Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S3:E14

this here is another viewer's broken gaming PC and uh well I'll be honest not sure if we're gonna be able to fix this The Story Goes this rig was working just fine for a few years until the owner recently wanted to gift it to his son for Christmas well if you're watching this video around the time it's published Christmas probably already happened so that's the one we're talking about we're kind of we're in the past here and so he wants to have this ready as of time of filming it's like December 1st so we've got a few weeks to fix this for him he was cleaning things up he updated the BIOS or attempted to anyway and that's when the issue arose he tried to update the BIOS enter the Little Portal within the uafi to do so and his screen went black and that's a very weird problem I've never run into before there are a few other cosmetic issues I want to address obviously it needs to be cleaned a bit this noctua cooler a very large one is upside down so that's driving my OCD crazy uh the the card is actually super close to the base of these noctua fins as well which is slightly concerning though we are limited in terms of where we can slot this card into the motherboard because of the PCI slot layout so I'm not sure what we're going to be able to do there but just a few other things we'll tackle once we figure out why the heck this system is not posting welcome to fix or Flop if you're new here pertinent info is in the video description just know that everything you see us do here is free of charge we don't charge the owners of these rigs anything to diagnose the systems we also don't charge for components that we need to replace at times so like motherboards graphics cards Etc I'll replace what I can if I can't have a manufacturer send something in I'll dip it in my own pocket at times uh but sometimes I just have to call it because there's like maybe too many things that need to be replaced I have to keep track of my inventory very carefully because we're fixing so many of these in the Orlando Florida area anyway that pertinent info again is in the description if you want to check it out but uh I'm hoping we can fix this one and I hope you'll stick around for the ride are you ready stay with me mail gun is how modern companies work with email reach real customers at scale with its data-driven approach and easy to use UI it's powerful email API and intuitive email Marketing Solutions enable mail gun to control the entire email lifecycle from free development through delivery and it's why they're still supporting companies like DHL Wikipedia and Microsoft you'll find useful tools like send time optimization which automatically tracks and pushes emails to individuals at the Times they're most likely to engage with them you can also create massive reports for large email lists and test and avoid things like spam filters the next time you click Send mailgun is the most relied upon email platform for growing businesses and we greatly appreciate their continued support of this Channel Try today by using my link mailgun.com forward slash Greg again that's mailgun.com forward slash Greg which you can also find at the top of this video's description first things first let's attempt to power the system on and uh well try to replicate what the owner's describing so that we're on the same page also if you hear something churning in the background that's my editing rig rendering a video so it gets kind of toasty in there let's see power on and looks like the fans are spinning graphics card fans are spinning CPU Cooler fan is so those are good signs but nothing on screen which is what was described to me so in that sense that's a good thing we are on the same page uh yeah this is this is an odd one so I know that the owner already told me that the CMOS was cleared it's not that I don't trust him I just don't trust anyone when they say they've done things I have to play it by those rules because uh well I'm gonna look pretty silly if that turns out to be the issue and uh the owner just wasn't aware that maybe he wasn't properly clearing the CMOS so we have to check those things so if you're watching don't take it personally we do this for everyone so let's go ahead and power the system back off and uh yeah clear the CMOS we're gonna have to jump pins because I don't see a button on the back of the board and of course stupid board would have the pins for clearing the CMOS underneath the graphics card right here by the battery so we're gonna jump these two pins with the power completely off for anywhere between 10 and 20 seconds this will cut power to our bios chip resetting settings there so if we're if there's an issue there some sort of uh corrupt sequence of settings this should clear those and give us a clean slate but alas that has done absolutely nothing for us can't say I'm surprised but it was worth a shot now I did just know notice and perhaps should have noticed this sooner the fact that this board has a series of debug LEDs these can be useful for diagnosing issues with a rig in this case the LED illuminated now corresponds to dram which um that'd be kind of strange for all of a sudden one of your memory modules to quit working but that's what it's telling us it is we've already cleared the CMOS so it's not a software setting it's not like a frequency setting in the bios for memory so let's try swapping out some dimms by the way yes all four of these dimms are seated correctly and to the best of my knowledge none of these were touched between the time the system was working and when it stopped how about a single Avengers RGB Pro module we can use the LEDs on top for reference make sure these are getting power a few moments later but alas that did nothing I've tried all four slots with a known working dim nothing still black screen and the board immediately throws up the dram LED it's a bit odd that the board is telling us it's a dram problem but we've pretty much done everything we can to isolate the ddr4 variable in the same symptom with the Same Led showing up I don't know could be a CPU issue still maybe we have some bent pins uh something lodged between the pins in the socket and the pads on the chip who knows I kind of want to dig in there next I don't think this is a wiring issue it's again it's just too specific of a problem to be a wiring issue but I'm still going to do my due diligence off camera just to let you know and check those things behind the motherboard tray down at the power supply level what I really want to do though is get this cooler off because I think something's going on with the CPU at this point so let's see exactly what this CPU is definitely 10th gen because this is uh what a b460 in motherboard yes I'm expecting attention to core i7 10 700. okay so uh this actually has integrated Graphics we can bypass the graphics card if we need to move further or deeper into this troubleshooting I've also disconnected all non-vitals still nothing so I'm going to check the socket and the CPU we might have to swap one or the other the board or the chip to get this to work but I've got to admit this socket looks pretty darn clean no bent pins no missing pins this is how it's expected to look out of the box brand new same goes for the underside of the CPU nothing blocking these pads here looks really clean nothing to complain about and just for the laws a CMOS battery voltage is also fine so we're at a Crossroads again it's seems like either the motherboard or the CPU is at fault and this is just becoming a pretty routine thing here on the playlist the only hesitation I have with swapping in one of my known working 10th gen chips is that his board could potentially fry mine if in fact that is the reason why the system isn't posting I can't confirm that his tent ownership is actually cooked because I don't have another b460 or Z equivalent motherboard to throw his CPU in so I'm just gonna I don't have a choice I'm just gonna put one of my CPUs in there and we're going to see if we get the same symptoms if we do then that'll rule out the CPU and at that point I'll start looking at replacement motherboards I'll probably have to buy one on eBay so I actually have a 10 600k as well as a 10 900k and I don't really want to give them the 10900k for this kind of rig because his board has a what's a lock chipset it's a B series board so he's not gonna be able to overclock he won't be able to overclock this either but this is a little closer I think to the 10700 that he has in there currently his is a non-case SKU so so let's throw this in there and see if anything happens 12 o'clock midnight and still nothing even with my known working CPU in his rig we've um yeah we've we've got a problem here I think the motherboard needs to be replaced at this point we've already taken out the graphics card tried booting from integrated Graphics both on my chip and his chip no picture no post it's it's a bit bizarre that just attempting to flash a bios I mean not even getting to the point where you're actually flashing but just trying to get into the I think what it's called M flash here with these MSI boards uh the M flash window is what bricked this rig super super strange at this point the board is still telling us that it's a dram issue and we've ruled out every other component there's only three in total that tie directly into system memory obviously the ram itself the CPU with memory controllers and things on board and the motherboard so if it is in fact a dram issue and it just so happened to occur at the same time this user tried to update his bios then I think a board replacement is a done deal is it a could it be a corrupt bios yes if in fact the BIOS was being flashed and the viewer was mistaken then yes the corrupt bios would give us these symptoms or symptoms similar to this I'm not sure if we'd be getting the debug LED notification that we're getting maybe the board wouldn't be sending any lights at all but I can't confirm that because I wasn't there to witness what was happening when everything uh stopped functioning so what is this a b this is a b 460 board yeah so let me let me triple check that I don't have a board I can replace this one with again we'll probably have to order one well well well look what I found we actually had a spare z590 motherboard I forgot this is the one that I took out of my personal rig when I upgraded uh to the 13th gen Intel so this will be a perfect swap for him not only is this an ATX board versus his matx who has empty space in his mid Tower but this also has optimal PCI slot spacing so his larger CPU Cooler will fit a bit better with his graphics card this also is obviously a more modern chipset even though we can't overclock with his non-k skew it's just an overall better board for him so let's swap his out for this we'll try tackling anything else that we could possibly do with his old board see if there's something we can fix again it's it might be a corrupt bios I really have no way of knowing here with the tools at my disposal but maybe someone else won't I can send it out and report back in a pinned comment but let's get this thing swapped in along with his original CPU and original memory and yes I understand I'm kind of just jumping into the deep end here we should honestly test this uh before assembling everything again but I'm fairly confident that uh we're right about this and I'm willing to just do it all at once for the sake of attempting to save time you know I've got to say I'm really digging the way that this uh NZXT board looks in this case especially with this noxual cooler just black on black black memory looking pretty Sleek it's also really nice that this graphics card has a bit more breathing room again being one slot lower on this board kind of a consequence of going with a more compact layout like matx or especially ITX the 16 Lane slot the uppermost slot is going to be really close to the socket which could impede your ability to stack on some larger coolers like this we'll get our eight pin supplemental cable connected and that's pretty much it everything else has already been taken care of everything's rewired all of his original components with the exception on the motherboard are now in here let's see how we do then I'm crossing everything I got in hopes that this works otherwise I'm going to look a fool on camera after redoing all of this uh wiring and stuff so okay oh the hesitation there for a second scared me come on yes okay the hesitation while a system boots up for the first time after doing a lot of work that is uh that's great to see all four dims are detected we've got a storage drives it looks like detected as well we'll just uh enable XMP for them make sure that's all stable and he'll be good to go now we just have this final question here regarding this board what on Earth is wrong with this and again there's only so much more I can really test here I suspect it's a corrupt memory chip um I I highly doubt it's anything else because the viewer told me he was attempting to flash the BIOS when this happened we checked the CMOS battery voltage is fine there we tried multiple dim slots with multiple dimms we tried multiple CPUs and still couldn't get this thing to post and it's just stuck on that dram light a very strange symptom I still I'm still completely clueless now again I want to take the time here to show you that there is nothing inherently wrong with the socket it looks really clean uh this is physically all around pretty Immaculate so there's not much else I can do here I I mean I could start probing random places on the board but again I don't really have the tools here to start removing and re-soldering replacement smds I don't even have donor boards for a lot of these so it's um it's just something where it might be more feasible for you if you're running a repair shop to actually repair small places on the boards but for me it's much easier much less time consuming to just swap the board outright we could be talking about a short somewhere between the slots and the chip we could be talking about a chipset short uh it could be so much that could go wrong and that's why I mean by Design motherboards are supposed to be the things that fail first you want the motherboard to fail in most cases before the CPU does and ideally you'd want the power supply to fail before the motherboard does if we're talking about some sort of power surge issue so there should be Protections in place there it's just not a very common thing thankfully when it does happen though it can be very confusing because you saw the motherboard was trying to tell us that our dram was at fault but we isolated everything down to the board nothing else was to blame I will say if these thermal pads are like super chalky I I can't even pull these up with my hand I have to scrape this stuff off because it's just so look at that it's breaking like like clay um yeah probably shouldn't shouldn't be like that and for those who are curious here is the board completely stripped down so this has all of the heat shields removed and again the physical inspection checks out I don't see anything super alarming here at this point we would just have to start probing and I would also tend to focus some of my time I imagine on the BIOS chips which are well the bioship is probably down here I think it's this chip but you know you you really would be spending quite a bit of time repairing this I'm not sure how expensive this board is you might save yourself you know 100 bucks in terms of like sheer expense but you've got to think about your time as well and then you've also got to hunt down that particular bios chip there there are some tools that'll let you just kind of jump onto this chip and then flash it that way might try to invest in something like that to see if we can salvage this board in the future but for now I am glad that the owner's rig is now back up and running with an updated more modern board at that thank you so much for watching this far into this one again my goal is just to get it back up and running however we are able to do that is fine by me I know it's probably not the most efficient way of diagnosing a problem like this or at least remedying the issue replacing the board outright and calling it I did I feel like do enough due diligence checking the battery checking the socket doing what we could just to physically inspect the board but beyond that again it just I just don't have the tools nor frankly the time to start probing random places so a shame that it came to that but the good thing is the system is back up and running and the owner can give this to his kid for Christmas and uh and be able to do it in time right and without dipping into his own pocket which is the ultimate goal here I do have to say that this rig still needs a bit of cleaning so out of out of the shot I'm just going to do this after the video ends I'm going to take it outside and give it a quick dusting with my electric duster but other than that I think it's ready to go fixed up cable management just a tad it looks a lot cleaner I've got to say with this new or a newer NZXT z590 motherboard in here and it all just comes together so much better the graphics card spacing as well from the CPU Cooler that was a potential issue again we were like millimeters from shorting out components on that graphics card so I feel a lot better about the state of the rig currently and again it works so a job well done if you enjoyed this one give it a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated consider subscribing if you have not already and uh do a few other things while I read it if you don't mind consider joining our public Discord server that's free of charge if you want to support us on patreon for as little as one dollar a month you can do that as well that is in the description and uh yeah stay tuned for more content I think it's already 2023 by the time you guys watch this but uh thank you for another great year of videos here on the channel thanks for your support just by viewing these videos you allow us to continue doing what we're doing especially for the the local area here in Orlando Florida being able to fix and deep clean systems for free is only possible because of you I'm able to make money on the backside obviously from the from the advertisements from YouTube AdSense Etc and I wouldn't have any of that if it wasn't for your viewership so again thank you very much I will see in the next one my name is Greg thanks for learning with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 156,065

Keywords: fix or flop, computer repair, broken gaming pc, broken pc, how to fix a pc, how to troubleshoot, pc no post, pc gaming, gaming pc, how to, pc wont post, pc doesnt turn on, viewer pc, fixing a pc, fix or flop season 3, greg salazar, s3:e14, fix or flop s3e14, pc gaming setup, fixing a viewers broken gaming pc, broken computer, How to fix a computer

Id: p4idwFV_Cbg

Length: 18min 1sec (1081 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 24 2023