Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S2:E2

this here is a viewer's broken gaming pc and in this video we're gonna try to fix it this system has a very strange backstory if you can believe this it's been down according to the owner for over a year i i simply cannot wrap my head around the fact that a build has been down for this long and nothing's been done about it actually the owner to be fair did try to do something about it he took it to geek squad and uh yeah it didn't didn't go so well so when he took this system in they charged him 100 i don't know why they charged him a hundred bucks to not even diagnose the problem they initially assumed it was his graphics card that wasn't sending a picture out his system appeared to turn on the fans would spin things would light up but you could never get a picture out so they naturally focused on the graphics card which i don't really blame them for that's probably one of the first things i would have tried as well and apparently they swapped this card out with one of their cards into his build they swapped this card into one of their test beds and they still couldn't get a picture out and then they told them that essentially they couldn't fix it and they took off with us 100 what what kind of service is that now to be fair i am going off the word of this system's owner and for all i know he could have it out for geek squad maybe just has some like personal vendetta i don't know but i i can tell you what he told me as to the reason why this hasn't been fixed for so long you assume well if geek squad can't fix i mean what's the point bringing it in anywhere else somebody's spending money so that you know other people just end up telling me the same thing it's unfixable we can't figure out what's wrong well now it's in this studio and i can personally guarantee you we're gonna figure out whatever the heck is wrong with this and if it does end up being the graphics card usually i make exceptions for these builds when it comes to replacing cards because i don't get cards from vendors either right i have to pay out of pocket for these but if the graphics card is the reason why this system is not working i will personally replace it i will dip it in my own pocket and buy him a replacement card on ebay this card in here actually isn't even that powerful so it wouldn't be difficult to give him an upgrade pretty sure it's an hd 7700 somewhere in that ballpark and he's obviously using a ryzen platform amd that the stock race stealth cooler there he has what looks like an nvme drive here from team group at the bottom and this case is from msi now the power supply in here he swapped out because he wanted to put a discrete card in here obviously the cpu this ryzen chip doesn't have integrated graphics so he needs a dedicated card to run picture out and that's why this kind of cheap placeholder is here but he swapped a power supply so that he had dedicated pci power and i actually have the old unit i'm going to test that for him he also wants me to test another graphics card that he is not sure of whether or not it works or not again geek squad couldn't give him any answers he actually brought a second card in and we we don't know if it works or not but uh we're going to test everything and we're going to definitely get to the bottom of why this build is not posting so be sure to stick around for the ride stay with me nzxt's bld foundation pre-built pcs are a great way for folks to easily get into pc gaming without breaking the bank reeling over 100 fps in league and valorant and over 60 fps in fortnite all with settings at medium and in 1080p that ain't too bad at all and perhaps best of all this build is super easy to upgrade down the line with a discreet graphics card since you've still got 6 multi-threaded zen 3 cpu cores to pair it with nzxt's bld pre-builds waive the 99 build fee since they're made in bulk and you'll get a two-year parts and labor warranty with every purchase learn more about bld systems including this foundation pc here via the link below now for those who aren't aware this playlist is fixer flop sometimes i agree with fof that's the acronym kind of unofficially but if i'm just describing the playlist or wanting to reference the name sometimes i'll put that instead and what we do here is attempt to fix viewer systems and around the orlando florida area generally for free we charge zero dollars and zero cents so long as the owners are okay with us taking on their systems for a few days and filming these troubleshooting processes we can monetize these videos externally via youtube adsense and other external brands and because of that i don't feel like offloading any of that you know cost what would be a cost to the owners because they're already gracious enough to loan us their systems for a few days now again with respect to this build here i know nothing about this system apart from the fact that it has had um a bit of a history and that it does not post the owner told me that the fans will spin that things do light up but that no picture is sent out whatsoever in fact it even sounds sometimes like it's power cycling to him so let's get to the bottom of it now one of the most important troubleshooting steps is also the first step you should take and that is to verify that the system is exhibiting the symptoms that are described by the owner ahead of time if what you're seeing in the office doesn't add up with what they're describing you might have a different problem on your hands you might want to contact them before diving into a project like this so the system is on and we have all the lights from the fans lighting up the cpu fan is not spinning oh there it goes yeah but no post hmm i don't know why i keep waiting i'm waiting for something to happen but nothing is happening okay so what we can do now uh we can't plug the hdmi cable into the motherboard because the cpu in here from amd does not have integrated graphics so that's going to do us no good what we can do let's see do we get any signal detected no no signal so no signal at all coming from the card i am inclined to run through a few basic checks first and you want to run through these mainly because they're so quick and so simple to do namely those are checking that ram is seated properly and clearing the cmos because those two things could very well be causing the symptom we're seeing here now it's going to be a bit difficult to see but these two ddr4 modules are actually in slots a1 and b1 whereas slots a2 right this right here between these two dimms and b2 are typically where you want to install your first two dimms now some boards might be weird but most boards i've worked with prefer a2 and b2 first so what i'm going to do is remove both of these dimms and move them over into the other two open slots and try to power the system on like that and by removing these modules we'll ensure that once we reinstall them that they're reinstalled correctly this time let's move this one over both of these modules do feel like they are installed correctly so i doubt this is the issue but having them in the incorrect slots i mean that could be a very kind of just finicky thing that could be preventing the system from posting so now we are definitely good to go on ram is it going to work i don't think so i'm not all that surprised but i did want to roll out that variable and now what we should do is clear the seamless i'll show you how to do that right now so with the system fully off what you'll want to do is let's see where are the two pins we need to jump because this board doesn't have a dedicated button for it uh don't tell me they're behind the graphics card this is the most annoying thing ever okay well uh let's remove the card real quick to get to the pins we need to jump because yeah this board doesn't have the button ah okay so actually the two pins are away down here at the bottom of the board next to the jfp one header and these two fan hubs it's kind of a good thing to remove the card anyway because we have better line of sight now where we're working so if you look very closely you'll see text under here that says something along the lines of clear cmos or cmos clear clr and the two pins directly above that description are the two that we want to jump you want to use something that's obviously metallic something that can conduct electricity and uh so using you know like this phillips head screwdriver i have here should be good for that we do this all the time so you want to hold this right over the two pins and you're going to hold it there with the system powered off for about 10 to 20 seconds now you might be wondering well greg how is this supposed to work if the system's fully powered down we're actually utilizing the battery on the motherboard to take care of this uh this clearing so you don't need power from the wall i've seen people do it with the system on and i don't really advise that if you do it the correct way it should only take 10 to 20 seconds here and once we are finished with this we can lift it back up and then all we need to do now is reconnect power is this gonna work uh i don't know i doubt it but you'd be surprised clearing the cmos can cure a number of computer ailments just i'm just not feeling this though i don't really feel like this is it because i mean for it to be down for a year all because of the need to clear the cmos no it can't be that simple okay we're going to be diving a bit deeper the first thing i want to tackle for sure because this card is so old is just that the graphics card i think that swapping this out with our trusty gt710 should let us narrow down whether or not the card is the reason why we're not getting picture out so let's do that right now so out goes this get it out there we go and in goes this we don't need supplemental pci power mind you all the power is driven through the pci slot and let's give it a shot a few moments later okay i'm starting to see why geek squad didn't want to take this on i think it's extremely dirty that they took a hundred dollars from him if in fact that happened i mean ultimately to do nothing right you didn't fix the problem but uh i can see why they might have wanted to not touch this because if if it's not the obvious thing then it's probably something much more intensive and maybe they just didn't want to deal with it and if that if at that point you decide that you don't want to touch it that's fine but then don't take 100 from the guy you know that that's just that's awful i mean that's not a good look for your brand at all so uh i guess it's a good thing that it's not the graphics card you know i mean despite this being quite old it would still be pretty expensive to replace so um it's it's nice that we've narrowed that down but uh that leaves just the motherboard cpu and power supply i don't think ram is bad it's very rare that ram is bad i mean usually it's just not installed correctly but for the actual modules themselves to be defective uh that's that's very rare i suppose we can swap them out though very quickly just to be on the safe side and then what we'll do after that is unplug every non-vital component with the exception obviously of the 24 pin which we need and the 8 pin eps which we also need i know for a fact that these corsair avengers lpx modules work what i'm going to do is stick with a single dimm and try it in multiple slots to ensure we don't have a dead memory channel which would ultimately be the responsibility of the cpu yeah none of that worked we tried every single memory slot with a single dim that again we know works and we still can get a post there's a very loud bike passing by and my infant daughter is crying so i apologize if you hear either of those things in the background throughout this video it's just one of those things i can't really get around at this point so what this tells us is that a ddr4 isn't an issue it's not what's causing the system not to post and b this isn't a memory channel issue which rules out one potential problem with the cpu that doesn't tell us that the cpu is fine it just means that it's not memory channel specific which again more or less relies on the cpu so the next thing i'm going to do is disconnect everything except for the 24 pin and the 8 eps that includes removing both disk drives actually one of them the disk drive the other one is a solid-state drive so this uh team group nvme actually it's not even nvme drive it's a sata drive uh you know we might need to upgrade that for the viewer now in this case we'll need to jump the front i o pins for power okay there we are so the system is actually on even though it doesn't look like it's on all the fans are disconnected we're not going to leave it on for long obviously we don't want things overheating but i forgot to disconnect the the sata drive dang it that's the one thing get on out of here you there we go and uh yeah still doesn't seem to fix the problem this is cp related or motherboard related i highly doubt it's the power supply we could test it after the fact if neither of the other things work but um i think what we need to do now is swap cpus i i can't think of any other reason why this system wouldn't turn on apart from maybe the fact that this graphics card is in the uppermost 16 lane slot we could try another full length slot um it's not 16 lanes but we could try it the viewer told me that he did already but you know how that is you always have to verify for yourself okay um cpu it is at this point our hands are tied we're pretty much cornered by the platform uh it's either the motherboard of the cpu again i don't really have a reason to believe that the power supply is bad considering it was already replaced and it was only replaced because he needed a bit more wattage to run his uh discrete card because it required a supplemental six pin that his old unit didn't have so he had no other reason to upgrade it but we're not we're not getting we're not getting anything i don't know what the timeline for this was though i mean for all i know it could have stopped working the moment he swapped power supplies so if the psu is in fact bad and you know he noticed that the system stopped working the moment he put it in here i mean that would be all the information we need right it's the only variable that's changed between then and now i i don't think that's what it is but i don't know let's let's do the power supply first just just to rule it out because it is pretty important so we've got our passmark inline psu tester connected we're going to power on the system by clicking this power button down here and let's see how this goes i have to hold it down i forgot about that not hearing any beeps which is always a good sign that's a ripple that's cool and uh timings everything looks great so i think the power supply is a-okay so we're gonna swap cpus then at this point i don't feel like we have any other choice it's a bit more labor-intensive than uh there goes the back plate it is a bit more labor intensive than say swapping ram but it needs to be done so what is this uh what is a cpu so this here is a ryzen 5 3600 which is a great cpu one of the better value chips on the market actually one of the best if you ask me and so i'm pleased to see it in here it would be unfortunate if this is in fact the reason why the system isn't posting but it is very easy to replace i have several on hand you know just realize something ryzen 5 3600 b450 motherboard an older b450 motherboard is it possible that the bios for this board is not compatible or the cpu rather is not compatible with the bios in this board if that's the case then that would 100 explain why we're not getting a post if you put an incompatible cpu in a board like this you won't see any picture you won't get into your bios nothing you'll just have a black screen it might boot up it might power on in fact in most cases it will but you won't get any picture because the system can't post because the necessary files aren't there to run system checks with the new cpu in it the cpu that it doesn't recognize so i'm going to replace the 3600 in here with a 2000 series zen plus cpu and see if that works i bet you it will and a quick visual inspection of the cpu everything looks good i don't see any bent or missing pins and i don't see any gunk in the socket either so in goes a ryzen 5 2600 it's a bit awkward doing this with the pc standing up but anyway looks pretty good on camera now is this gonna work i sure as heck hope so i i do believe that it will um i have every bit of faith that this will work this time we're going to reconnect the cpu cooler don't want that overheating especially a chip that i know works come on come on power cycling that's actually a good sign um it is probably training memory this notices that a new cpu is in there a compatible one at that and i think we should get yes there it is so there's a picture all right so we're not done yet so you know you could stop here and i'm sure at this rate i mean whoever whichever geek squad this guy took the system to i'm sure they probably if they had gotten here would have said yeah it's just a dead cpu but it might not be okay it might just be an incompatible bios so what i'm going to do now is upgrade or update this bios to the latest so whichever board this is we're going to look it up online we're going to download that bios we're going to connect the usb drive that that bios file is on to the back of the board and then we're going to go in here and flash the updated one and then we'll try putting this 3600 back in here because at that point zen 2 should be compatible with b450 boards so let's give that a shot i know i've said that a few times just bear with me so actually what it looks like now he has p 4.50 this bios version installed currently and this actually added support for 5000 series cpu so the 3000 series cps are definitely support in fact that support was added way way down here in 3.2 i believe where it says support amg next gen ryzen processors doesn't say 3000 series or zen 2 but i assume this is what they mean and this was back in may of 2019. now this actually adds up with the uh the owner's story actually sophia is 4.5 installed and this bios revision came out in 11 19 2020 that means that this system theoretically could have been down for a year that's i mean that's really something so i i'm not really inclined to update i mean we could update his bios it says that you really shouldn't especially if you're going to be using some of these other cpus but uh i mean we get a few against updates and things with the latest bioship vision so we'll go ahead and update them to 5.0 what we'll do is click the global download link over here we've got the file extracted and saved to the root of our thumb drive all connected to a usb port at the back of the motherboard you may need to connect to a usb 2.0 port depending on the drive used and the motherboard in question and in the bios we'll want to click the tool tab followed by the instant flash icon and this should find our uh bios update here we actually have two copies of it and we'll click yes now you want to make sure that you don't do this during a thunderstorm or if you have really spotty power make sure you're hooked up to a ups or something because you don't want power to cut out while this is happening if you don't have a secondary bios backup then you're gonna have a brick board if this gets interrupted so we'll click yes and we'll let this thing run through its paces without touching anything now once it's completed it may reset a few times just let it do its thing eventually you'll either get into windows if you have windows installed or you'll just get back into the bios home page at that point the flash is successful all right now with the bios updated and the original 3600 back in here so his cpu let's see if it works we need to jump i don't know why i'm reaching for the power button let's jump the pins and we can reconnect the cpu cooler yeah i don't think there's always that weird delay with the cooler with a 3600 in here i don't think it's going to work now if it didn't work before again i don't expect it to work now just because p 4.50 already included support for zen 2. so i just doing this as a precaution doesn't hurt to upgrade the bias anyway with the latest against updates so uh yep doesn't look like it's gonna do the trick so i think his 3600 is just bricked which that's that's not a very common thing but uh i mean we've narrowed it down to just that specific variable the other thing we can do is try the 3600 in a different platform maybe an x 570 or b 550 board just to be sure but uh we know that the rest of its components work because we got a post with this fully functioning 2600 so something's up so first we'll swap in our fully tested ryzen 5 3600 we'll set up the remainder of his build i also want to upgrade his storage which we'll get to in a second and then clean up his cable management clean up his build a bit because it is a bit dusty and then once we're finished with all of this we'll set it aside and try one more time to get his original ryzen 5 3600 to post we'll get some fresh thermal paste while we're in here i like the x pattern for horizon cpus something like that maybe a few extra dots around the edges doesn't have to be a work of art it usually never is in my case i'm going to look pretty stupid if this doesn't work but again i have no reason to expect that it won't that's weird the cpu fans always it always takes a few seconds to turn on maybe it's in the wrong port that's cp fan 2. that would be why let's move that over to the main cpu header there we go this this has to work yes okay whoo um i was a little worried i was a little scared there again on paper it should work especially with the the new bios we have installed and that is uh p5 so p5.00 and that's the latest bios revision for this board so he's up to date there uh he has essentially the exact same cpu just swapped over with one that actually works and this one we're gonna have to do a few more tests on and we'll conclude the video with that uh for now though the reason why we're getting kicked into the bios is because we have his storage drive disconnected he actually has two drives in here uh he has a hard disk drive and this sata uh it's actually a sata m.2 drive i have a solution though that's going to give him much faster speeds and he's also going to be able to put more stuff on it because this is only a 512 gig sata ssd so let's uh let's give a bit of an upgrade shall we so this here is a crucial p5 plus this is a one terabyte pcie 4 nvme ssd now obviously his system isn't yet capable of pci gen 4 speeds that said he'll still be able to essentially fully saturate gen 3 speeds with this drive which is excellent and he can always migrate this to a build that does support gen 4 later on down the line if he wishes this is double the capacity of his current drive and best of all it doesn't break the bank i want to thank crucial for being our product sponsor for this video and i'm going to show you how to install it it's not too difficult with these nvme drives first you're going to want to find the uppermost nvme slot which is typically right under the cpu socket then you want to match the key and the drive with the notch right there in the socket it should slot in very easily just like that right there then you want to use the very tiny phillips screw included in your motherboards box to lock it down you can find crucial p5 plus storage drives linked below if you are interested now at this point with the drive installed we need to get windows installed onto it and to do that we need to connect our usb bootable media to the back of our motherboard here and to power the system on we want to choose the usb drive as the boot device there should be no other bootable volume in this system because the only other thing in here is a hard disk drive and that apparently just has games on it and then his original m.2 drive just had a basic operating system he told me that since it's been a year already i could go ahead and wipe that if i needed to there was nothing important on the end it was all backed up which is it's always great to hear folks backing up their data that is very important if you have sensitive files all right and with everything reconnected including his original graphics card all of the smaller connections front i o all the fans leds etc everything else works and again i'm not surprised because we essentially tested everything else by the time you get to the cpu if the cpu is the culprit and you discover that just by you know process of elimination in general pc troubleshooting you should probably have already tested everything else because to get that far into it right you want to rule out as many things as possible and you're more or less just removing parts at that point and testing them as you go so cpu being bad is just um it's unfortunate but it certainly could have been worse if his graphics card had been dead i'd say that was that would probably have been a little more cataclysmic but uh windows is set up now he's gonna have a blazing fast windows experience now thanks to that new crucial p5 plus drive we installed and all he's got to do is just sign in set up his account and he'll be good to go we'll clean this up and set it aside the last thing i want to do then is test his ryzen 5 3600. you'll have to pardon the mess this is a very very temporary setup obviously we're just trying to see if this cpu works with a totally different platform we are reusing the same gt710 we always do because we know it works and i think that's it everything else is different the motherboard's different ram is different although i expect these really won't be uh variables at play here i do have a stock amd cooler atop the chip and i use carbonart thermal pads in case you're wondering the uh carbon pads that are very easy to swap from build to build it's great for troubleshooting is this jank setup going to work we'll find out actually don't need a screwdriver this has a power button on board i guess i can't really see the screen from here so i won't know if it works this'll actually i didn't think about this this board has a doctor debug led so it'll tell us specifically what is wrong with it right now the code is nine zero that that uh that doesn't sound too good i did a bit of research and apparently on reddit there are several folks who have run into this postcode 90 and more often than not this ends up being an amd thing so postcode90 means dead cpu that's pretty much the gist of it folks who have run of this code before have ultimately ended up replacing their cpu to get their systems working again and uh well i'm not really surprised because we narrowed it down to the cpu ourselves uh it just would have been nice to have a dr debug led on the original board it really is a shame that these things are only usually on more expensive boards i'd like to see this as a standard feature in the future would make troubleshooting so much easier for so many different platforms so this was a success we were successfully able to diagnose the issue at hand we swapped out the cpu with basically an equivalent and we also upgraded him he's got a a much faster nvme drive again courtesy of crucial in there and we also cleaned up his system a bit it's not deep cleaned i don't think it really needs to be deep cleaned yet although it certainly was getting there there was a lot of service dust that was starting to cake up so i took it outside dusted it with the electric duster and looks quite a bit better now sorted cable management just a tad he already did fairly well with cable management that the rear behind the motherboard tray looked fine and i mean i think it all works really well you know his his graphics card is a bit weak sure but uh in this market you really can't complain at least he has something that can help him with display out now i do still have his other graphics card i was going to show that to you in this video and maybe even attempt to fix it if it is broken but i've been spending all day on this build so far and i just want to break it up i don't want to do it all in one video it's too much at this point so i'm going to take a look at that if i think it's worthy of a video if i think it's something i can fix maybe we'll film that but uh if i don't have the time i might just end up giving it back to him and and he can always just swap that into here now that this system works and test it himself shouldn't be too difficult uh with that if you guys enjoyed this video be sure to let me know by giving this one a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated if you have not subscribed already get subscribed that would be also greatly appreciated and be sure to leave your feedback in the comment section below i always love reading your comments especially in the first like hour so i mean those are the really those are really the best comments because uh those who are willing to be here uh very quickly especially right after the video is published you know barring any time zone issues i know i can't publish at the optimal time for everybody but uh the comments within the first few hours are always very refreshing and even the critiques that i see in there you know some people might think it's it's negative but i do appreciate them you know the folks that are willing to be as prompt as they are usually their feedback is the most valuable stay tuned for additional episodes this season i have plenty in the queue we see we seem to get like three or four at least every day and that's just in the orlando florida area which is uh pretty pretty crazy uh in one sense it's a bit disappointing that this many systems have issues but in another it's great that we can make this much content and help out this many folks in the area as well so uh stay tuned for all of that i will catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for fixing a system with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 1,338,005

Keywords: fix or flop, broken pc, pc gaming, broken gaming pc, computer, viewer pc, broken computer, gaming pc, how to build a pc, broken pc fix, how to fix a pc, pc no post, no post, tech, gaming pc build, Gaming pc build 2022, fix or flop season 2, fix of flop s2e2, s2:e2, FoF, pc doesn't turn on, pc doesn't, pc doesnt display on monitor, pc doesnt boot

Id: LKBzg33z7IE

Length: 29min 8sec (1748 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 21 2022