Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S2:E3

this here is another viewer's broken gaming pc and uh yeah this one's a bit of a doozy you're probably looking at this thinking well greg it's old i mean yeah old stuff breaks so no surprises there but this one actually went through somewhat of a traumatic experience and unfortunately i expect to have to replace the platform just going into it based on what he's told me and what he's experienced the owner that is yeah this system's been through a heck of a lot so let's start off with what he wrote initially in his inquiry to us he said the pc won't post and the hard drive gets really hot i built this about six to seven years ago and when putting in a new gpu i had to upgrade the power supply i got a new psu that had the eight pin connector i needed and about six hours after i plugged in the new power supply i heard a pop and the system hasn't posted since anytime you hear a pop it's just it's bad news he says he's since repurposed the dvd burner which is why that's not in here he's also swapped out the graphics card which is why there's a really small tiny weak one in here and he sent back the power supply that caused the pop but the computer still won't post uh with the old psu back in it which is um yeah this old metal thing right here frankly this entire build is a bit of a basket case hard disk drive for a boot drive that's a bit of an ouch in 2022 uh it's it's possible again that his platform is dead so we probably will need to swap that out uh this power supply definitely needs to be upgraded as as does this case this case is in really rough shape and it's a bit dirty as well so we'll be taking care of as much of it as we can in this video assuming we can even get it up and running again we might just have to build up a new one from scratch but i'm hoping that's not the case we need to get to investigating stay with me to get rid of that annoying windows activation watermark head on over to vip scd key and purchase a windows 10 pro oem key for a fraction of the price of retail just use the secure payment method like paypal enter your product key into your pc settings window and say bye-bye to the watermark and be sure to use our offer code skgs for a sweet discount well hello there this is fix or flop if you're not sure what that is be sure to check out season one it's already up 20 solid episodes you'll probably be interested in a lot of folks tell me that they love learning from this series which is um that's really great to hear it's difficult to to find new content that hasn't already been tapped into in this space so being able to fix viewer systems and around the orlando florida area for free is uh it's just it's one of those things we can kill a lot of birds with one stone uh so that's that's awesome so we can be informative we can be entertaining as well uh and we also get to uh help out folks in around the area um again the the premise here we don't charge anybody anything for the services that we do whether it is a deep cleaning that we're talking about or an attempt to fix as is the case here maybe even if you have a console or something like that that's very disgusting we'll clean that for free as well you just need to live in and around orlando and if you want to submit an inquiry check out the video description now when it comes to things like power surges where maybe a defective power supply sends power down a wire it shouldn't i mean it could take a lot of very expensive stuff with it that's why it's so important to pick a reliable solid power supply backed by a very solid long warranty and uh that's where this msi power supply comes into place a bit heavy but it's very compact which i love so this is the a750 gf we've used it a few times and this is what i'm going to be upgrading the viewer in his build uh just because yeah i want that peace of mind as much as he does i'm sure uh we'll be talking more about this unit here in a second we'll also be upgrading the case i'll show you that also from msi and then once those two things are taken care of right assuming the build is fixable then we'll just reassemble everything and power it on once more make sure everything works but we can't get too far ahead of ourselves here because we still don't know what's exactly wrong with it so with all that out of the way let's get into troubleshooting first thing we need to do is attempt to power the system on and see if we can replicate the symptoms exhibited by the owner in this case no post i'm not sure if it even powers on let me check i don't remember if he said it powers on or not uh he says it won't post even with the old psu in it so i'm assuming it does power on which okay i mean that's a start but for not getting picture out it could be a number it could could be a nuke platform but it could also be this little graphics card here i'm hoping that it's not that even though it's cheap and kind of small and maybe insignificant to some folks it's still something it's better than nothing especially if you don't have integrated uh graphics processing on board i'm not sure if this cpu does it probably does it's an older intel chip but we'll find out place your bets gentlemen is this something that uh will be easy to fix or do you think it's gonna be something much more complicated than that i'm kind of 50 50 here it could be something simple maybe miswired once the new psu was thrown in maybe maybe it did actually take a bunch of expensive stuff with it you guys hear that oh my gosh i don't know if the camera is picking i don't know not my camera but the if the mic i'm wearing is picking that up that's a very high-pitched squeal coming from the unit before the system's even powered on i don't even want to turn this thing on to be completely honest with you this sounds very sketchy probably the sketchiest build we've had in the office so far let's uh screw it we gotta try to turn it on it sounds like a balloon filled with air that you know you stretch the little like nozzle of it and make that really high-pitched sound that's what this sounds like whatever let's let's give it a shot where's the power button is it here guys i'll just click this button wow nothing yeah no power okay so it's not that it doesn't post i mean of course it doesn't post because it doesn't even power on now we can see parts of the build illuminate so i know that some power is being delivered likely via the 24 pin but other parts of this build uh maybe the a-pin eps or something along those lines is just uh it's not functioning that's why the system is flat out not turning on at all and after unplugging every non-vital connection attempting to jump the build that's given us a whole lot of nothing as well as clearing the cmos manually no power no boot so here's what i'm thinking we check the obvious right mis-wiring potentially any of that we've would have removed by just by you know disconnecting the non-vital stuff we only have the 24 pin and the ap eps connected at this point and we're still not getting power so i'm not inclined to believe that it's user error at least to that extent the other obvious component keeping us from powering on is the power supply normally i wouldn't jump straight to this but because of the symptoms i'm seeing here i think it's safe to remove this test it and then swap it out with the one that we know works now this unit here is from ultra 600 watts an atx form factor if you can see it's a bit older school looking just you know the cheap kind of metallic shell not painted or anything not there's anything wrong with that though you've got ketchup mustard cables and things here on the far left i mean there are places in the market for these kinds of units it looks like this is the one that shipped with the case because it's from the same brand now as for our psu tester let's see how this goes so it's powering up wow that's really weird so it's not it's not making any noise right now i mean the fan's on but i don't hear that squeal maybe that wasn't coming from the unit before this actually checks out yeah power supply looks fine across the board so i take back what i said this this uh yeah this thing is a clean clean bill of health so if our power supply is fine that means that there's something else wrong with this build and uh well we've only got a few other options inside of the graphics card or the motherboard potentially the whole platform or more specifically maybe the cpu or the memory so we're gonna have to start running through our typical checklist to figure out which one if any of them it happens to be it could be something else but i don't really think it's the hard drive that's really the only other thing in here now there's no sense in leaving things in here they're going to be transplanted into the new case regardless so we'll pull the platform out now cpu looks to be what is it core i7 3770k okay cool it's actually a really cool chip uh i wish i wish i'd gotten a chance to work around more of them i kind of started the youtube channel around the haswell era so this is just before that but this core i7 is solid even in 2022 yes it's not the best out there but if you're still rocking this platform you know there's really nothing wrong with that so i'm really hoping that the chip's not dead i was just really curious what this was because if i need to run off of integrated graphics i now know that i can do that okay and awkward transition i'm in my car i'm actually here to pick up a z77 motherboard i think it's an asrock board and i think it has a core i5 30 5 90 or 35 70. you can't remember basically two working components from that platform that generation uh that i can use to swap uh with his component so that we can narrow down specifically what's wrong these are older boards i don't have these laying around so that's why i'm here to pick one up uh just hoping that it works there's always a risk of that not being the case so i've come back the next day with this here which is actually not the owner's motherboard again like you just saw i had to go and pick up another z77 platform and we need to verify that this works before we start swapping other things out because it's going to complicate uh whatever we're working on if we don't verify that these other parts are in fact fully functional so uh we've got i believe it's a core i5 3570 in here eight gigs of ddr3 and an asrock z77 extreme four motherboard so we're going to put all these uh to the test first uh with this power supply which again we just checked with our psu tester we know that this works so we're going to plug this all this stuff into here and then power it up make sure that we get a post and then from there we can start individually swapping components with his platform because something clearly is wrong there so with the cp fan migrated over we've also got his graphic skirt in here because i have no reason to believe that that is uh broken we will let's power the power supply on and oh we have we actually have a dedicated power button on this board that is that is super nice let's see oh that's a good sound we've got a dr debug down here i'll show you that closer up here on camera but uh wow that was quick okay so uh his board his platform the person i bought this from last night this all works this is good news so now i want to do is remove the viewers 3770k uh it's funny this is a 3770k and the one in the build i just bought is a 35 70k so that's a core i5 variant this is the core i7 uh let's yeah let's pull it up from the socket first and then we can clean up some of this excess thermal compound i want to be careful just in case the motherboard is still okay you can see how dirty it is uh definitely needs to be cleaned if it is in fact still functional now in cleaning this chip i don't notice anything in the way of defects i don't see any issues on the back of it where we see these contact points sometimes you'll find little smudges and things that'll actually prevent the system from starting up outright we've run into that actually in this playlist before but this one seems very clean especially after getting rid of the thermal compound i think it is i'm hoping at least that it is still okay that we can migrate this into the new board so the moment of truth with his new chip let's see power on and we'll click the power button here oh i just realized the fan's not going to spin because of the uh clip the cooler just kind of sitting on top of the zp this is only a temporary thing a few moments later yeah i'm not getting anything on the dr debug led that's not good that's the only thing we changed was the cpu oh by the way something i just noticed in this old socket here from the viewer it looks like damage i'm not sure yeah look at these little plastic bits just fall apart in this socket that should not be the case so we're gonna carefully remove these let's see uh it does look like a couple of pins are pressed a bit further down than they should be everything else though in here see it's a bit of dust but no other bend or missing pins it looks like so again very carefully going to clean this up we'll try to bend these back and then i'm gonna try the working i5 cpu in the viewer's board round three or four or whatever whatever we're at i still hear the popping i really don't like this we're still not getting any power yeah looks like looks like the board has break and unfortunately it also looks like it took the core i7 with it so the only other chip that i have to give this person is a core i5 which is a bit of a downgrade from a core i7 with hyper threading to a core i5 without it still gonna get four cores but uh yeah i mean all around um just uh disappointing to find out that both the board and the cpu were toast by whatever happened with that sketchy power supply um man i was really hoping to save at least one of them but uh they're both bricked i'm not even sure about this ddr3 i guess we could try it because he has let's see how many that's a single four gig sticks he's actually got 16 gigs it looks like a ddr3 in here albeit from two different manufacturers but still i only have two uh four gig dimms from the platform i just bought from offer up so uh i think i'm going to test these next just to see so maybe maybe we'll be one for three maybe these survived whatever power surged this whole thing experienced come on give me something give me a win small win that'd be that'd be fantastic it looks good dr d bugs up okay alrighty oh this is um oh wow this is a lot more memory than i thought it was so two of these dimms are eight gig modules and two of them are four gigs so 16 plus another eight right so 24 gigs in total so i've been unorthodox there's again two different kits of memory in here but it shouldn't be too big a problem we can still run dual channel and wow i mean this it works um so the memory is not dead but that is the only part of this platform unfortunately that is not dead the cpu and the motherboard are both totally fried all right so uh now that we have narrowed down what is to blame there are multiple things to blame the motherboard and the cpu and i guess both of those could technically blame that old power supply uh it is now finally time to talk upgrades first thing i want to do is upgrade this viewer's case because it desperately needs something a bit more modern and something much much cleaner this here is the msi gungner 110r so this thing is a lot going for it first off it has four 120 millimeter rgb fans included three up front one at the rear and they're all pre-wired into an included rgb hub there's a dedicated button by the way that you control and cycle through rgb effects with these fans which is really helpful especially if you can't wire directly into your motherboard and control via software some prefer just the hardwired button anyway i have a nice basement here with a cutout to see your power supply even get a cut out up front to fit up to a 360 millimeter radiator up front and you can fit extra fans up top ventilation the magnetic dust filter uh all around this case reminds me in a lot of ways i mean it's it's very like it's like a staple mid-tower style you know there's really not too much to be afraid of in terms of hardware support it should be long enough to fit pretty much any graphics card out there with very few exceptions there's plenty of cable management space behind the motherboard tray you get decent airflow on this one but it could be better and they do have an option for a perforated front if you want that one instead of this one which is more of an aesthetic play with the the glass up front seven pci slots at the rear of course as i said it's a mid tower and you get a nice transparent left side panel now the next upgrade for this individual is the power supply again courtesy of msi this here is the a750 gf so a few things going for it let's see if i can name them off the top of my head first off it's fully modular it is 80 plus gold rated it has a fantastic warranty and it's also fairly compact which means it's perfect for cases like the one i just showed you the 110r it's not like super long so if you want to keep your hard drive cage at the bottom of the basement uh you'll need a more compact power supply and this one is perfect for that not only that but it's also 750 watts which that's going to give this guy plenty of breathing room my gosh i mean the graphics card he's got in here really doesn't even need like a 300 watt power supply but if you're wondering why we're throwing such an overkill unit into the build it's to prep him for the future whenever he decides to upgrade he'll already have components that are suited for such a thing you're gonna get some nice black sleeve cables as well on this unit which is a nice change of pace from what we're used to in the uh the older builds with the ketchup mustard cabling so first let's get the motherboard in here nice and carefully and with some basic installs and wiring out of the way we'll get the expandable slots taken care of first up here i think this is a it's a wi-fi card slide this in down here and then the graphics card this by the way i'm curious what this is i haven't actually it's an r5450 yeah so that's that's pretty old uh we're going to slot this into the full length slot up top and we'll lock these down with some screws so now i believe this build is ready to be tested i'm hoping it turns on because if it doesn't it's back to square one that would that would suck we only want good news here we only want good news please please now we have a blue led in there so let's see if we can sync that up while we're waiting yeah it looks pretty oh yes all right cool uh i have his hard drive connected so we should be able to boot into that if there is in fact bootable media on the drive which i'll have to check ahead of time with the owner about because i don't want to be spending a lot of time trying to figure out where that volume is if it doesn't exist okay something's up because you can see that his hard drive is connected into this sata port right here but in the bios it says that this data port is empty so it's likely the hard disk drive isn't receiving power or is broken yeah well that explains it this hard drive is nuked as well and a very quick and dirty way to tell just by trying to feel there's nothing spinning in this drive this drive is bricked yep all power i know that the hard drive is receiving power because the other peripherals that are connected via sata power are receiving power so it's just the hard disk drive and there are no platters spinning in there there's nothing going on yeah all right well time to upgrade something else so out comes this old drive and in goes this ssd i actually don't think it's a one terabyte ssd so a bit smaller on storage but significantly faster than what was previously in here and that also means we need to reinstall windows just one more step in the process and here we are finally at the point where this system powers up no problem and has a detectable bootable volume that's great windows 10 is on here and he is good to go now uh it did take a bit longer than i expected this is like the second full day of working on this build and part of it had to do with the fact that i had to go out and buy a separate motherboard and cpu from someone in the local area thankfully there was someone local i was going to end up buying on ebay but that always takes a few days at least to get here uh whatever you order on there so the fact that someone was local and very cool about meeting up there quickly that was great and for those for some those who are interested i paid like a hundred i think i paid 140 bucks for the motherboard cpu and ram which isn't really a good like i wouldn't say that's a good price um the only reason i offered what i did first off i needed it rather quickly and i also needed him to part out the build because he had a full build around this motherboard and cpu and i asked him to just remove the platform and sell me that so now he's stuck with basically a shell and a graphics card and that's just going to require more work on his part so just to make it quick and simple and didn't want to haggle or anything i just offered him 140 and he took it and he met up with me so that was really really nice so now this viewer system is good to go and now we've got windows 10 on here and the upgrades several upgrades more than i thought there would be uh this build is just begging for the remaining upgrades right that being mainly the graphics card and then probably a platform upgrade after that which is going to require ddr4 or potentially ddr5 a new motherboard new cpu so that's going to be a pretty hefty one to swallow but also on the graphics card side of things anything right now is expensive so another pretty large pill to swallow this one this one's tough which would i upgrade first probably the graphics card this thing is as bare bones as it gets so this here is what ultimately ended up needing to be replaced three different things and folks let this be a testament to again picking a reliable solid power supply because if that unit goes if it's the first thing to kick the can it could potentially kill this what you're seeing here your motherboard your cpu even your freaking hard disk drive or solid state drive whatever you have connected to your main board again your main board is more or less distributing power everywhere else right i mean part of that response but obviously is the psu uh but from the motherboard and you've got through the 24 pin through the eight pin sometimes you have supplemental pcie power as well to worry about all of that can then kind of trickle down into other components if the power supply were to fail and that's why again it's so important to pick a solid one from a reputable company the one in here from msi i have no doubt it's going to be a really good power supply for years to come so no reason to be concerned there that's peace of mind and ultimately that's what a power supply should be is peace of mind in preparation for whatever you happen to throw at it in the future other than that again everything else in here works i love the upgrades the only thing that we couldn't really hook up was usb type-c which obviously isn't supported by this older platform but it's ready for those other upgrades we just talked about and that was the goal and it's when i wanted it to first off get back to working order and then also kind of be primed and ready for uh anything else that you know hardware wise you want to throw at it so hopefully the viewer is satisfied with these uh these fixes and with these upgrades and i'm looking forward to taking on the next one hopefully it's not going to be as challenging as this one in terms of just like yeah so many things dying but uh that's what can happen it it's it's not the first time i've seen it it probably won't be the last now if you enjoyed watching what you just watched be sure to let us know by giving this one a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated also if for whatever reason you aren't subscribed yet go ahead and get subscribed i'll give you a few seconds cool i appreciate that and if you want to find our troubleshooting gear that is linked below maybe cleaning gear as well if you live in the orlando florida area and have a broken system or a dirty system or a dirty console and you want it cleaned and or fixed for free that's where you submit a form uh don't email us because we've shifted to the form for that very so that you don't have to email us because we just get inundated with those and a lot of folks don't even live in the area so we just have to move along uh we're not ignoring you on purpose it's just there's way too many to respond to so uh there's that but uh all right i'll get out of your hair again thanks for watching i'll catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for fixing a system with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 585,110

Keywords: fix or flop, how to fix a pc, broken pc, broken gaming pc, pc doesn't turn on, pc gaming, tech, pc no post, computer wont post no display, pc gaming setup, gaming pc, how to build a pc, how to fix, how to, computer, fix or flop season 2, season 2, pc gaming for beginners, gaming pc doesn't work, how to troubleshoot, troubleshoot gaming pc, Broken

Id: 6itM-uQIcQU

Length: 25min 4sec (1504 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 28 2022