Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S2:E13

this here is another viewer's broken gaming pc this one turns on but does not post it doesn't send a signal to a monitor and you guys know by this point that could mean a number of things are wrong with this rig basically he'll connect via hdmi cable or displayport cable his discreet card here which is a gtx 1080 ti to his monitor and the monitor will say no signal signal not detected something along those lines which i'm sure many of you have seen before if not at least temporarily it being a long-term issue could mean that either the graphics card is dead uh or maybe your your display port cable or whatever cable you're using is bad maybe you have an incompatible bios the system's just not posting because of that you didn't seat your ram properly there are so many different possibilities here and because of that i'm not entirely sure how long it's going to take us to troubleshoot but that's the joy of this playlist you really never know what you're going to get i don't know what i'm going to run into here i know just as much as you do which is the little bit i just told you and that's pretty much it so we're gonna dive on in and hopefully we can have this thing fixed sooner rather than later are you ready stay with me if you're looking for an all-in-one cyber security solution check out acronis cyber protect home office formerly a cronus true image they specialize in data backup as well as anti-malware solutions from data protection to threat prevention so let's set up a hypothetical let's say you've got a huge stash of important documents stored on your local machine you're looking for a cloud-based backup solution acronis has you covered and now let's say you've managed to protect z data from attacks while it sits online as you should acronis has you covered there as well and you can easily restore information to new hardware in the event of a disaster their goal was to simplify the experience for the end user by unifying two otherwise standalone paid solutions 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and that is much appreciated so your continued support just viewing just clicking on the videos when you see them go live is a huge help and it allows us to make a very small impact here in the local central florida area now i don't see too many alarming issues with this build apart from the fact that it is kind of dusty um it's it's not pcdc worthy but it's pretty darn close we might take it outside at the end of this and give it a quick dusting but other than that the only real issue here that i see apart you know this cable management could be a tad bit better is the fact that it doesn't work it's just one giant paperweight as is i was told that this graphics card was actually already replaced and the owner did this because he suspected that the graphics card was to blame i don't blame him for thinking that because if everything was working you know perfectly fine before which apparently it was then all of a sudden he went to turn it on one day and he got the no signal issue um you know you might think it's your graphics card because that's where your monitor is connected right so the first line of defense here is a discrete card and so we swapped that out actually went and bought a gtx 1080 ti this one here i think from best buy and still ran into the same issue and by that point he decided to reach out to us in hopes that we could figure out what was actually wrong with this thing i'm not entirely sure about specs i know that he's using an x570 motherboard so that means we're looking at at least maybe horizon 2nd gen ryzen 3rd gen maybe ryzen 5000 it looks like we've got 16 gigs of ddr4 in here the stock amd stealth cooler which suggests it probably is like a 3600 or maybe even a 5600 and the graphics card of course we talked about gtx 1080 ti the case is a dark flash case looks like it's decent airflow it's probably one of the reasons why however there's so much dust in here and the cable management is just the one other thing that we might be able to touch up on at the end of this video but first we need to tackle the elephant in the room so with that out of the way let's get straight into the troubleshooting process we need to start by attempting to replicate the issue described by the owner which again is a no signal uh notification from our screen basically no post right the system should turn on if it doesn't that means that something else might have happened maybe in transport at which point we need to contact the owner because something's mismatched right what are we working with here so power on at the rear power button up front and as expected everything does appear to power on that's weird the fans at the top and the rear stopped stopped spinning what's going on there maybe a controller or something they should definitely still be spinning though so that's a smaller thing we might be able to fix later okay so yeah as described nothing on the screen that means we need to start with the basic stuff so we'll check ram seating we'll try clearing the cmos and we'll just make sure that the obvious cables are connected would you look at that it is loading into the operating system i'm assuming there is an nvme in here it looks like or at least some sort of m.2 could be a stata m.2 but there we are we are in the we're in we're in windows i'm kind of caught off guard by this because all i did was disconnect the fan controller and an ssd that was pretty much it of course we disconnected front i o you know hd audio things like that but those are usually smaller less pertinent items they shouldn't affect the stability of a system unless you've wired something backwards which i suppose we should check next also just notice the chipset fan is not spinning and that could be a problem you can usually turn this off in the bios but i doubt that the viewer actually did that so we have a few fans that aren't spinning now now clearing the cmos is very straightforward we have the system totally powered off we're just going to be utilizing the battery on board the battery on the on the main board i should say and we're just going to take our screwdriver and jump these two pins for about 10 to 20 seconds the system should clear all of its initial bios settings and also check that ram is seated properly and indeed it is we're also in the correct slot but what i want to do is remove a single dimm i'm just going to leave one stick in slot a2 and see if we get a post this way by the way clearing the cmos did nothing okay and now a slightly different symptom all the fans are still spinning at this point but we also don't have a picture out so it doesn't really do as much good let's try swapping this them out for one that i know works in my own inventory a few moments later still nothing so we'll need to go deeper i have disconnected everything except for the vital components we've got our graphics card here powered by an eight pin and a six pin the 24 pin is still connected and the eight penny ps up top which is for the cpu i also have the cpu's uh cooler fan cable connected just because i don't want the cp to overheat while we power cycle this at this point we have pretty much stripped it down to the bare essentials here and if this doesn't work then it's likely likely that's not guaranteed to be the case but in my experience it's likely either the motherboard or the cpu i can't i could check the bios revision the problem is this board doesn't have a q flash function or equivalent so i can't flash a new bios if we can't get into the bios without soldering a new chip in and because of that we're kind of at the mercy of the yeah the combination of hardware we already have i'm going to jump the two power pins which are right here okay and we're just we're just looking for a post oh there is a picture wow would you look at that it is loading into the operating system i'm assuming there is an nvme in here it looks like or at least some sort of m.2 could be a stata m.2 but there we are we are in the we're in we're in windows at times like these it's important that you retrace your steps kind of go backwards from the way you came especially when you disconnect a bunch of stuff at the same time and then you get a working result you still want to try to figure out specifically what was wrong so you can inform the viewer and in the future you can build a loyal customer base and they'll also trust you as well you know some folks might receive a system like this and say yeah the whole thing needs to be replaced and then charge a crazy ton of money and that's easy to do if the owner of the system isn't very familiar with computers you could you know essentially lie and tell them anything uh but if you're running a business like this and you're up front and you're honest and you're like yeah it didn't cost really anything at all apart from maybe an hour two of my time i didn't need to replace any hardware there's no installation fees and and so tracing back those steps can kind of allow you to elaborate a bit more on that and also build trust uh with your client which is great for business long term so a few things i highly doubt we're responsible for the no post situation hd audio here at the rear we're gonna go ahead and reconnect that usb 3.0 up front is reconnected and our exhaust fan is reconnected these are things again i don't expect are causing the issue so we're gonna start adding things back one by one until we figure out what specifically is causing the no post and we're still gucci now our fan controllers reconnected usb 2.0 we've also got the samsung two and a half inch ssd at the back reconnected and that's pretty much it with one exception and i noticed this i just didn't think much of it at the time but i noticed that it wasn't where it should have been i doubt it was causing the no post problem but i've left that disconnected it's an rgb cable and wow okay this was not what i was expecting so of the three things we just reconnected one of them is preventing the system from posting those are the only variables we've changed from run to run i don't think it's the two and a half inch drive that would be very very weird i'm leaning toward the fan controller there might be something wrong with that uh and the motherboard just says hey we're sending power or receiving power from something that just we shouldn't be and it's tripping up the entire rig as a result i i don't know what else it could be so the only thing i'm gonna do now is disconnect this fan controller and that's all now we're gonna try powering the system back on once again 12 o'clock midnight okay um you're not gonna believe this but uh everything is reconnected and it's all working great with one exception it's not what i thought has nothing to do with the rgb apparently front i o there is and i've look i've done this hundreds of times i know how to wire front we have a video talking about how to wire front i o jfp one it's very straightforward the only polarities you need in mind are for the power led of course and the hard drive led but the power switch and the reset switch those are just you're just opening and closing a circuit and those were all reconnected properly but that is the one thing that i can change that affects this i don't know why yet but we're gonna find out so here we go one continuous shot i'm first gonna power off the system at the rear which you're not technically supposed to do but not a big deal i'm going to reconnect front i o okay i'm gonna reconnect it that's all i'm doing okay and that'll do it there now we're just gonna power on at the rear i'm gonna click the power button up front and you'll see this time we'll get no post for whatever reason it's almost like it's being continuously reset or maybe the power button is stuck closed so the system thinks it's just trying to be forced on and off over and over i i don't know i've never run into this before but i expect it has something to do with the little front i o board which we can check next by the way you can see still nothing on screen so yeah that right there is all that is killing this rig now interestingly enough the system does fire up with only the power switch cables connected but the moment i connect the reset switch black screen reese is the system infinitely resetting itself is that why it can never post i'm going to leave the camera rolling and all i'm going to do is pull out both of these from the header i just want to see if now it'll settle down and it does it is settled the whole fan curve has just changed it's posting now let's pull the entire power and reset switch assembly out of here i i don't know what we're going to find i'm not really sure again these this should be pretty basic switches involved but clearly something is wrong with the recess switch it just might be broken apart from it being a bit dusty however i don't see anything physically wrong with this again it's a pretty primitive circuit board there's nothing too complicated going on here now i do have the power switch and the reset switch still wired up to the system so we're going to see if we can finesse things a bit here try to narrow down what is wrong let's try powering on okay so the power led works just fine we saw the hard drive led blink for a second that might start blinking a bit more if we can get past this post check but i don't think it's gonna because the recess switch is still connected and this is it's not doing anything power switch works when you first turn the system on but i can't hold it down to power the system off i think that's the problem here let me get my multimeter so this here is my multimeter and it's nothing really special it has a it's actually a clamp meter too which is kind of useful for other applications but here you can see the screen we've got it set to continuity which usually on these looks like a wi-fi symbol and all that test is for whether or not a circuit is open or closed so i've got two ends of this picture like just a you know a bunch of wire that is not connected but then when we connect them you hear a beep okay very quick test that's essentially what testing for continuity does and when it comes to a switch application the switch should be open right which would indicate that the circuit is open there's no current flowing so the switch isn't active if the reset switch was closed permanently if the switch was bad then that would mean that the system was infinitely resetting itself which would explain what we're seeing on screen that is uh kind of weird so when i push the button yes there is continuity it's a bit odd doing it like this i have to push it from behind the board but uh yeah so the switch is working most of the time yeah that that works now if we test the power button these traces run actually to these pins over here so let's see open or what should be open we shouldn't be hearing any sound yet we don't hear any sound now and if i close the power button oh my gosh i'm gonna have to finesse this let's see if i can push it and probe it at the same time yeah so i guess after pushing these buttons so many times we fixed whatever was causing the boot loop maybe i mean from what we're probing here this board is okay but still we get nothing on screen so this is just being all wonky i think that the quick fix here is going to be to replace the case which i really didn't expect to conclude this one with but if we just swap the case out we'll bypass whatever is wrong with the board even though again we probed it and it seems fine what i know for certain is that if we disconnect these cables here and power on manually we have no issues at all so uh it's possible that these buttons are just kind of staying stuck uh closed when the system is on when power is being fed through them i i don't i don't know what else to conclude here so let's see if we've got a newer case for them and there again just to prove it the second i remove these switches the system powers up just fine all right and one case transplant later essentially had to rebuild whoops essentially had to rebuild the entire pc uh because yeah we're taking everything out putting it all back into a new chassis anyway corsair 220 t much uh much better case in my opinion than the one that was in previously it's a bit of an upgrade there we're just gonna fire on up and cross our fingers because if this doesn't work then we just did all that work for nothing okay sounds good it sounds like it's posting the fans calm down yes there it is look at that folks just when you thought you'd seen it all here on fixer flops swapping out a pc case fixed a no post issue it really came down to this though i still don't know entirely why sometimes it was working sometimes it wasn't but it was causing a lot of issues with the case and so swapping the case out right got around that and now we have a successful post also put his ram back in there slots two and four looking mighty fine at that well well well the case was that on your radar certainly wasn't on mine when you see again no signal you think maybe it's the graphics card maybe it's the cpu maybe you wired something incorrectly and that's why it's important that we remove non-vital connections you see me do that in almost every fixer flaw video because it rules out the smaller things the simple things things that you don't normally blame for no signal symptoms what on earth i just i'm still kind of shocked that this was the culprit checking for continuity with the multimeter didn't give me the answer the quick answer i was looking for it does appear like the switches are functioning properly but for some reason when we connect these cables to the motherboard in question they start acting all wonky and i suspect that the reset switch is the one that's remaining closed permanently with the system on and that's what's keeping the system from posting essentially it's just boot looping over and over and over again that would also explain why the fan curves never had time to set in because by the time the system was on and things were being detected it had to reset itself because the switch was just permanently pressed it's just yeah just a strange one for sure and i expect i could probably use this to mimic the symptoms on my own personal rig if i if i did that so um we might play around with this a bit more in a future video but for now i'm happy to say the system is back up and running and all it took was a change of case again who would have thought with that if you guys enjoyed watching this one let me know by giving this one a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated if you or someone you know lives in and around orlando florida and you have a broken system or are aware of a broken system that needs to be fixed and it's not like a software related issue where it's like oh every now and then i get a blue screen to death like we honestly we reject most of those submissions because i don't want to deal with inconsistent symptoms it needs to be readily repeatable which is why you see all at times we'll deal with hardware here in the studio it's very easy to troubleshoot hardware and software can just lead you down infinite rabbit holes and i'm just not interested in doing too much of that here every now and then we'll dabble in it but mostly hardware related maybe your system doesn't power on at all maybe it turns on but you don't get a post like we saw here those are perfect for the fixer flop series we don't accept shipments of any kind i do want to make that very clear but if you're willing to meet me in person both to drop the system off and pick it back up and you have a symptom like the one you just saw here be sure to submit a form linked in this video's description other than that uh yeah also subscribe leave a comment down below am i missing anything check out our social media channels down there in the description as well and stay tuned for the next one my name is greg thanks for learning with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 208,460

Keywords: fix or flop, fix a pc, how to fix a pc, how to, how to troubleshoot, broken pc, viewer's broken gaming pc, dead pc, broken gaming pc, pc no post, pc won't power on, no picture on monitor, greg salazar, no signal, dirty pc, viewers pc, dead computer, fixing a viewers broken gaming pc, How to fix a computer

Id: Q186Dc6xg_M

Length: 20min 23sec (1223 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 24 2022