Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S2:E20

yeah i know i usually just like walk these into frame but uh yeah this case is huge and i'm not sure i could pick it up again this is a viewer's broken gaming pc now this thing has been part swapped to the moon and back and this owner still can't get the system to post so we've got um yeah we've got a tough one on our hands and to add insult to injury here this uh platform is pretty darn old you can see there this is an old evga motherboard you've got ram on both sides so that means we're looking at something like a core i7 4930k he said it was a core i7 but um it's definitely not a modern one just looking at the board here also for some reason the graphics card is way down here the graphics card is actually pretty modern an rtx 2070 power supply looks like a 1300 watt which is that's beefy from antec definitely not really warranted for a system like this but it is what it is and um well the build's also pretty dirty but it's old so what do you expect with all that out of the way let's get straight into the troubleshooting process starting first with attempting to power this system on are you ready you know what's coming stay with me celebrating intel gamer days where you can find your favorite intel powered products at great prices for a limited time starting august 25th shop entry level intel core i3 processors for budget friendly gaming solutions or step into the big leagues with intel core i7 and core i9 skus like the 12700k and 12 900k you can find great hardware combos from hp including the victus 15 featuring an intel core i7 12700 and rtx 3060 as well as the omen 45l part of their premium gaming lineup and packing an unlocked intel core i7 12700k and rtx 3060 with plenty of space for activities also take up to 10 off select hp gaming products powered by intel by using codes five gamer 2022 and 10 gamer 2022 check the video description for more details hey there how you doing my name is greg and this is fix or flop for those who are new here the premise is simple if you have a broken gaming pc and you live in or around orlando florida i would like a chance to fix it for free that's exactly what this viewer took us up on and we're not going to charge them a dime even if it means replacing parts i can get a hold of a lot of stuff just because of the connections we have with vendors thanks to the size of the channel thanks to honestly the viewership that you guys have provided so consistently for so long that is much appreciated the reason why we can continue doing what we're doing is because of your viewership alone we don't need a patreon or any other donations on your side just the viewership and we'll take it from there so thank you for that support i the only thing that i haven't really been able to replace consistently is the graphics card and that's just because i have to dip into my own pocket to buy a lot of those even now with the market cooling off it's difficult to get allocations for even older cards so that's the only thing that i hesitate to swap out if indeed that is the problem uh but pretty much everything else with the i say that this platform is also really freaking old i don't have any replacement parts for the platform so either we upgrade the platform entirely if something involving the platform is broken or we have to go to ebay or search locally and try to find a replacement that way so i'm not entirely sure what we're going to be doing it really depends on what's broken you can see just how dirty the build is i think the white makes it look worse uh but it's not one that i'm comfortable holding for a long amount of time it's just yeah a lot of goo and and hair and dust that's just collected and you can see up top there oh that top fan is that is caked but we aren't tasked with deep cleaning it that's a different series we're just tasked with fixing it we're going to try our best to take care of that here we've got power connected at the rear power supply switch in the on position we've got the hdmi cable connected to our portable monitor and let's see where's the power button is it this one no that's reset that was it yes all right so we do have power some power this thing is smelly i'm not to turn on my uh my air purifier oh graphics card fan spinning ooh we have multiple debug leds so that's difficult to see i can't get my camera fully under this because the graphics card is blocking half of this docker debug but the code that's showing us is actually b7 the 7 is being blocked so we're going to look at what b7 means and after specifying evga because some boards have different debug codes for some reason error code b7 in this case looks like it points towards the dim sockets or the dimms themselves that means the very first thing i'm going to do is power the system back off and remove each of these modules i think this is ddr3 pretty sure yep ddr3 and we'll take out all four dimms and we'll just use a single module from my own stash that i know works i've been saving this old school g skill trident x kit for a rainy day looks like today is that day gonna make sure it is fully inserted and we'll give it a power on crossing everything i got that it's this simple by the way there are a few folks who seem to think that well i just like stretching these videos out for the sake of youtube absolutely not the case we have picture flop videos in this very playlist that uh we're only like eight ten minutes long because there's nothing left to do we diagnose it fairly quickly although that doesn't usually end up being the case oh i'm hearing some beeps now not sure if those were post beeps or error beeps i don't think we're gonna get a signal here i think we already would have gotten it okay um let's try quickly clearing the cmos just to get that out of the way by the way before i turn this off you can see with dr debug the code keeps changing and i think that's because that's not actually a code that's the temperature of the cpu possibly 20s is pretty low but sometimes what these debugs will do after the system post is that will switch to a temperature indicator so i think the system believes it's it's good to go we might have an issue with maybe the graphics card i'm not sure at this point but we'll clear the cmos anyway and we'll also move this graphics card to the uppermost full-length 16 lane slot because it shouldn't be down here i'm not sure why it's down here unless you have clearance issues it should be at the top one i'm really hoping this 2070 is not to blame that would not be something i could readily replace let's see slide it into the top slot here maybe that was done for another reason i'm not entirely sure but we're going to move it up here because that's where it traditionally goes and we'll reconnect pci supplemental power and to clear the cmos it's as simple as holding down this red button at the back of the motherboard for about 10 to 20 seconds with the system fully powered off and then we'll give this another shot i really don't want to have to buy another older motherboard from ebay to get a system to work so i hear the click the beep for a post one two three four five beeps this is really odd now we're getting dr debug code d6 now i did just notice he has his hard drive led wires connected to the power led pins shouldn't be a huge issue but these obviously aren't in the correct places so we'll swap those uh power switch is in the correct place and i'm assuming the one underneath that is the reset switch so after doing a bit of research it seems we have two different error codes happening simultaneously and i'm not sure why we're seeing this inconsistency with this particular board but uh what i've found is that if i place this graphics card in the uppermost 16 lane slot the doctor debug sends a code d6 d6 if you look that up for an evga board means that the board can't find graphics out which means that the graphics card would have to be dead however i don't get that code if i have this card in any other slot other than the top one i'm not sure what's going on there the other thing that we're hearing when the system tries to boot is the five consecutive beeps five beeps in a row from what i could see either means that there's a cmos battery failure or some issue with the cmos or the cpu is nuked uh could be both at this point i'm i wouldn't put it past this rig so uh the easiest thing to check with regard to the five beeps would be the cmos battery itself we'll check voltage there if we need to swap it out we can this is a pretty old platform so it would be wise to upgrade it anyway voltage for the battery is correct we're still gonna swap it out um but if we need to swap the entire platform i mean this is kind of futile i have disconnected literally everything non-vital here all sata cables disconnected all the stuff at the bottom under the card i've tried this card in so many different slots there is an extra eight pin up top but i want to make it very clear that that's not a requirement for this board uh just running the the first eight pin is fine that second one's there for supplemental power when doing extreme overclocking in this sort so the fact that we're still getting five beeps which means it can't detect the graphics card and we're getting very inconsistent doctor debug codes some sometimes it's d6 sometimes it's like 50. uh it's just just a bunch of random ones there's nothing consistent about it at all so i can't at this point rely on it anymore i i really have no i have no other way of narrowing down the board versus the cpu because i don't have replacements for either of these the last thing i can check is the power supply although i don't think this is a power supply issue we can at least rule it out we can also roll the card out i'll throw this into a different rig and make sure that it posts and then at that point we'll know we we either need a new cpu or a new motherboard uh maybe both oh my god this is um this is disgusting back here wow this is in a worse state than i thought so i i was going to disconnect the 24 pin the 8 pin connect those to my psu tester i i really should take this outside oh boy this thing is just a basket case testing the unit everything looks to be pretty good with the exception of ripples um those are pretty high and you can see on the five volt and three volt lines they're both barely passing occasionally failing so uh the spikes aren't nice but otherwise it looks pretty decent nothing that would keep the system from posting or or yeah functioning properly at the onset so here is where we stand i am gonna remove the motherboard i'm going to check the socket i bend pins missing pins you never know the cpu was actually replaced something i forgot about the owner of this system when i went to pick it up actually gave me the cpu that was originally in here he thought it was bad so he swapped that himself now the chances of two different cpus being bad at the exact same time especially when you just bought the replacement pretty slim so i'm going to go into this assuming that the motherboard is the issue that is what i will order for replacement if i need to because i if we get the same symptoms with two different chips i'm going to assume that the board is bad there's nothing else i can do i don't have my own working 4930k or generation cpu that would fit in that socket to test otherwise so let's take the motherboard out and we'll just do a quick physical inspection see if there are any obvious issues holy crap look at how disgusting this is oh that's just pure neglect this this hasn't been cleaned in several several months if not years and and i wonder if the system was even used for this probably sat broken at this point that's what i'm thinking because how do you let this slide for so long jason this cpu is just littered with thermal paste this is way more than you need folks holy cow it's spilling over the edge in large quantities here so uh yeah cpu is a core i7 4930k as we were told and oopsie looks like this lever wasn't pushed all the way down and into place that could have been bad i don't think that was our overlying underlying issue here but uh yeah you got to make sure that you secure this correctly like that i mean just look at the spillage here of this thermal paste it is all over the sides of this socket it's going to be a pain in the butt to clean up that's for sure 2 000 years later i am so frustrated right now you guys have no idea this is this is just a huge headache and it could have been prevented so i'm going to try my best to clean this up it does look like there's spillage around the socket not just in that area but also over here looks like there's some debris in the socket i don't see any missing pins or bent pins so that's a good thing but you can see even on the on the cpu side which yeah this this is also still covered look at that it's just it's running over the the under underside of the chip like what's going on here so now i'm just uh flooding the socket with isopropyl alcohol i've got this brush here that i've been gently scrubbing over these pins uh this would be a lot easier if this was a pga socket but it is what it is and i'm just trying to get as much of this thermal paste dislodged not too worried about it getting you know sinking down below the pins that shouldn't be a problem i just don't want any on top of the pins you know interrupting contact so i think it looks decent now i'm going to dry everything up with my electric duster and yeah i guess we'll swap back to his other cpu it's the only thing i have here to test with but uh i'm assuming we're gonna need to to yeah try a new motherboard and if that is the case i might just just so that i can wash my hands clean of this one i might just upgrade the platform entirely and call it a day i really want to be done with this system at this point it's it's very frustrating to work with um very dirty just wasn't cared for and i still don't know if the motherboard swap will fix it so we'll see socket actually cleaned up surprisingly nice i didn't expect that we'll pull out a few bristles from the brush remaining in here and then yeah we'll swap over to the other chip now i could pull the trigger right now on an x79 motherboard along with an i7 3820 which would be nice to have an extra cpu on hand for testing if we ever come across another platform like this but i'm going to again try the other cpu as well as the original one that was in the system just because there might have been an issue with the the socket just not being cleaned maybe thermal paste got in there when he was swapping them out himself so just to rule out that and yeah if we don't get post with either of these this board is gone two hours later well some time has passed and now i'm getting a pretty consistent dr debug notification code 19 which has something to do with memory i suppose swapping in both cpus i had the cooler on for both both sets of runs i've got my cheaper graphics card in here that i know works i've tried multiple slots with the same dim different ddr3 sticks this board is just nuked and i'm extremely confident that ordering a replacement x79 board would remedy the issue and we'd get a post again so that's what i'm gonna do i i don't know what else to do at this point i don't want to upgrade him because what i would upgrade him to is amd and i don't want to swap his boot drive from an intel system to an amd system outright without taking some precautions i'm not sure what is on those storage drives and i i want to treat it as though it's sensitive because i don't really know so i'm going to play it safe i'm going to order the x79 board i just showed you and hopefully that fixes things so we're gonna spa we're gonna fast forward another few days like it's all on camera in one video so that's cool but uh for me this is dragging out to a multi-day event here she is folks our motherboard replacement i don't remember what i bought i think it was a an asus board it has blue accents i couldn't find this exact board this evga classified x79 on ebay i think there was actually might have been one but it was like 220 or something stupid i'm not going to spend that kind of money for an exact match so this here should support uh the chip that he already has in here the 4930k and it looks like it has similar feature sets so apart from the color which yeah i'm not going to pay 100 premium to match the color here this board should be apples to apples so i can get this thing open i also think this order came with a cpu so we'll have an extra one on hand in case we ever deal with x79 again uh in this playlist i'll have an extra chip to test with so that's nice it's nice that it's wrapped this way it means it was uh packaged with care what do we have here oh yeah looking nice so like i said it's blue not red but other than that it's pretty sweet i'm literally just going to drop his i7 in here very carefully and this is the one that that was in his system when it showed up in the office so i'm not changing anything here i'm not using the second one it's also sure to double check that this listing came with the original back plate some of these don't so uh just keep an eye out i'm pretty much just gonna go all in with this install gonna very carefully lock down the board i'm pretty much going ham just throwing everything in the case because at this point if it doesn't work i'm at a loss i'll probably just end up giving everything back to him i've spent so much time on this as it is and that would just mean that more than one thing is dead because i'm fairly certain that the board the original board was fried all right and here we go this is a moment of truth i'm a bit nervous about this one because well anything could go wrong with this rig at this point come on come on uh we've swapped literally everything unless this ebay motherboard is also dead which just too old a platform to really do much else about i can't order brand new anymore this platform is not very relevant anymore so what parts we can get a hold of are usually secondhand and i'm i'm really loved i'm really let down by that i was hoping that was gonna be it it looks like i mean the damn thing looks like it's posting let me just let me clear the cmos real quick and then i guess we'll swap cpus i notice we get this hanging cpu led it just it just stays on nothing else happens i don't see there's a memory led that stays completely off same for vga so i think it's stuck on cpu it's possible that the cpu is also dead which i suppose i shouldn't be surprised by the current state of this rig so let's swap it for the other 4930k and then if that doesn't work we'll swap it for the other i7 i got with this motherboard from ebay a few moments later when you thought it couldn't get any more frustrating i'm super super annoyed with this system now so here's uh where we stand i have swapped both of our core i7s our 40 49 30ks both of those have uh not posted now this motherboard did have a bios update that allowed it to work with 4th gen x variant chips and i don't know if this motherboard has that bios update yet i'm assuming it doesn't because we were hung on that cpu led light there so it noticed right away that the chip was a bit newer than the bios supported no problem we can swap in that 3820 or whatever it was that he gave us into here which is what's in the rig now and i've managed to get past the memory led which was the next step so now it should be working right i mean there's there are no other debug lights lit the system should be posting but obviously it's not so the only other variable at this point that it could be is that and i'm i i don't think that i don't think this card's bad but i feel inclined to check because this is just um this is too fishy i could probably get it to work but i've been i've spent hours on this this like today alone i spent another four or five hours on it the first day it showed up and uh i'm just exhausted i don't know what else it could be i have run through everything i could think of everything so let me tell you everything i did i have tried all three cpus i have tried a different power supply it's this thing right here it's not connected anymore but you get the idea i've tried three different graphics cards all of which i believe to be working two i know are working and his graphics card as well i've tried multiple pci slots i have tried what else have i tried uh clearing the cmos multiple times i checked the voltage of the cmos battery um i mean i've disconnected everything except for the 24 pin the 8 pin eps in the case of using my uh my small and weak graphics card i've tried a single dimm in multiple slots from his set i've tried a single dimm in multiple slots from my own personal set that i know works there are no other variables i don't i don't know what i'm missing here i've just spent far too much time on this and i'm at a total loss for why this is not working i i think that this ebay board is also toast i don't know what else to blame there's just nothing else i can do i don't want to wait another week for another replacement to get here it's just not worth it and this is one of the risks of uh running an older setup just having to wait for parts to come in and those parts might not work because they're used just the risk that we run so for the first time in this playlist i have legitimately no idea what's wrong what a way to end the season man that sucks i feel like a loser and i can't figure this out i don't know why it's not posting everything looks healthy there are no debug leds lit anywhere the checks run the cpu is good the dram is good what's the next thing with vga okay so i tried multiple graphics cards i tried multiple pcie slots i can't try integrated graphics so what else am i supposed to do here everything else is detached from the rig i don't know so on to another day then it's actually been two days since the last clip you just saw and uh i've been doing things off camera just that i could devote 100 of my attention to this trying to to narrow down the issue essentially what i've done i've taken another rig and i've used it sort of as a test bench and i've individually swapped components from this one into that one to see at what point the system fails and because i don't have a part from the two x79 motherboards here another platform to swap with it or to use in place of these two that i know works the only time the system would fill the post was the moment that i swapped the platform itself so the motherboard and any of the three cpus and i actually tried both motherboards his x79 evga board with even his uh third gen core i7 hdt but still and then also 4th gen both motherboards i used multiple sets of ddr3 in various slots i still could not get the the system to post at all with either x79 motherboard in play and uh so that that's kind of led me to conclude that the board i bought on ebay is likely dead um i'm not i can't definitively say that because i i just don't have another i don't have another board to test with and it could be just the cpus maybe all three cpus are dead i still can't say for certain that the motherboard is bricked the new one is i i reached out to the ebay seller very cool person he was you know totally willing to take it back uh i did ask him if he tested it out of the system before he packaged it and he said that everything was working fine he pulled it straight out of a working rig and that was why i bought it i just wanted to double check and make sure that there wasn't like a ton of time between when the system was was last tested and when it was boxed up and shipped to me and it doesn't seem like there would have been any issue there and although he did say that that he would happily refund at this point i think what i'm going to do is just leave that replacement board in here and just i'm just going to give everything back to the owner as is so a small consolation he'll get a new motherboard and a cpu to work around uh but he obviously still can't get a post so it's not a real fix but i just don't want to go through the trouble of refunding and all that i i think that the seller is being honest and i again i cannot say for certain that the board's dead so it's it's it's kind of annoying that things worked out this way and this yes is going to be a pretty big flop uh one of the few thankfully that i can say we've had in this playlist but certainly a flop nonetheless and i'm pretty i'm pretty disappointed that we weren't able to to fix it i mean we've gone through the trouble before of having to order replacement parts online and i've usually been right when i've ordered those things because we at that point we've narrowed everything else down and ruled all that stuff out uh here i thought the motherboard was the issue it probably still is and we just happen to get another board with more issues i'm not i don't know why we're not getting picture out because it looks like the cpu debug led it checks for a second and then goes away which is what it should do it checks dram then goes away the next step in that process is the graphics card and this 2070 works in the test rig that i assembled off camera so i know it's not this card's fault that said i did drop some lower end cards some older cards as well maybe there was a pci generation issue or something and we still could not get picture out through whatever discrete card i put in here there is no integrated graphics here so it's not like it can wire directly into the motherboard i tried an outright new power supply of course with the test rig but also the one that you saw the one we always use the night jar uh fanless unit still couldn't get a picture so i i i'm at a total loss and at this point if anyone watching this video thinks they know what this issue could be i know when you ask the internet this question they start throwing out a bunch of random stuff but there might just be that one jewel of a comment that saves this person's rig i might be grossly overlooking something i i checked uh the batteries on both motherboards voltage is fine replaced them anyway still fine i checked the cmos itself cleared multiple times on both motherboards bypass the power supply like i said entirely i pins look fine in both sockets even though his original evga board had some thermal paste and stuff in there we cleaned it up really well the new motherboard has a fine looking socket no missing bent pins or anything like that it at this point i would just recommend a platform upgrade entirely and that's that's the easy way to get out of this is just to use this as motivation or just an incentive to upgrade to say am4 even though am4 is pretty much end of life at this point or getting close to it it's still a very healthy versatile platform you don't have to start very big you can start with you know zen two zen plus even and work your way up you can still work your way up to zen three and it you know even if you're a generation behind at that point it's still an upgrade and it's not gonna cost as much out of pocket now for the owner to to maybe swap to zen plus you will need new ram ddr4 of course and a new cpu but you can get some pretty sweet used deals as well so i would invite them to check those out i've done what i can i've spent way too much time on this and i've got to move on to other things so unfortunately a flop this has been very humbling again i might be missing something very obvious so if i am just all capsid in the comments just screaming at me and i'll be sure to relay that information over to the owner uh if uh yeah if anything relevant shows up down there so thanks for watching this far into this one i'm very sorry that i don't have better news say our track record is um it's pretty good but this is going to be a fairly decent blemish on it so um yeah maybe i'll just steer clear of like older x 79 x 58 systems in the future i've never had great luck with these older hddt platforms i never have i maybe this is just uh another lesson learned on my part thanks so much for watching again comment down below consider leaving a like subscribing if you haven't already and i will catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for learning with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 400,883

Keywords: greg salazar, fix or flop, gaming pc, pc no post, how to troubleshoot, how to build a pc, how to fix a pc, broken pc, broken computer, how to, pc doesnt turn on, how to fix a broken pc, computer cleaning, dead pc, fix or flop season 2, broken gaming pc, pc wont post, no post, i finally met my match, season finale

Id: CE1yXSWXfyY

Length: 32min 12sec (1932 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 02 2022