Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S3:E7

this here is another viewer's broken gaming PC and it's Bulbasaur themed the owner says this system doesn't send a picture out but it does turn on and he says that this problem is getting worse and worse over the past few months as some was noticing in frequent crashes blue screens of death and one day he tried to turn it on and couldn't get a picture out welcome to fix or Flop pertinent info is right here I'm ready to jump into this one are you ready Stay With Me what a modern way to work with email check out our good friends over at mailgun with their data-driven approach and easy to use UI you can reach real customers at scale mail gun controls the entire email lifecycle from pre-development through delivery supporting companies like DHL Wikipedia and Microsoft through their powerful email apis and intuitive email Marketing Solutions 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 be sure to check them out today using MyLink mailgun.com forward slash Greg which you can also find at the top of this video's description all right so first things first we need to attempt to power the system on and uh I'm I'm hoping either it works out right or we get the same symptom that the owner's describing this will give us a good Baseline knowing where we have to start the point is hopefully in the right direction with regards to troubleshooting it seems fine just checking connections here he's got a little extra display here for system stats I'm sure and it's not connected right now I'm not getting a picture out let's see no Dr debug LEDs this is an AMD ryzen system his graphics card is quite old and very well could be the culprit here it's an R9 390. yeah that's um that's ancient wow okay maybe not ancient but uh definitely old by today's standards and yeah usually after about seven eight nine ten years the card is gonna be close to its last leg if it hasn't been uh cared for cleaned Etc so we'll definitely keep our eyes on that first thing I'm going to do is disconnect from power and clear the CMOS because after a few minutes we still aren't getting a signal out and and I'm not joking when I say this I legit had somebody complain in the comments one of our previous fix or Flop videos because I showed clearing the CMOS and recommended it that's a waste of time that's what he said he said that clearing the CMOS was a waste of time and it never fixes the issue but it literally has it's literally fixed a problematic build in one of our earlier fixer flop episodes so it's just more proof that the comment section can be a bit crazy sometimes it comes with the territory also got my eye on this smart 430 watt power supply is wattage is cutting it kind of sort of close with an R9 390 I mean despite the fact that the ryzen CPU more than likely in his rig is pretty power efficient the R9 390 sucks on juice I mean it's like with a big old straw so I yeah something he'll definitely want to upgrade down the line I just noticed we do have a debug LED array here and you can see a few times the CPU light turns on we've got VGA right there that lights up for a few seconds and then cuts out goes straight to the boot LED which in theory all right I guess it's like looks like it's resetting itself again uh in theory once the boot LED turns on we should be getting a post but we aren't so um I also just noticed that his graphics card fans are not spinning at all and uh you can see I'll go ahead and reset it here for you I just clicked reset and we still aren't seeing the fan spin that is not a good sign I think at this point it makes the most sense to swap the graphics card I've already checked make sure it's ddr4 seated properly I don't suspect that he has a bad dim again it looks like the system is posting we're just not getting picture out to the card and uh it's just the motherboard can't detect it there's a card issue everything on the motherboard side seems okay and that's why it's not indicating a VGA issue that's what I expect is going on here although I've been very wrong in the past in this playlist so what I'm going to do is go ahead and swap his card out we've got our old trusty XFX card with no supplemental PCI power required that we're going to throw in here and hopefully hopefully we'll get yeah we'll get somewhere I really doubt it's a dead CPU or motherboard this time around although that has been the mo for many of these Horizon systems for some reason so out with the old I can carefully wiggle it on out of here all these stupid retention clips now it's stuck there we go nice nice nice does IT wires here and then with this weakle thing again several cables it's a little monitor he's got here getting in the way a little bit Slaughter in don't have to worry about supplemental power and uh we'll get our HDMI cable connected maybe we'll get a post this time how are we gonna do power on I'd be pretty shocked just based on the you know the fact that the fans aren't spinning on the R9 390. if it wasn't a card issue oh looks like a post we're getting a signal there it is uh oh folks he has a dead graphics card so we got this narrowed down fairly quickly I'm gonna go ahead and try disassembling this see if we find anything uh physically wrong with it inside we'll re-paste uh reseat everything and you never know sometimes that alone can can fix a broken card we'll start by removing all these Phillips screws around the back plate before we blast this with IPA I'm going to remove all of these uh memory thermal pads as well set these to the side these actually look to be in decent shape I think we're going to reuse them just carefully pry up one by one get as much as this thermal paste up as we can I'm going to use uh just a Q-tip without ip8 first I think I'm going to take this board outside give it a quick dusting with our electric duster and uh and then we'll scrub manually with IPA afterwards I'll I'll see what I can do I don't want to blast it with heat and just try to uh you know give it a quick fix because ultimately I mean if this card is going back in the viewer's rig even if we can get the card to work again it's only a temporary fix heating the GPU or around it and we have a video talking about why it's usually not permanent so I don't want to give this back to the viewer in the off chance that something goes wrong again in a few weeks or a few months I'd rather just replace the card outright this R9 390 is quite old he has told me the owner that he's got no problem at all with replacing the card he was more or less just curious as to what was actually the problem but I think I'm still going to replace this with maybe something that's Equitable but newer maybe like an RX 570 or I'll see if I have like a GTX 1060 or something like that so it won't be a huge performance change but the card will be newer and should have decent life in it and you can see now after giving the card a good soak we've got IPA we used IPA to clean up pretty much everything we could and the board's looking uh pretty pretty sweet again a bit of oil residue and things still lingering but all in all especially the GPU memory side of things everything's looking good physically the board still looks fine also was sure to clean up the cooler assembly a bit the fan heat sink over there and uh it's it you know it's not a deep cleaning but it's definitely much better than it looked when it first came in so let's give this one final hoorah if the card still doesn't work we'll go ahead and swap them out with another one also don't want to forget to repaste the die alrighty and after all that here we go it's the Moment of Truth we're gonna reconnect HDMI I also just quickly off camera here checked that these two supplemental eight pins since they weren't included or weren't being used with our XFX card were actually connected to the power supply and I also probed them with the system on to make sure that they were sending power so we're good on that front there's no other reason why this card shouldn't be working apart from the fact that there's you know obviously a physical defect on the board itself so let's give it a go aren't spinning and even if the card worked at the bare minimum we would need to replace the fans which not even sure they make that kind of fans you'll need for the Sapphire card anymore but yeah I don't think we're getting anything out of this I think the card's bricked now I did have someone at one point oh well actually I've had multiple comments uh about stuff like this in the past folks think that you know people are planting known defective Parts in their Rigs and then sending them in to potentially be fixed so for example I'm sure someone might be thinking right now well Greg the owner probably just threw in a car that he knew wasn't working this R9 390 just so we could get another free card well he's not going to get like a huge upgrade in this I I don't I really try to stick Apples to Apples as close to Apples to Apples as possible when it comes to power and performance um unless it's some kind of sponsored spot I really don't have any other incentive because I'm doing this for free right so I'm not I can't go out of my way every time to give you like this epic upgrade that's why I stated wanting to swap this with maybe like an RX 470 or 570 or a GTX 1060 something that's like in the realm of this card's performance but that's a bit newer should have a bit more life in it so so yeah this car definitely is not working the fans aren't spinning so I think there's something wrong with power delivery that means we're gonna go ahead and turn the system back off and swap it for a known working card and here we go I have just the candidate this here is an Asus RX 570 and uh it's decent you know it's a strix model it's not like super ultra high-end or anything it is used but we've already tested it run a plethora of tests actually and this card runs very stable very cool so hey it beats the heck out of a broken outright bricked graphics card right so we'll go ahead and remove this card one last time I'm not sure what I'm gonna do with it I might send it in to see if it can be repaired Maybe by another tech Channel and we'll go ahead and slide in this RX 570 this is only going to require one supplemental eight pin PCI power cable so we'll tuck the extra one into the basement how on Earth just the cables and things are like over complicating this that oh this is cringy bordering on cringe here there we go that's better and we'll connect one we'll tuck the extra down below alrighty and the moment of truth power back on now the elephant in the room I obviously wasn't able to ddu before removing the R9 390 these are still AMD graphics cards but uh the drivers are going to be a bit different I imagine so what I'm going to tell the viewer to do because I don't have the password to sign into this system is uh have them ddu they're gonna wipe completely any trace of any video driver and then start fresh I just use AMD Auto detect and it'll give you the uh the most up-to-date relevant driver there so there we go boots straight into Windows super fast it's ready to go this thing wants the game and uh now it finally can again thanks to a new at least to this viewer graphics card this was a fun one a fairly easy one I've got to say um here's some of the more complicated ones usually involve swapping motherboards and CPUs and it just gets a bit dicey when you're basically disassembling an entire rig fiddling with tons of cables and whatnot but swapping grab excurs is pretty straightforward and that was one of the reasons why I was willing to jump straight to that after checking the CMOS itself and the ddr4 I mean those two things take seconds so knock those out because a lot of times those are to blame believe it or not and then the card was a quick and easy one for me because I saw that there was no signal out and I also saw that the graphics card fans weren't spinning that was an immediate concern and it was one of the reasons why again I jumped right on it so we got it right we pretty much nailed it down about as quickly as I think we reasonably could have you know some people might have just gone straight to the card right away but I did want to check the CMOS and check the ram because they're again so quick to do but uh system's up and running again the color scheme probably needs to be tweaked a bit especially with the cord yeah the cards got some red here we got red LEDs up top but green fans and a green yeah I don't know I don't know what the color scheme is supposed to be but the Bulbasaur theme system pretty cool I haven't seen that before and hopefully this rig has several years of life left in it now that we've got the RX 570 8 gig in it now with that if you were someone one you know has a broken system and you live in or around Orlando Florida I like a chance to fix it for free we charge zero dollars for the service and uh yeah there's really nothing to lose apart from maybe your commute time to drop it off and pick it back up again but uh as long as you're local or somewhat local that is really all I ask and the responses I'm trying to get better at I'm trying to be quicker at uh approving or rejecting forms and so all that stuff is going to be in the description if you want to check it out you have to enter a few things just give me a bit of insight into what is wrong with your rig and we'll go from there if you guys enjoyed this one be sure to give it a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated please consider subscribing if you have not already that subscription uh while it doesn't mean as much now as it used to is still a huge help it's validation for the channel and it really helps with the brand deals and things that we work out on the back end so uh thanks for that support if you've already been subscribed as long as you have and consider leaving a comment down below let me know what you think about this one do you think uh do you think I fixed it about as quickly as I could have should I have jumped on the graphics card train earlier than I did I think I think the order of operations was pretty sound here and a pretty straightforward fix all around with that again thanks for watching and stay tuned for the next one my name is Greg thanks for learning with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 203,066

Keywords: fix or flop, fixing a viewer's broken pc, broken gaming pc, how to fix a pc, computer troubleshooting, computer tricks, greg salazar, computer training, how to troubleshoot, pc gaming, broken pc, how to, dead pc, broken computer, Pc no post, fix or flop S3:E7, fixing a viewers gaming pc, how to fix a computer, computer repair, how to fix a pc that wont boot up

Id: pVK_gt-htXw

Length: 14min 36sec (876 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 18 2022