I Bought a Broken PC and Instantly Regretted It...

I spent 40 bucks on this PC and uh well there's a couple things going against me in this one firstly it doesn't work it doesn't turn on at all and secondly it's a Dell pre-built so on eBay this computer was listed four parts or not working and the description reveals well enough computer will not turn on please see pictures for details of damage computer does have cosmetic damage see pictures computer does not come with a power cord or any other boards computer comes as is I won't keep you waiting much longer before we dive into this thing stay with me Nord pass is an intuitive way to manage passwords without complication and with utmost security using the latest technology it streamlines business account access for employees including secure ways to share passwords credentials and other sensitive data Nord pass implements strong passwords with a password generator feature and identifies weak reused or old passwords within your company for peace of mind you can also quickly revoke access to corporate accounts with the click of a button ensuring sensitive data is retained long after employees are offloaded it'll also autofill credentials at the start of every session for maximum efficiency and minimal hassle including for things like credit cards and employee data and will flag any breach of said data by proactively monitoring websites tied to your online accounts so what are you waiting for secure your business effortlessly with a 3-month Nord pass trial use code Greg Salazar via the link below or visit nordp pass.com Greg Salazar to get started today again that's nordp pass.com SLG Salazar and offer code Greg Salazar should be pretty straightforward you'll probably notice things are rotated backwards this is the front of the case this is the back we're going to take off the right side panel because this is an inverted chassis my friends and that means uh well we're going to be working with some very odd constraints namely this super bulky CPU Cooler here so yes this motherboard is flipped upside down heck even the Dell logo is backwards but the real interesting thing here is where the PCI slots are located typically if a board's rotated 180° the slots are up top but Dell has design this board where the slots are still near the bottom which means our card uh is going to be fan side up and positioned somewhere down here and that normally wouldn't be an issue but again we've got this bulky CPU Cooler in the way it's going to prevent us at least in the top slot from running a larger graphics card so for demonstration purposes here the golden fingers are on the bottom of this card in this Orient a which means we actually need more space above the slot for the remainder of the Shroud and you can see we just can't get it in there there's there's no way that this card and this is a smaller GTX 1050 is going to fit with this bulky cooler which means we'll either end up using this guy here or a riser cable of some sort now there is uh quite a bit of dust especially in this hard drive cage I think we'll need to clean that and as usual with a lot of these listings the specifications were very vague I knew there was a core i5 in here just based off the sticker but otherwise all we know about the CPU is that it's a 3.6 GHz apparently processor and it comes with 16 gigs of non ECC memory we'll be the judge of that let's see here ah yes a very dirty 2 gig stick which means we've got four gigs in total that is um that's disappointing we got hosed boys let's recap then for 40 bucks we get a broken system with an i5 from either the Sandy Bridge or Iver Bridge lineup of CPUs and it only comes with 4 gigs of memory when we thought it came with 16 at least I thought it came with 16 heck this description actually in hindsight looks like it was ripped from a generic Optiplex product page and you can spec these in so many different ways so it's likely the seller just picked whatever looked enticing and threw it onto the listing we were a bit fooled there uh this is looking like my worst $40 investment yet but rest assured I'm not really surprised by this and this isn't me trying to cope or Justify a bad purchase like oh I saw this coming from a mile away when in reality I'm hurting inside I I bullly expected this to be completely honest with you and I in normal circumstances never would have purchased this even for 40 bucks knowing what little I knew about it I tend to avoid vague listings or listings that seem too good to be true and in general I think you should as well unless you want to have some fun like we're about to here first things first we need to try powering this on I don't think it's going to give us any sign of life at all based on the description but look even the description was wrong about other things in this rig so maybe we get lucky I would normally hook a screen up at this point and normally I'd be on this side of the table but things are inverted and I don't think things are even going to power on so we're just going to go straight in as is where's the power button there it is yeah whoa okay I don't think the microphone's going to pick this up but I definitely hear a high-pitch squealing sound coming from the power supply Ox power we have an Amber LED on the board but we don't have fan spinning yeah I think there's something uh wrong with this power supply which actually would be I'm going to go ahead and just unplug this because I don't want to damage things further uh I think that this is actually a a a best case scenario for a broken system power supply swap is going to be pretty easy and I actually chose to buy this this uh broken unit because the power supply mounting points appear to be standard ATX ones so I think this going to be a fairly easy swap and I don't see off the top any proprietary connection apart from a slight unorthodox 24 pin this connector has 24 wires running to it however it is smaller than normal this is a mini 24 pin so all we need to do is buy a very cheap male 24 pin mini to female 24 pin standard we'll just quickly disconnect some of these extra wires and after four Phillip screws it should pop out let's see it might be on a uh yep it's on a little retention clip up top now that might prove difficult to work around with a standard unit and you can see this is actually an 80 plus gold rated unit total output is 225 Watts not bad for stock and check this out I was able to almost perfectly match the length of the original unit with the 700 GD from evj also 80 plus gold rated but a 700 watt total output so much more Headroom for additional graphics cards and things the height is slightly different but the mounting points are virtually the same I know it looks a bit strange as is we can clean things up later but remember we haven't even actually verified that the power supply is the problem yet so I might have jumped the gun bit uh we've got our 24 pin to mini 24 pin adapter we'll connect this and then we should be ready to fire things up again I've also taken the liberty of connecting both a small discret card just so we have HDMI out because for some reason we only get display port with these old pre-builts and I don't want to buy an adapter from display port to Mini HDMI because this isn't a standard HDMI connector here in case you're wondering I've had a few people ask uh we're going to also try to boot into Windows I've got a SSD hanging literally for dear life over there we're just going all in power on here we go uhoh now there is a little tamper button here sometimes if it's enabled usually in the Bios I think uh this will either prevent the system from turning on or prevent it from posting I'm just going to hold that down and then try one more time we're basically tricking it into thinking that the side panel's on but we still get the same the same Amber LED for auxiliary power and I know that this power supply Works we've used it in a recent PC build I'm basically gutting this entire case now and I want to see if this power button is functional it might just be that the system isn't turning on because it's not registering a button being clicked I've been searching for a good while for a 14 pin pin out that front panel and I for some reason cannot find it I keep finding the 20 pin but that's different that's a different front panel it doesn't have the power button on this one uh I did find the service manual and this at the very least has confirmed that a solid Amber LED is not a bad thing it's just saying that it's in the potential power on state I'm just I'm just confused I don't know I mean I I've looked through this whole manual and it's not showing a pin out anywhere either so we're kind of going into this one a bit blind which I'm not a fan of I think we're going to have to start probing some pins with the power on and that's going to be Mega cringe I definitely don't recommend you do that but we're playing with a $40 system here so what the heck something blows up not the end of the world again don't try this at home so nothing there ooh so that's the Amber LED pins that we shorting there okay interesting there's the diagnostic LED I am legitimately dumbfounded by this this darn Amber LED just wants to stay on for whatever reason uh it's all we can get it's the only sign of life from this rig maybe there's something obvious in the CPU area we can fix easy does it now we've got a lot of small wires to deal with check out how bad this thermal paste is you can tell it hasn't been changed in a very long time I am actively scrubbing here putting quite a bit of force into it and we're just not getting rid of anything this is pretty bad also wow I should have done my research when buying this Optiplex this is a first gen core I 5 not a Sandy or Ivy Bridge unit like I originally thought um this is I mean you don't uses for gaming not even for like bare bone stuff that said the pads all look nice and clean and the socket also looks really good no bent or missing pins suppose we could check on this battery here maybe the voltage is too low holy guacamole is the camera getting that 2930 molts that's uh that's not what we need we need a whole three volts so uh we're what 1% of the way there is my math right I stole this one from a brand new motherboard you can see 3 volts almost dead on so uh we're definitely coming up short with the original a few moments later but even with the new battery is still nothing I'm not getting any reaction from the rig other than an Amber LED this is super frustrating because I feel like it's something so simple you can tell I really don't want to take this motherboard out but uh I'm not seeing any other obvious thing we could remove to isolate either the socket CPU or motherboard in general I've tried different dims I've obviously reset the seos we did it again when we remove the battery and swapped that over um I've disconnected everything nonvital and I still cannot get any reaction from this rig it's yeah it's just really frustrating after looking at things outside the case though I will say changing the battery around did reveal one extra clue with the original battery we still get the same illuminated am LED on the motherboard but nothing on the front panel board if it'll focus there we go you can see no reaction at all however when we swap this dead one out for an essentially brand new one we can still see the board's Amber LED illuminated but now on the front panel board we also get a blinking Amber LED here this is one of the diagnostic LEDs and in the manual unfortunately a blinking third diagnostic LED tells us that uh well we've probably got an issue with our motherboard and to reinforce this suspicion I have swapped the 650 in here with a 760 that I had on hand I'm actually surprised I haven't chipped this old it's just laying in a drawer but we still get the exact same symptoms with this CPU installed instead by the way you probably noticed we didn't have Dam in those last few shots and that's because I was trying to uh circumvent the original issue and trick the board and thinking something else was wrong it does not really matter though if we try powering on we still get the same blinking Amber led the third one to be specific so by testing things this way we have ruled out the CPU because I know my 760 works we rolled out dram because we've outright removed it from the system and still see the exact same symptom and we' ruled out the power supply because we replaced it with an own working one I actually expect that this uh original Dell PowerPlay here fully functions I don't think there's anything wrong with it at all I was just misled a bit by the original symptom the Amber LED on the board is completely normal and just tells us that it's receiving basic power from the wall but of course the board physically checks out and that's really where I've hit my dead end I could start probing random places we might have a power delivery issue but I don't have donor pieces from random boards that are around this uh era and even if I did honestly it's not my strong suit I don't have the fine soldering skills needed to repair something like this and if we really want to talk about the viability of a board this old I mean the amount of time I would spend probing alone is probably worth more than the value of this board the enax S lick Max flow series of aiio are beefed up for the latest and greatest processors thanks to 38 mil thick radiators up to 420 mm built-in vrm fans over each block and specially designed dual chamber pumps for increased coolant flow also enjoy tasteful argb and a rotatable cover for a clean look in any build and in any orientation learn more about intermax limax flow CPU coolers by clicking the link below and so that's where we have to call it we have tested everything under the sun in this pre-built with the exception of the motherboard one of the reasons why I can't just swap another one in is because it's proprietary we said earlier on it's flipped upside down it's inverted the io is on the opposite side of the board we can't just shove this into a you know regular mid Tower or something because the layout is all backwards and I don't have severely old you know Dell motherboards laying around that I could swap in so repair aside it's not even like I could easily just replace the thing but since we've tested everything else including known and working CPUs known in working DDR3 known in working power supplies I mean that's the core of your platform right there it's really all you need to test um it has to be the motherboard unfortunately it's not something we can physically see but I suspect there is something probably wrong with power delivery I don't see anything desoldered anything super corroded it's just probably a chip somewhere that is fried that's creating some sort of dead short and that unfortunately is just not worth the fix so we're just left with a bunch of random working parts maybe we can repurpose some of these in future fixer Flop videos by the way I didn't have to pay shipping for this item was just $40 out the door one of the reasons why I agreed to buy it despite the description stating that it did not power on it's not the end of the world but we didn't manage to fix it one of the reasons why is because the board is proprietary just good old OEM stuff if you guys enjoyed this one give it a thumbs up consider subscribing if you have not already consider joining our public Discord server it's totally free to do if you want to contribute there or just hang out with some cool folks and consider supporting us on patreon if that fits the bill if you want to support us there financially there a few options to choose from you'll see the little ending credits as well with all of our current patreon supporters so just a small token of my appreciation for what they currently are doing thanks so much for watching my name is Greg and thanks for learning with me

Channel: Greg Salazar

Views: 121,349

Keywords: broken pc, I bought a broken pc, instantly regretted it, cheap pc, $40 pc, cheap computer, computer repair, gaming pc, broken gaming pc, dell optiplex, cheap dell pc, barebones computer, computer won't power on, pc won't turn on, how to, Computer Hardware, how to fix, PC Gaming, Technology, Tech, fixing a pc, broken computer, dumpster pc, ebay pc, Greg salazar

Id: cOu1uvEVPVo

Length: 15min 29sec (929 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 26 2023