resistance i mean that's obviously a sign that some pins are out of place just be very careful pulling up this would also explain why this chip was so difficult to plot if you noticed earlier i was like i was trying to just pull straight up it should go straight up right when the retention clip is up the chip should just slide out but uh in this case it was it was just difficult on one side to pull up and i didn't want to pull too hard because i didn't want any of these pins to snap but uh that would explain why i mean if if we had a couple bent pins maybe they were kind of wrapped around the pin holes in question then it's just yeah getting snagged and that shouldn't be the case so if you notice that when you're swapping a cpu out or you're just troubleshooting like we are here that could be the reason why uh you're not getting a post or maybe your system's acting weird so yeah looking at it from the side now all the pins look straight we'll rotate this way down each side again just like aisles in a grocery store everything should be aligned correctly looks pretty good now i'm going to try throwing this back in his rig and seeing if that fixes the memory channel problem i doubt it but just to be on the safe side you want to rule out that possibility so we've got his two sticks of ram back in the system uh of course his original cpu now with the uh vent pin fixed and i i doubt this fixes it i think that the pin was still making contact in the socket but you never really know i don't want to check the debug leds over here and it looks like it is staying lit for dram just like before already well at least now we know it's possible that it's possible there was something maybe in the socket that was catching the pin that was straight when it went in there and uh maybe when i pulled it out it would it slightly bent uh it shouldn't have happened i'm not sure what's going on but uh all right so now that we've rolled that out we'll get the 3700x in here so we'll drop the new chip in it's been a while since i've used the 3700x lower the retention clip also given him a scythe mugen 5 rev b here it's a really nice looking uh tower cooler just to yeah give him a bit more breathing room with that higher end ryzen 7 cpu it also looks really good in here and now it's time to fire things up one last time i made a bit of a mess here but it'd all be worth it if this system now posts with both dims in both memory channel slots so let's let's see what we've got here a few moments later there's no way it's the motherboard it's almost always been the cpu yeah we've still got the same dram light just for good measure i'm going to very quickly clear the cmos we're going to hold it here for a few more seconds and uh we'll try one more time oh my gosh i can't believe it's the motherboard what on earth it's still not working gg remember what i said at the end of this video where i could just be led down a rabbit hole that ends up not bringing us anywhere i thought it was a cp this entire time and the reason i thought that was because i was basing it on on just my previous experiences with ryzen 5 chips we actually have a ryzen 5 cpu it's in my box there in the closet i have one that has the same problem but it's the cpu's fault it's the memory channel configuration of the cpu side that's preventing the system from posting when a when a dim is in slot i think it's either slot b1 or b2 so a1 and a2 work but b1 and b2 don't if you put a dim and b1 or b2 either one or both the system refuses to post just like we're seeing here so exact same symptoms i just assumed it was the cpu to blame but it looks like it's actually the motherboard to blame which is weird so what i'm going to do just in one continuous shot here i'm going to remove the dim from slot b2 all right that's this inner slot and i'm going to power back on just to show you that it works now again this is with my cpu in here as well the 3700x so we get the amber light on the dram and it should switch from that to something else here pretty soon what the heck is going on wow that's okay so let's i guess then try the innermost slot we'll just see if this works again i doubt it but i'm kind of sort of at a loss for words right now because that should have worked this is this is really confusing oh it works now what i don't know what's going on why is it being so finicky and now it boots now we get a picture on screen it very clearly says that b2 and a2 should be populated at first well we try a2 it doesn't post we try b2 it doesn't post we try b1 and it posts i guess we swap motherboards now i want to swap back in is 3600 there's no reason to upgrade them if this original chip works just fine that's not really how i run the uh this playlist here especially with the the main components i don't really upgrade those unless i have to unless the component in question's broken so um i'm gonna put his 3600 back in the rig and i'm just gonna swap his motherboard now so he'll get a new motherboard assuming that's what's wrong i don't know what else it could be because we've already tried my stick of ram his two sticks a1 and b1 work a2 and b2 don't just for a quick sanity check again i'm gonna put the same dim i'm gonna put it in slot b2 it's working now is there debris is there debris in this board these dimm slots look fine i've installed hundreds of dimms before so i know it's not how i'm inserting these stupid things contact points look clean there's a hair in one of them but other than that physically they look fine why are we getting inconsistencies here let's try just slot a2 and there's another boot okay so i don't it's like it's just weird you put two memory modules in that still doesn't add up though i mean why were we getting why were we not getting a post with my working module my single working module and his 3600x in here or 3600 in here before because that's what led me to believe it was a cpu because in some slots it was working and some it wasn't in this case it works in every slot with his dims but when you put both of them in it no it doesn't work wait wait wait wait wait and and now we can get a post with both dimms inserted but in slots b1 and b2 that's that's a post so what is this so when i move these two to slots a1 and a2 which are the two rightmost slots we don't get a post i'll go ahead and show you that again same continuous shot here power off and pull these dimms out we're just going to slide them over to slots three and four and power the system back on again these are all the way inserted i've done this dozens and dozens of times and now we get nothing can't even power off through the power button okay what if i move the outermost slot to the second slot maybe if we populate the two middle slots be able to get it to work as well i'm just having fun with it at this point i can't really figure out the pattern yet so that works as well so we can populate slots one and two slots two and three we can't populate slots three and four we get no post there um let's try slots two and four again which is how it was to begin with i'm assuming this isn't going to work either let's just fire it back up but it works now what is this i just showed this config not working like a few clips ago and now it does i don't know what else to blame i think it's the motherboard i think it's just being inconsistent it's confusing a bunch of other things we're trying to do here so i i think i think i'm just gonna swap boards i mean i could put his ryzen 5 chip back in here and just see if as is it posts but i i think things are inconsistent because of the motherboard it's the only variable we haven't really addressed yet and the fact that we're still getting mixed signals from some of the stuff we're doing with the the dimms i i just i really don't get it so i want to switch outright the boards just so that we're on the safe side i'll put his ryzen 5 3600 back in with a new board and we'll try multiple dimm slots just to be on the safe side and to ensure that uh the system is stable going forward i don't want to give this back to the owner like this because i still feel like something could go wrong if he power cycles and you know he's not getting a picture out anymore i mean we're back to square one so i think swapping the board out is the safest bet and it will ensure hopefully that the system is stable in the long run so we're going to try this msi x570 ace so we're sticking with the same chipset as his own i don't want to downgrade him to something like b550 i just wouldn't be right we've got his normal cp back in here the 3600 are gonna put a stock cooler back on and uh we're just gonna outright swap platforms have i told you guys how much i hate motherboard swaps it just takes so long so many cables involved and just a bit messy all around okay and here we go this is uh this is for all of it i'm hoping this works that's a loud pch fan you can fix that in the bios though come on give me a post this is with again just a reminder his ryzen 5 3600 his original two sticks of ddr4 so pretty much everything the way it was when it came into the office minus the motherboard which has been swapped oh okay we still got still got dr debug stuff going on so that's that's why hey and there it is alrighty so i guess um yeah i guess that was it i guess it was his motherboard um and just to just to be on the safe side i'm going to try a bunch of weird dim slot configurations we'll maybe try like the innermost two slots the outermost two slots just to make sure it's not optimal to do either of those things but um yeah i just want to be on the safe side before i get the system back so now we're gonna try the innermost two slots by the way i do have some things disconnected uh non-vital stuff just wanted to make sure that the motherboard worked first power back on and uh we'll check the dr debug led at the bottom we also have an led indicator here just above the 24 pin i want to make sure that it boots i have the screen hooked up of course we'll make sure that we get a post and yep it looks like that is a post awesome okay so that is good oh that's really cool i didn't notice this this motherboard will actually tell you when you have your modules in the incorrect slots that's um something i haven't seen before so it's just a quick sanity check in case you're not sure if you're doing it correctly we'll go ahead and connect his boot drive to this new motherboard uh this is the only drive in the system actually we'll need to get this locked down i've got the included screw it's somewhere over here i'm sure the camera is getting none of this because it's a pretty small living space cover's going to go back on somehow forget how it's supposed to sit i think something like that and here we are a successful boot to windows from his boot volume so the system is good to go now i just power cycled a few more times to make sure that there aren't any issues with memory etc and it all looks fine i'm going to clean up this desk a bit and then we're going to clean up his system attack fix cable management maybe take it outside give it a quick dusting and we'll be good to go this is what it looks like um well before we manage things part of this is my fault but it was quite messy in here before i'm gonna go ahead and tuck a lot of these cables in we'll clean things up behind the motherboard tray as well i'm gonna give you a three second countdown three two one ah much much better now we just need to dust it if you're wondering this is what the right side of the case looks like after some cable management always try to stick with straight lines horizontal and vertical just keeps things nice and clean uh there are a few extra cables that we had to take care of like the rgb ones that run from the front fans but otherwise i think it looks very clean depending back to this motherboard for a second just want to show you i don't see any physical problems with the board i'm still sort of kind of at a loss for what exactly it was that was causing it i think it is board related but you know all the pins look intact in each of these dim slots i i don't see any other issues with smds i could just be some internal controller somewhere that that's going bad but uh it clearly wasn't the cpu like i thought it was and i'm glad we did a bit more investigating because otherwise i would have just shoved a 3700 x in there and called it a day and he probably would have run into this issue again with this board down the line also looking at socket here just moving the lever back and forth so we can see the contact pads underneath i don't see any issues here so i i'm not entirely sure what's going on again it's so inconsistent with how sometimes dims in certain slots would work sometimes it wouldn't it's just um a lot of mixed signals that i just made you want to just completely replace the board outright it you know you start dealing with this enough and it's like all right i'm done with you let's swap you out and uh there we go back to back to being in business again with a brand new x570 board well it's not new but it's gonna be new to this viewer but uh it is a very good one from msi so um this was interesting i was let down a path that i believed was correct i thought the cpu was to blame it was not and i was basing this on my own historical my past experience with ryzen 5 chips we have one like i said in the closet right now that has a dead memory channel but we did our due diligence another important part of the troubleshooting process is double and triple checking your assumptions because you could end up being wrong i was wrong here it ended up being the motherboard i'm not sure specifically what about the motherboard was bad but it clearly was causing some issues with the way we were configuring dimms in in those slots and uh swapping the board outright and we tried multiple slots we've power cycled multiple times the system is fine now with the original cpu the original ddr4 if i had you know just stuck with my gut feeling and replaced the cpu and called it a day we might have the same issue a week from now a month from now and that's not how you build a long-term positive rep in the industry if you're a small like boutique pc repair business or whatever um that's not the way that you build long-term clientele right you don't just put a band-aid on the problem and call it a day especially if you're charging folks to replace components you don't want to charge them for a component they don't need that again doesn't ultimately fix the problem so you have to be very careful you can always triple check your your assumptions triple check what you're doing uh in these kinds of uh processes here and you should be okay you'll find the solution with hardware it's a lot easier you just have to keep part swapping until you recognize a pattern and the only variable we didn't change again was the motherboard which yeah it's all good now i feel like i have to address this part because i'm sure some of you are going to say oh you were going gonna give him upgrades and you took the upgrades back that's not right first off he got a free motherboard right the system is working now because we swapped his boards for free that's not something that a geek squad would have done right they would have charged a flat fee up front just to even look at it and then on top of that they would have recommended assuming they got the uh the troubleshooting correct they would have recommended a board swap that's a couple hundred bucks at least and there you go you're in it three four hundred dollars so um the fact that i didn't upgrade things that i didn't need to upgrade i don't think is is a bad thing i want to save the 3700x that i would have given him uh and the mugen 5 rev b cooler i would have given him for folks who genuinely need upgrades right maybe the cpu cooler is broken or maybe their cpu is defective i want to use those parts for those upgrades for those swaps because they're in more dire needs of them in this case swapping the motherboard i think was sufficient for a 3600 this stock cooler isn't ideal but it's it's fine it's not the end of the world cable management looks a lot better now i'm really happy with the way it turned out the case has been cleaned up a tad uh and it works again that's the most important aspect of the right the fact that it works so we've uh we've breathed new life into this rig it's very balanced i love the combination of hardware it's just a very solid middle of the road good value build uh so whoever built this they knew it they knew what they were doing and uh happy to see it up and running again hopefully it remains up and running for years to come if you guys enjoyed this one let me know by giving this one a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated if you have not subscribed yet get subscribed and leave a comment down below if uh you want to see more more content like this let's say maybe an idea for a future playlist that would be appreciated as well also if you do live in around orlando florida and you have a broken system it's exhibiting symptoms like what you just saw here where you don't get a picture out no post or maybe the system just straight up doesn't power on at all be sure to send us an inquiry via the link in the video description you have to be local that is a requirement otherwise we'll have to ignore it we get non-local inquiries all the time and we just have to ignore them there are too many to even reply to so uh please follow the directions that are in that link if you want to submit an inquiry and we'll be sure to check them out as quickly as possible with that i'm gonna get out of here we're gonna give the system back to the owner tomorrow my name is greg thanks for fixing a build with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 572,126

Keywords: fix or flop, fof, broken gaming pc, viewer pc, viewer's broken pc, fixing a viewer's broken pc, how to fix a pc, how to fix a broken computer, dead computer, pc no post, pc won't turn on, pc won't, pc wont boot, pc wont display on monitor, computer, pc wont turn on but has power, pc gaming, tech, how to troubleshoot, troubleshoot pc, gaming pc, troubleshoot computer, How to build a pc, fix or flop season 2, fix or flop s2e10, Broken pc

Id: 3wpriWPq-Nk

Length: 30min 54sec (1854 seconds)

Published: Sat May 07 2022