Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S4:E5

The reason I think my PC would be a good fit for Fix or Flop is that it's an iBUYPOWER PC. Owned it for about two years, and it was previously my sister's PC up until it was giving her problems such as randomly shutting off. We never really knew what the issue was. We thought it was because of a dust buildup, but turns out we were wrong.

I took some time and opened the PC up, removing the RAM slot while... RAM slot, okay, I think he means the DIMM. While putting the RAM back in, it made a weird noise and was a struggle to put back in. However, the PC still would not turn on, so I decided to remove the BIOS for three to four minutes. I think he means BIOS battery, CMOS

Gen. Please, it'll be a blessing if you can fix this. This here is that viewer's broken gaming PC, and yeah, she's definitely a more budget-friendly iBuyPower pre-build. For starters, an MATX motherboard, a very small one at that, in a mid-tower, that smells like iBuyPower. In all honesty, the CPU cooler also smells like iBuyPower, but for a Core i3, it's probably okay. And this power supply, oh

my goodness, this definitely smells like iBuyPower. Jokes aside, this kind of corner-cutting is pretty typical for companies like iBuyPower, CyberPower, there's a bunch of different Walmart brands and Best Buy brands that will all do this. They'll buy very cheap power supplies and throw them into these rigs, these pre-builds, because they know that a lot of folks who buy pre-builds aren't very computer-savvy, they don't know what

hardware is good, what hardware is not, and that's how they maximize profit, and they keep their margins up. So, I'm hoping that it's not a power supply issue, because it's possible this kind of power supply would have taken other things with it, if that were the case. I'm hoping it's not. But we'll find out in this video. Stay with me. To get rid of that annoying

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If you're new, check out pertinent info in the video description. Just know that everything you see us do in these videos is done free of charge. So, the troubleshooting itself, that labor, I don't charge for. I make money on the back end by, you know, filming these videos and throwing them up on YouTube and the like. The only other thing I want to mention is that

if you live in or around Orlando, Florida, and you are having issues, like this gentleman is here, maybe your system is turning off but not sending a signal to your monitor, or maybe it's just not turning on at all, submit a form. That link is near the top of this video's description. First things first, let's attempt to turn the system on. I'm not sure how far

we're going to get with this, but we do need a baseline. So, power at the rear, power up front. We had power on for a split second, and it turned immediately back off. I don't want to attempt to power this back on over and over, because this very well could be a power supply issue, and I don't want to risk damaging anything else. So, yeah, I

think I'm going to start with the power supply. It's not usually what I do, but I want to rule this out up front, and I might even just upgrade them just because, even if it's not the problem, because this does not look like a suitable unit for a gaming PC of any caliber. Oh, yeah. That's not good. So, hooked up to our PSU tester now, and

you can see, pretty much fails across the board. Looks like we're only getting the 5V to work. I'm not sure why nothing else is responsive at all. That is super, super strange. What's also weird was that the system was willing to power on at the start, just for that split second, so I don't think it's totally dead. I think there's an internal short of some sort,

and that's why it's cutting off. Maybe this unit is actually attempting to save the remaining components. An easy way to rule it out is with a separate power supply, which you can see we've now connected. I'm going to power it on this way, and it looks like it wants to post. Now, we don't have the RGBs lit up. I don't have any of the SSDs connected

to this new unit. I do have my portable monitor here, and we're just going to see if we get a post. Sorry about the glare. I have a pretty good feeling about this, and if that's all it is, well then, gosh darn it, that cheap power supply really was doing its job, and it really was trying its best to save the remaining components. I thought for

a second that we were going to get a post. Oh, no, we have. Sorry, I couldn't see it. So, yeah, we have a post. It's, like, super faint, but that is a really good sign. So, at this point, I want to check remaining wiring, just give it a once-over. Again, he mentioned that he was having trouble seating his RAM. It didn't sound like he was very

familiar at all, frankly, with building PCs. So, I'm going to check that stuff, and then we're going to upgrade his power supply. I think that, well, the replacement is definitely warranted. This unit looks cooked, but I was going to probably upgrade him anyway because it's just so old. I think I have a really good solution as well. This here is the PurePower 12M from Be Quiet.

This thing's a beast. It's only 750 watts, but they go up to, I believe, 1,000 or even higher. It's 80-plus gold certified, fully modular, and not very large, meaning it should fit in pretty much any mid-tower out there. On it, you'll also find the latest connector, supporting up to 600 watts for the latest graphics cards. AKA, you won't need something like this right here. We get

multiple connectors spliced from the sameit's just stupid. You just get one of these, and you run this straight into your new card. You don't have to worry about any of that. It looks a lot cleaner as well. We won't need any of that for this viewer's rig, obviously, but you can always take this system and migrate it to a newer build down the line. I want

to thank Be Quiet for being the product sponsor of this video. If you guys want to check out the PurePower 12M, be sure to do so via the link in the video description. At this point, we're just looking at a power supply transplant, and again, crossing my fingers that that's all we have to actually worry about here. So, we're going to slide in the new power

supply, fan side down because he does have ventilation underneath this case. Going to take care of some basic wiring8-pin EPS up top connected. And the 24-pin's good. We've got the 6-pin. We've got our drives connected behind this tray. And I did my best to route these cables in a way that I thought was clean. Other than, you know, them just running across here, this was really

the only other option. There's a bit of a cutout space behind the motherboard itself, and I think this looks a lot better. We do have a cluster of cables here that are exposed through the cutout, and I justthere's not much else I can do with this case. It is rather limiting from a cable management perspective. I can go ahead and tuck these fan cables in a

bit more. And yeah, I mean, I think it looks a bit better now, and hopefully it turns on. This is the moment of truth. And I think everything's been hooked up, and I'm ready to power on. ... RGB's not working? Oh. I actually see what that is now. A few moments later. Oh no, it is working. Without this cable connected. I'm not sure what this is.

It's like some kind of adapter. I hate these RGB cables. They are so annoying. There we go. Okay, so it looks good. Just press F1. I need to get my keyboard. Now, I'm not entirely sure here, but I think we have an operating system on this drive. From what it sounds like, we should get into Windows. It does look like that's what's happening. We have both

SATA drives connected. He has a 3.5-inch drive at the rear, and also a 2.5-inch drive. I imagine the OS is on the 2.5-inch drive, since that's a solid-state unit. Should be a bit faster. We are in recovery. It might be because he was resetting his system so much. Maybe because we were resetting it, just trying to troubleshoot it. 12 o'clock midnight. No, okay. Doesn't look like

we have one. So I'm going to confirm that with the viewer off-camera, and then we can wrap this one up. The biggest issue that we had, we've already overcome. It now turns on. All I need to do is get that OS installed. I'm not sure if he's on Windows 10 or Windows 11 or heck even Linux or something like that. Who knows? So that'll be up

to him. Oh, you know what? I am glad I checked, because it does actually look like we have Windows installed on the SSD. It's trying to boot into the hardest drive, which might have happened when I might have swapped around the SATA cables, the SATA ports for each drive, so that might be why it's slightly confused. So let's go into the boot menu, and we're going

to change the, yes, boot one option to, wait, wait a minute. That's weird. Okay. Yeah, we're going to change this to that. So that the ADATA SSD is on top, and then now it's up top there, boot option number one. And then we're just going to save and exit. Hey, there we are. So that was a quick one. Boots right into, looks like Windows 11 that

was already on the SSD. Now, between the clip that you just saw and this one, I actually had to hop back into the BIOS, because we were still getting the can't find bootable media prompt, and I had to disable CSM. Sometimes enabling CSM allows the system to boot into the bootable volume. Sometimes disabling CSM does that, and I still haven't totally figured out why that's the

case, why it's so finicky, but I'm just going to leave it as is. It boots repetitively into Windows now, and that's a good thing. Now, I am rather curious, before we close this one out, I do want to see if we notice anything obvious inside of this unit. This is one of those areas that you do not want to mess with, if you do not know

what you're doing. Make sure that you properly drain the capacitors in these units before opening them up, if you want to get that deep into it. The reason why I don't like showing it is because, you know, people just copy without hearing that disclaimer, and you can genuinely hurt or kill yourself by messing with stuff in here. I don't, at first glance, see anything physically toast.

So, hmm, pretty much the same as the last few times we've had dead units. There's nothing burned, nothing exploded in there. Another issue with these units in particular is that, even if you take the board out, you've got a whole string of spaghetti noodles to deal with, because this is a non-modular unit. You can see it's quite dusty in there as well. Yeah, I'm not going

to spend too much time looking at this. I was just hoping for anything obvious here. The fact that this power supply is so old, I mean, it means it's probably only worth about 10 or 15 bucks, maybe 20 at the most new. And since this one's dead, I mean, it's good for scrap, and that's pretty much it. You want to use some pieces on here for

donors. Yeah, I wouldn't go any further than that, though. So, a few takeaways then. We had another disaster averted here. I mean, the fact that it was only the power supply that got taken out here is actually a really good thing. It means that the power supply did its job. Even that cheap old unit, you know, that's what they're supposed to do. I just had a

little less faith than I might have otherwise, just because it's such an older, dirtier, and cheaper unit, to be fair. This new unit should last him several years. Comes with a really great warranty from Be Quiet as well. And will definitely give him a bit more breathing room for upgrades down the line, which he might entertain, or maybe his sister, if he said he's giving it

to his sister. Maybe she'll entertain those upgrades later on. But this is a very healthy starter rig. It does need to be cleaned up quite a bit. Maybe take it outside and dust it before we drop it back off for him. But other than that, the rig works. It boots into Windows, and we don't have any other issues to worry about. Now, if you enjoyed watching

this video, let me know by giving this one a thumbs up. That would be greatly appreciated. If you want to subscribe and you haven't already done so, do us a solid. Consider clicking that red button. Very much appreciated there as well. If you want to support us on Patreon, that link is below. Or if you just want to join our public Discord server, that is totally

free of charge. You can either contribute and help others out who have issues with their rigs, or maybe ask your own questions if you're trying to troubleshoot yourself. There are a lot of really helpful folks in that Discord who might be able to help if you are one of those people. We have a lot of entries still in the queue. I'm trying to think. I think

we have like 30 or so that were submitted in the last two weeks. So there will be many more episodes to come. And thank you so much for watching. Again, the reason why we're able to do what we do here is because of your viewership. That continued viewership means so much, and it allows us to make a very small impact here in the local Orlando, Florida

area. So yeah, with that out of the way, I'm going to get out of here. Thanks again for watching and thanks for learning with me.