This Viewer's PC Doesn't Power On! - Fix or Flop S3:E20 [SEASON FINALE]

hey everyone I'm going to start this video out a bit differently because I have to call out to the audio that you're about to hear unfortunately there's an issue that just uh it just persists throughout the entire thing and we had had intermittent issues with this before um but this was the first time it actually happened throughout the entire recording and unfortunately uh there's just not

much we can do in post to get rid of the the weird sounds you'll hear so we scrapped that audio setup entirely from here on out you might hear it in a couple of the other videos we've already recorded intermittently but we're using a totally different audio setup now so hopefully this doesn't happen again I apologize thank you for your patience hopefully the video is still

enjoyable so let's get to that this year is Another viewer's Broken gaming PC and uh this one's got some weird Behavior so apparently the motherboard lights turn on and things when he switches the power supply on at the rear but he cannot get the system to power on and because of that he obviously cannot get a post a signal to a monitor so this one as

of now is pretty much one large paperweight and we're gonna try to fix it in this video hey there welcome to the fix or Flop playlist if you're new here pertinent info is in the video description just know that everything you see us do in these videos is done free of charge there is a heck of a lot to unpack with this rig so I'm going

to give you the old trick and dense diversion this owner has replaced almost everything in this rig in an attempt to get it to actually power on he does get lights on on the motherboard when he turns the power supply on but attempts to actually power the rig on have always failed he's replaced the graphics card the CPU the motherboard in fact the only thing he

hasn't replaced if I recall correctly is this power supply here and he hasn't done that because again he's seeing Signs of Life in the rig the rgbs that light up when the power supply is switched on so we might need to hone our search in on this but I must confess I found an even more glaring issue that could explain all of our problems but you're

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POV perspective of this rig and I want you to guess you might not even have to guess you might know right away what is wrong with this rig is there anything obvious that is missing or maybe in the wrong place you can see we put our eight pin and a four pin up there there are 24 pin all our cables along the side cables at the

bottom what are we missing here does anybody see it this is the thing I noticed right away in that Publix parking lot so you can see we've got this HD audio cable connected as well as what I thought was like a USB 2 cable or something like that but we have nothing on this side absolutely nothing and if he's attempting to power on this rig via

the owner assumed this is where he had to connect his front panel cable and you can see here this is what that front panel connector looks like it's actually all unified similar to what NZXT does in some of their modern cases and so what I think happened here is the owner recognized the same pin layout the same pin configuration with the same key in the same

spot as your typical front panel typically have your power LED positive and negative as well as your power switch on top followed by that key Gap and then you have your hard drive LED pins on the left and then your reset pins on the right with an extra pin uh off to the right this looks exactly the same as that front panel header that you would

normally find on a board and it's wrapped in this black plastic shroud which makes it look all official even though most of us will never use this so in light of the fact that this video might only end up being five or six minutes long we're just going to go ahead and swap the cable back over to the correct pins on the lower right side of

this motherboard and attempt to power it on we'll try for a post if it posts we're pretty much good to go I'm going to check the rear because he was having issues cramming all those cables behind the motherboard tray and getting that right panel to shut so that's the only other thing I want to tackle but again kind of beside the point because it looks like

the only fix required here is just rewiring something pretty simple and when I say simple I'm not talking about how simple this was to do from the get-go I mean there are plenty of pins here that are all really confusing and so it can be a bit daunting I totally see how this owner confused the location I have done much worse on the channel made bigger

blunders not a big deal I'm just talking about how simple it is to fix we literally are done that's it this is the correct location for the front panel and if you're wondering why I know that or how I know that there is inscription underneath the pins we actually have a dedicated video about how to wire front i o I'll have that linked below but maybe

you just want to look up the motherboard manual you can do that as well find the front i o section and it'll tell you specifically what each pin does and how to wire this we're not going to waste any time here let's see if we get any post so with the switch flipped on you can see there's some LEDs on the motherboard that's probably what he

was seeing but he couldn't get past this let's see if we do in fact get power ah that's a good sign now he doesn't it appears have the front fans wired up or this rear fan so we'll take care of those I'm going to take care of cable management behind the motherboard tray anyway which I will show you in a second it's sort of kind of

a disaster but uh it's okay we told him we'd take care of it form also not sure if Windows is even on here since he wasn't able to even get the system to post in the first place he probably hasn't had a chance to install Windows unless he's migrated to drive which we can also verify here now we're um we're not we're not getting a post

I do have things wired incorrectly so this is slightly concerning 12 o'clock midnight so no signal um all right so let's try bypassing the graphics card then wiring things straight into the motherboard looks like we're starting this all over recall he did tell me that this card was confirmed working in another rig so um that would suck if this card is also dead I know he

said he's replacing this anyway but it would be nice to still have a backup or give it to a friend or family member I'm going to connect the HDMI cable directly to the back of the motherboard I'm not sure if the CPU has integrated Graphics or not but I'm just going to assume that it does because I don't want to take the CPU Cooler off if

I don't have to it's a beefy or an October one which actually is upside down another upside down an actual cooler this is like the second time in a row we've had it and it's this exact same cooler as well I guess people just don't notice that there's text there and it really doesn't hurt anything but yes it is upside down so that's kind of bothering

me let's see if we get a post this time through integrated graphics foreign so it fires up just fine wow but we're still not getting a post I really hope that him connecting that front panel cable into the com Port didn't fry something on the motherboard that wouldn't be good this power supply looks fine on our PassMark tester so I don't see a need to replace

this anytime soon that was with these cable extensions connected still by the way so I don't say you need to replace or remove these well this is looking like a motherboard or a CPU issue and here's why I think that and no matter what we try to do that doesn't involve the motherboard or CPU including swapping out dram swapping out the graphics card for another working

one our trusty XFX card down there we have unplugged everything that's non-vital we still get no posts I mean nothing on the screen at all the system fans are not ramping up or down it's just it just stays at a static RPM and I am getting the hunch that this might be a bios compatibility issue it's possible to run seven thousand no 7000 sorry 13th gen

so 13 000 series Intel CPUs on c690 motherboards but you need a bios update first and so it's possible that if there's a 13 gen chip in here it might just not be posting because the BIOS isn't compatible I'm going to verify that by removing this cooler which we're going to have to do anyway because it's upside down oh and yes before someone all caps me

in the comments I did clear the CMOS one of the first things I did and unfortunately didn't change our situation this CPU is uh core i7 ah see as I suspected a core i7 13700k if this was built brand new even though it's a bit Dusty it looks like it's been sitting for a very long time I'm not sure how long it has not been working

but if you built this stuff new there's most certainly no way that the z690 motherboard had a bios compatible with 13th gen out of the box so that's the first thing I'm going to tackle I don't know if this has bios flashback functions or not but just for me a quicker way to do this is just to pop in a 12th gen chip very quickly and

then we'll update the BIOS that way by the way the underside of the CPU looks really clean no obstructions here and his socket also thankfully looks really good it was a tad bit dirty but I don't see any bent or missing pins I'm going to drop in a core i5 12500 to get the ball rolling here and we'll just uh hook this platform up to his

power supply externally since we're going to be swapping it right back out once that bios is updated we've got our USB drive connected we've downloaded the most up-to-date bios for this motherboard and would you look at that that it boots right up with that 12 500 this only confirms our suspicion about it being an incompatible bios and you can actually reference up top here this version

of the BIOS is super super old definitely doesn't support 13th gen all right and while this is installing again you want to make sure that you're not prone to power outages don't do this during a thunderstorm if you don't have a backup bios you might have a totally brick motherboard especially if it's an older board you don't want to have to replace that chip entirely also

don't judge my super messy super basic test bed it gets the job done okay you know it's actually kind of cool that things worked out this way because we've been preaching this for a good while with regard to Verizon CPU specifically the am4 platform it is so versatile and it encompasses so many different ryzen Generations that you do have to mine the BIOS in question when

especially pairing an older motherboard with a newer CPU in this case between at least 12 and 13th gen Intel CPUs you also have to mine that it's pretty much the same story just with different Hardware anyway now that this is posted again let's go ahead and swap back in his original 13700k hopefully uh we'll get a post of that issues also a quick exciting while this

is booting up I noticed that this board actually has a debug LEDs just above the 24 pin I was kind of confused why I couldn't see them earlier and I think it was because the BIOS was incompatible with the 13th gen chip you can see it's hanging right now on the dram LED I think it's just because it's training memory in a few seconds it should

actually post so that would be um yeah that would be helpful any any minute now 12 seconds later we've got a problem this stupid dram light is now staying on I was complaining about them being off a few seconds ago and now they're just uh stuck on yeah um I've tried multiple sticks of ddr5 I've tried multiple slots I have no idea why it's not posting

now with his 13th gen ship in here I'm gonna try one of my own 13th gen chips and see if it's just his CPU that's giving us problems but uh wow that would awfully suck if it was not only a biosyncompatibility but also some sort of like CPU issue that's just unfixable given the tools I have here so uh yeah I'll get like a 1300k or

something somewhere in in there actually I'll bring you over here let's go so here is my little stash of CPUs and we've got to find what we're looking for wow okay so I popped in my uh I had a 13 600k and that there's a post folks sorry about the glare but yeah that's a post so why is it posting no problem with a 13 600k

but not his 13 700k this isn't looking good I think he's gonna need a CPU replacement unfortunately I don't have anything as powerful as his CPU on hand I just have that Core i5 which I don't want to give them because it's not everything that's that's actually downgrade so it yeah he'll have a working rig but that's CPU I think he can get replaced because it

is rather new so here is the situation uh the CPU just doesn't want to post it's still on right now it still hasn't posted the dram light's still lit I've tried every single slot I've tried multiple ddr5 modules nothing wants to post um but my 13600k does which tells me that it's not a bios issue any longer it would have been before but he just has

unfortunately another CPU problem that's preventing the rig from from actually powering on fully so because it is a 13 gen CPU I know for a fact it is still covered under warranty I can reach out to Intel directly and have them send this gentleman a replacement CPU he's already waiting on a replacement graphics card anyway so I don't think this is anything super time sensitive and

the rig frankly looks a little Dusty looks like it's been sitting for a good while so it doesn't come across as like one of those like time sensitive projects that needs to be finished say before Christmas which we've made exceptions for we've taking on broken things that could have been RMA just for the sake of getting up and running quickly so I'm going to leave a

CPU and as is we're going to reassemble everything I'm going to tell them where we are we're just waiting for that post it is definitely CPA related he just needs to get that swapped out uh we'll take care of cable management and everything else for him so all you need to do is pop that new chip in and his rig should be good to go and

like I said I would normally just replace his CPU with one I already have here but this being the only one I have and the fact that it is a downgrade just doesn't really make a lot of sense to me these are new components more or less so uh he should just be able to RMA it and get a proper replacement with the correct number of

course so let's get this platform back in here and try to straighten up cable management as we go as well notice he's missing a few screws we'll take care of that for him basic wiring taken care of this thing looks a lot better than it did when it came in we've got these panels to help cover things up closes like that yep closes no problem now

and then this panel here slots in somehow is that it yep and then closes effortless we've got our top panel take care of that and then where's our yes and in our left side panel drop in the swings and should shut with ease it wasn't shutting before nice it's not even fueled but you've still got plastic to peel here that's so tempting but it's not mine

to do just for the laws one last time I want to try firing this up we'll see who knows maybe the increased mounting pressure now that CPU coolers like fully mounted there maybe that'll fix the problem I doubt it but uh yeah I would be I'd be pretty upset if I didn't try it at least one last time before giving it back to the owner so

all the fans this time are spinning I believe we should have RGB up front I'll go back and check that we're still stuck on the dram LED and unfortunately I feel like that's where it's going to stay there's just something fishy about the CPU if it was purchased new like this super unfortunate just uh just bad luck all around but if it was used and abused

maybe it was transferred from another really and just tossed around I mean who really knows I can only go off of what I see here and it definitely doesn't want to play ball you know what I just noticed this power supply doesn't have any SATA power cables connected now I did receive the box from the owner just in case something like this were to occur however

he still does not have any Molex or uh State and power cables in here I don't know where this power supply is from again it checks out according to our tester but yeah we're missing we're missing some cables so no RGB for now well uh let's let's count the number of things we fixed here that ultimately led to more things that needed to be fixed the

front panel cable first and foremost that was obvious easy fix then after that it was the BIOS incompatibility fairly easy to discern easy fix we checked that it boots with a 13 600k but it won't boot with his 13700k so it's not a bios issue any longer it's potentially just a CPU specific issue probably a defective memory controller on board that's preventing it from communicating with

the dram which is why the DRM debug light is on no picture to the screen we're missing power cables outright from the power supply I don't know if some of these components were secondhand or not clearly the graphics card is the power supply might be but at least the viewer now knows what that final thing is that needs to be swapped out it's unfortunate that it

has to be something as expensive as a 13700k and I don't have I thought I had another 13 900k I do not I only have 12 gen Replacements I have a 12 900k but I don't want to I don't want to downgrade them even generation wise even if it's an upgrade from a core account or frequency perspective it's still a downgrade generation over generation so I

want to stick at least Apples to Apples here or potentially upgrade them and I know that he can get a replacement from Intel whether I go through the RMA warranty process or he does it really doesn't matter but I'd rather just give this back to him and let him swap it in and if he has any issues with Intel I can reach out to them directly

and you know provide more insight we'll get that expedited Forum so in the end unfortunately not a full fix but we do know what is wrong and hopefully the system doesn't have to be down for very much longer thank you so much for watching this episode of fixer flop and thank you for another epic season of this playlist I just realized that it's episode 20 at

least it's slated to be episode 20. and I cannot put together with words how grateful I am to all of you even if you just click on the video and skim through it very quickly I do not care the fact that you are willing to engage in any capacity with this playlist means so much to me and not only does it help me provide for my

family of course but we're also able to make a small impact here locally in Orlando and my hope is that I can continue to grow this and expand it even to other cities around this country it's because of you and your viewership that we're able to continue doing this for our community so thank you again so much for that and I only hope that I continue

bringing educational hopefully educational informative and maybe even entertaining videos in this playlist and others in the future so I'll send you off with that and uh don't don't worry another season of picture flop is coming up very very soon we have so many entries already in the system for the next season it's it's unreal how many problems most people are running into with their computers but

I will gladly help where I can or at least especially in this case here point you in the right direction if you enjoyed this one give it a thumbs up consider subscribing if you haven't already if you have a broken system and you live around Orlando Florida and you want a chance to have it fixed for free yeah that link is in the video description check

that out and stay tuned for the next video here on the channel my name is Greg thanks for learning with me