Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S4:E10

this here is another viewer's broken gaming PC and and yes I know there's already something super cringe about it I really don't know why this is here the bottom slot Mr Nader's 2000 why on Earth I don't know have you done that I would never I would never have allowed you to do that so for those of you who aren't aware Nate is my brother-in-law and we actually built the system together well it must have been two years ago or so on the channel he's since modified it just a tad but it is having some issues apart from the obvious so as you all can see I got a pretty sweet card in or so it was a sweet card what kind of card is it it is a you don't even know MSI GeForce RTX 3080 oh it's a 3080 okay it's a 3080. so I got it second hand from a guy in Tallahassee my wife and I your sister we were traveling from Tallahassee going back home and he was at a gas station long story short Tallahassee at a gas station it worked great it's it's been killing it out of nowhere this is like a week ago it just stopped stopped working it started giving me camo like digital camo on my screen and it freezes my computer digital camo I'm not gonna forget that one guess without further Ado since we now have that context about a gas station uh we might as well go ahead and turn this on and see if we can see the same artifacting Nate's describing and uh yeah this is usually what it looks like when a graphics card is on its way out so this might be a very quick fix but it's just unfortunate that the gas station graphics card here has decided to throw in the towel I think you'll need to brace yourselves stay with me to get rid of that annoying Windows activation Watermark head on over to VIP SCD key purchase a Windows 10 Pro om key for a fraction of the price of retail just use the secure payment method like PayPal enter your product key and your PC settings window and say goodbye to the watermark and be sure to use our offer code skgs or a sew wheat discount now I know a lot of you are screaming by this point at me for not moving the card to the uppermost full-length pcie slot the reason why I'm not doing that yet is because I want to see if at the very least we can replicate the issue Nate's describing here and again I saw the photos so I know it I know it exists I just don't know if it's going to happen right away I don't want to touch anything in case uh foreign don't look back here Nate don't look back here that was a false alarm dude what is that I don't know I just started doing it that sounds awful right so we do get a post um it is loading into windows I don't see any artifacting right now so what we can do is maybe try running it through like a graphics intensive Benchmark maybe like a burn-in test like furmark and we'll see if we get artifact in there I imagine since the card isn't under any sustained load yet and it's not very hot it might not be exhibiting what you were showing me earlier so let's try to push it to its limits right so here is firm Mark we're just going to run the standard preset here all we're looking to do is stress the card from what Nate says this has happened after gaming yeah so yeah so a longer gaming session when the card's been stressed it gets pretty warm that's when we should see either a blue screen or artifacting maybe both so let's go ahead and start the test we'll click go and here is where I think hey dude you've got so much stuff popping up oh man all right so we're gonna let this run we can see our GPU temperature down here it's looking like it's uh around 70 degrees Celsius right now we're gonna let this run for about 30 minutes or so when we have most of the card thermally saturated and if we don't see issues by then then we're gonna have to look elsewhere possibly the cables that Nate is using or even his display so far from what I'm seeing this card looks to be fine even in the lower pcie slot on his board 12 o'clock midnight uh my nose cut off oh it did I don't think that was related right it was weird that's what I was doing to mine it would no signal you know I've got two monitors my main monitor it would like shut off and say no signal but then my left monitor it would say um it would like blink like it was getting power to it that makes sense your PC just reset that's what it was doing to me so I was just about to give him crap for bringing me a perfectly working system and I don't know if the camera caught it but the system just went black it didn't turn off but it did hard reset and now we're back at the windows loading screen and now it's okay hold on that's what does that say video TDR failure well that's about as black and white as it gets folks so uh ignoring Nate's awkward Middle School profile picture you can see there are a number of small artifacts and this is what I saw in Nate's picture something along these lines and when I saw that I immediately thought there was an issue with a graphics card if it's not a graphics card problem it's a cable issue or a monitor issue more than likely but seeing as though he purchased a second hand card from someone at a gas station I don't think we should uh I don't think we should be all that surprised by what we are witnessing you can see even on the home screen we get small bits of Art facting it's again something that you never want to see it's never a good sign wow look further down at this Battlenet icon uh let's see it's this one here you almost can't even read the text because it's so distorted by what the card is doing in fact we're even getting driver errors now which we weren't seeing before we thought we were running for Mark without issue 10 minutes ago I think the drivers are having issues communicating with the hardware because we probably have a hardware issue I think at this point that's fairly apparent and that's why we're getting this message just a just a guess but I don't see why else we'd be getting this message since we haven't actually uninstalled any drivers or anything like that we've just allowed the car to heat soak a bit so uh let's try something different the first thing we need to try is perhaps the most obvious moving this graphics card up to the uppermost full length pcie slot it shouldn't be down here especially card as powerful as a 3080 depending on how you have your PCI Lane sorted by the chipset and the CPU this could be extremely detrimental to the performance in fact I wouldn't be surprised if just moving this up top fix Nate's issues entirely and that's ignoring the other elephant in the room when a card is positioned that low it doesn't get a lot of air so it can overheat which could also lead to artifacting the other less obvious issue that we can tackle very easily is removing this Daisy chained eight plus eight pin here for 3080s especially and cards higher than this I don't recommend running a single eight pin from a power supply and then running a daisy chain setup like so a few people have had issues it's not recommended necessarily though I don't obviously think this is alone causing the issues that we're seeing on screen in fact it's probably not related to this at all but I did want to mention it because I'm sure the comment section will now Nate I know you probably already know this you've got a large gaping hole now underneath your card not the end of the world you have the extra ones don't you though yeah yeah Okay cool so just wanted to let YouTube know so you don't get annihilated again in the comment section so now this card is where it belongs so now at this point you can see we are able to run firm Market again which is a good sign the GPU is being utilized 100 which is normal we've got temperatures in the mid 60s now I expect temperatures to fall a bit since we've positioned the card a bit higher it can breathe a bit better memory frequency looks okay so far so good still 68 degrees Celsius yeah it's it's not oh uh oh this looks familiar come on oh yeah dude it's it's hard resetting still this yeah this card is on its way out so what I think has happened is this card has developed an issue from constant thermal cycling which most cards are have that tolerance built in right they're they're designed to be stressed to get extremely hot and then contract and cool again and metal obviously expands when it gets hot and sometimes if you have weak solder points weak joints um you could have the graphics processing unit itself or maybe a memory chip partially d-ball which means that it can become dislodged some of the small little BGA balls that they use to connect the chips to the boards become dislodged they can corrode if it's you know if they're in bad environments and I I have a feeling that's what's going on here because from the start the cards seem to be okay it of course was cool it hadn't been turned on in what several days since you guys drove down here and then immediately after we fired up furmark and got this card super hot as it would in a normal game that's when we started seeing issues we turned this system off for about 10 minutes and then powered it back on loaded up for a mark seemed okay for about 20 or 30 seconds and then you saw the system completely shut down that to me warrants some sort of graphics card repair that will likely involve tools I don't have here so the easy bet for me is to just replace the card outright we can also try testing this in a separate system just to make sure that it is card related that the issue is being carried over from system to system but I think that the easy solution here is just to swap the card out the issue Nate is you have an RTX 3080 in here and I don't have too many of those laying around now I've gotten crap from some of you in the past for having so many graphics cards why am I so stingy with how many I'm willing to replace the truth is most of these boxes are empty they're either in systems or they have already been given away or repurposed in other upgraded rigs for viewers Etc so I like this one here I know I don't have this one anymore I might have a 3070 I do think I have this one um this one's in a rig this one isn't a rig a lot of boring math later yeah um I'll give you something for now but uh it's gonna be a loner so let's get this thing back out of here so I've got this 3070 here and uh you know what dang it I'll be a good brother-in-law I'll let you keep it all right but promise me that you don't swap this out for another gas station graphics card that's the one condition are we okay with that Nate yeah I think I think that'll work okay I think that's fair I know she isn't a 3080 and yeah this is sort of a downgrade but it beats uh well beats a 3080 that artifacts that's for sure and it still looks pretty darn good it's also not an MSI card and you guys know how I stand with that this card's also just a eight plus six pin so it's gonna pull less power and of course we're gonna run the same firmware test to make sure this one's stable some good news finally I didn't expect anything less from this 3070 the card runs perfectly fine I think it's been about 15 20 minutes or so and we're just over 70 degrees Celsius that's where it is leveled off without any issues or any artifacting I think you're ready for a new WoW jeez ready for a new home so now we turn our attention back to the MSI 3080 I have cleaned up the die I've taken apart the card things physically look okay and I've noticed this just in the past you know it's going to be difficult to see anything with the naked eye I'd have to start probing various locations to see if there's a dead short somewhere so far it looks okay I'm going to repaste this we're going to put the card back together and pop it into a test bench and we'll see sometimes just taking the card apart giving it a proper cleaning and then reassembling can actually fix intermittent issues like that so who knows I think it's a it's worth a shot back together again you can see we've got a makeshift test bench sitting right here on the edge of the desk it's already hooked up and I've already gotten the latest NVIDIA drivers installed now we're going to run for Mark and see if the exact same symptoms show themselves here if they do then we'll know that the issues were carried over by the card itself and it definitely needs to be either repaired or recycled and again I would be surprised if the card wasn't repairable I just don't have the tools here to take care of it the temperature is uh okay I was about to mention the temperature was climbing about the same rate it was before but the screen just went black and this was uh only after what like 20 seconds of running for Mark one other thing to note about this card while we're waiting for things to reboot this was previously opened I noticed the seal was broken so whoever owned this card before Nate did whoever sold it to him at the gas station apparently uh opened this up probably repasted it I don't suspect that's why the issue is coming up now because again he said Nate's had this card for like a year but it very well could have contributed to the problem if things weren't done correctly when it was apart and it looks like unfortunately we're not getting any signal from the cart at all now the monitors just completely black um I don't know why it's doing this now but we're definitely worse off than we were before so very strange but I think it's fair and safe to say now that the card is definitely the culprit and it's not something I would put into any rig again at least in its current state this board unfortunately doesn't have a doctor debug although I'm fairly certain it would Point toward a VGA out as the culprit you can see the fans in the cart are still spinning physically it seems fine the PCB seems fine but it does not want to play ball and that's sometimes just how the cookie crumbles maybe um in the future avoid graphics cards that are being sold at gas stations what a story there still is hope for this uh it'll have to be sent somewhere to some sort of specialist for more intensive diagnosis but for now yeah worst case scenario confirmed Now quickly back to Nate's rig I noticed that I still hear the the high-pitched whirring sound it sounds like a some sort of fan grinding noise coming from the chipset area I think it is a chipset fan in this x570 motherboard we'll definitely have to swap motherboards out at some point but uh for now you can see it settles down I think when the system finally posts uh the fan Curve Kicks in and the the fan either slows down to a near Holt or completely stops but that is what we were Hearing in the beginning of the video if you were curious no it was not one of the fans in the graphics card being snagged by something lower down fortunately Nate's rig is back up and running again unfortunately it required a graphics card replacement but at least it is a working reliable rig again we confirm that with furmark the graphics card was the only issue which is why I saw the need to only stress the graphics card to ensure that the system would be stable long term I think this is the same board mind you that we had to repair ourselves because there were a few pins missing in the CPU we ended up filling some of the holes in the socket with copper and to date Nate says he hasn't had any CPU related issues from what he could tell which is pretty impressive I really didn't think that would hold up as well as it did but it seems to be doing just fine so I totally stand behind how we repaired that and a lot of folks are like well you just solder it that doesn't make any sense you know very difficult to solder things that are that fine without a really expensive equipment typically plus I don't have certain hands so I don't I don't trust myself I think that shoving copper into the holes in the socket was the safer pet for us and the proof's in the pudding so at least the rig works the graphics cards not the same it is slightly weaker but if you look at it this way the original card in here that I gave him was an RTX 2070 I believe and now he's in RTX 3070 in here so really I kind of upgraded them I'm gonna go with that story I just wanted you to stare at the camera um do you feel like I kind of uh kind of screwed you on a graphics card downgrading situation no I'm grateful I'm grateful thank you I mean I I went for a card that didn't work too to a car that does work so thank you this guy yeah no worries and I appreciate you driving down and like I said if you have any other issues give me a holler I'm going to try my best to get that 3080 looked at by someone who is actually a professional and board repair um because I I don't claim that to be my strong suit not in the slightest so maybe we can get uh North Ridge fix or someone along those lines to take a look at it I'll reach out to um to several of them if I can and see who bites first and maybe we can get some cool little collab going on and if we get the card fixed then they'll you know hopefully they'll send it back and we can pop that back in here and you'll have you know a 30 80 instead of a 30 70. so I might be back with that uh thanks so much for watching hopefully you enjoyed this one uh yes it was a worst case scenario the graphics card is always it's always just it's it's the thing you're hoping it's not the most right um It's usually the most expensive or one of the most expensive components in a rig especially gaming rig and that was the case here but if you if you're seeing similar symptoms you're seeing screen artifacting what Nate was saying he knew right away that it was probably something graphics card related and I more or less confirmed that when I saw the photos he had sent I was on the fence about it actually being a graphics card issue when we first got it in here it seemed to be working just fine but I'm glad we gave it some due diligence and we're patient with it because it definitely exhibited many concerning symptoms and at the very end you saw was just giving us a black screen which Nate said he also noticed in his rig back home so um yeah I'll keep you updated on that card for now if you guys enjoyed this one give it a thumbs up consider subscribing if you have not already check out relevant links in the video description including a link to our Discord server which is totally free to join are you in the Discord yes yes consider supporting us on patreon and I will catch you in the next one my name is Greg my name is Nate thanks for learning with us I swear to God do it I got an alternate ending all right guys and as always do not buy a gas station graphics card uh Greg thank you very much I appreciate it you're awesome for this and consider liking and subscribing enjoy you're a natural Nate [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 132,455

Keywords: fix or flop, broken pc, broken gaming pc, greg salazar, Computer Hardware, Technology, PC Gaming, Tech, how to fix a pc, pc troubleshooting, pc repair, Computer repair, gas station, gas station graphics card, gpu, graphics card

Id: Cs2O6gfYkDE

Length: 19min 9sec (1149 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 02 2023