Fixing a Viewer's BROKEN Gaming PC? - Fix or Flop S7:E6

This here is another viewer's broken gaming PC, struggling to fit this into frame, and apparently it has several problems. It was initially submitted with a description of, I accidentally pressed the BIOS flash button while trying to plug a USB cable in, and the system turned off. I restarted it and booted into Windows, then Armory Crate had an update which restarted my PC again, and now it instantly goes to the DRAM light when booting. I tried every RAM slot with both sticks, none worked. Tried reflashing the BIOS with the button and a USB stick, but it didn't work. I removed my boot drive since it could have corrupted and wouldn't boot, but that also didn't work. I also cleared the CMOS. Please help, I literally just got back from college and want to game over my break. But this story gets much worse. In a desperate attempt, the owner tried reseeding his CPU, a strategy that I don't think makes a ton of sense because in most cases, chips aren't just randomly unseeding themselves while under load, even when you account for small changes in thermal expansion. But alas, he did it anyway. And after removing the CPU block from the AIO, the owner realized that the chip went along with it. I guess the thermal paste was being a bit sticky. Not uncommon, but what happened next was unfortunate. The chip actually fell from the cold plate into the socket. And this being an LGA layout, it's an AM5 platform, that means the pins were in the socket when the CPU fell inside, and the owner did disclose some damage. That is very unfortunate, but I am glad it was disclosed. This is so important, guys. Even if you're not sending this in to me, especially if you're paying somebody, I would argue it's more important. If you're paying for a troubleshooting service, and you don't disclose things like this, you could end up being out of pocket even more money as a result. If I had powered the system on thinking we just had a boot issue, and, you know, just rolled with it, we could have caused more damage to other components on account of shorting out the socket itself. It could have killed the chip if the chip isn't already dead. There are so many different outcomes here that are almost all negative. And so because I know this going into it, I know not to power the system on. We're going to try tackling the socket issue first, and if we can't, we're going to have to replace the board. But this knowledge is vital. Don't feel bad. I mean, obviously it sucks. It's a really crappy situation to be in, but don't feel bad about disclosing this stuff. I'm never going to charge you guys anything regardless of what happens, unless I feel like you're, you know, intentionally fishing for free hardware. We're not even going to respond to those. But in cases like this where genuine mistakes happen, just disclose them. It will save you a lot of time. It will save me time, and it will probably save me components as well. So with all of that out of the way, sit back, relax. We've got a PC to fix. I hope you will stay with me. Are you sitting on a gaming PC without an activated copy of Windows? Forget $100 plus retail keys. Instead, snag an OEM Windows 11 key for a fraction of the price to unlock the full potential of the OS. Oh, and don't worry. They'll still remove those pesky activation watermarks. Just click the links below to get started today, and be sure to use our special offer code SKGS for a sweet discount on a variety of options, including Windows 11 Pro, Home, and more. Hello there, and welcome to Fix or Flop, a playlist where we attempt to fix broken PCs for free. So we don't charge for hardware or labor. It's $0.00 to the owners in question, and that's thanks to your viewerships. We monetize on the backend. That allows us to try fixing rigs like these without charging anything. Thank you so much for your viewership. It's why all of this can happen in the first place. By the way, if you have a broken PC and you want a chance to have it fixed for free here, be sure to click the form linked in this video's description. As for this one, I don't want to try powering it on just yet. Obviously, we have the socket issue. So first things first, we're going to remove the CPU block, inspect the socket, and try to fix it if necessary. So first, we're just going to lay the system down like so, and begin loosening a few screws. You know what? I'm actually going to stop because I just realized something. Now, it's possible this happened after the owner started fiddling with things, but you can see that dim right there is not fully seated. This little arm, this little mechanism is pulled back a bit. So I bet if we pushed on this, we'll hear a click. Oh yeah, that right there could be the reason why he had a DRAM light. Again, not sure if it's always been this way. These usually don't just pop loose with time, but that will definitely be at least revisited again later in this video. Oh boy, I'm pretty pumped now. You know, that was a very easy find, if I'm being honest. But I think we might, if we can get the socket fixed, we might be able to fix this entire system without throwing any hardware at it, which would be nice because the specs of this rig are fairly beefy. There's an RTX 4090 in here. Again, it's an AM5 platform. I believe 64 gigs of DDR5. You guys know how expensive RAM is nowadays, especially DDR5. Not really looking forward to replacing DIMMs. Disconnect the cable or two, and I think I'm just going to hang the block over the side of the chassis. Oh, we actually have a contact frame over the CPU. Interesting. Place your bets on how bad you think the socket's going to be. Just removing a few torque screws, and out comes the frame. Looks to be in pretty good shape. And now, for the moment of truth, up comes the CPU. Oh, okay, that's not so bad. Yeah, that's not bad at all. We can definitely fix that. Nothing's broken, just slightly bent. In fact, I think I might be able to bend these back without even removing the motherboard, which would save me some time. There's a lot of stuff in here, a lot of wiring and things as well. So I'm going to get a small sewing needle and give some of these pins a small push. I first want to get a quick glance with my cheap microscope here. I want to get a glance at which direction some of these bent pins are facing so that I'm not prying in the wrong direction to get them seated correctly again. This here is an even better view. As you can see, it looks like just a couple of these, maybe three or four, but two are bent pretty badly to the right from your perspective. So I'm gonna have to push those back to the left and then maybe the two below it as well. So these now in the center of the screen. So those look a little out of whack. They'll probably still make contact, but we'll try to push those back as well, again, without breaking anything. The last thing I want to do is break one of these pins off because that will render the socket totally useless unless we chip some ground by the off chance. So I'm going to be gentle here and just use a sewing needle to push these back where they should be. For those longtime Fixer Flop viewers, you know that we've dealt with this many times. We're usually pretty successful at it. I don't want to jinx anything. I just want to be careful here about which pin we're pushing. That one especially is out of whack. Oh yeah, there she goes right back into place. I'm definitely not a surgeon, but I do liken this procedure to what I imagine a surgeon has to go through. It's probably not as extreme, of course, but you just want to be very careful, very precise with your movements. If you're all over the place, if your hands shake, you probably want to save this for somebody who can be a bit gentler with things. I think we can all agree this is much better than how we started. I'm not sure if it's gonna work. I would say the odds are probably good that we can get a post this time, assuming nothing else is wrong with the system. These pins are about as close to perfect as I can get them without risking bending anything further or breaking any of them off. Let's see, we can also check here with our microscope just to be on the safe side. I imagine it's gonna be a bit tougher to find exactly where we were working before. It's gonna be somewhere, yeah, somewhere in that area. So yeah, a couple of them are still not quite right, but I think they're good enough to make proper contact with the CPU again. Yeah, I mean, we're just a hair off in most cases here. I'm happy with this. We're gonna quickly clean up this 7900X 3D against a fantastic chip, and I would hate to see something go wrong here, but I think we're okay. And the fact that this wasn't powered on, which was great of the owner to do, so he didn't try powering it on knowing that pins were bent at risk of further damage, I think will be okay, at least on this front. This is a fairly expensive component, and that goes without saying. The 4090 would be pretty, yeah, it would be a pretty disastrous thing to discover that that was damaged, but I don't think that was much involved in the issues that we have with this rig. Now, it's not perfect, but it is much cleaner than how it started. We're just gonna apply some fresh thermal paste, probably after checking to see that the system actually posts or powers on to some extent, because if I have to take the chip back out, we're gonna have to clean thermal paste off again. That wouldn't be fun. So in she goes once again. Okay, and with the contact frame bolted down, what I want to try doing is powering the system on only briefly, only for a few seconds, to see if we can see a cycling of the debug LEDs off to the top right of this board. Just want to see if we get any reaction up there. If we do, that means that we probably don't have an issue any longer with our socket. So here we go. Power on. Is that power on? There we go. So we've still got CPU debug light on. Actually, no, we have DRAM now. It went straight to DRAM. Okay, well, that was fast. I wonder if it's gonna stay there though. So far, the behavior of the system seems normal. Yeah, we don't have much longer to go with this chip before it starts getting too hot. So that's good news. So far, the behavior seems totally in check. Now we can repaste and reapply our CPU cooler. And here we go. This is an attempt at a post for the first time with a screen connected. I would say this is probably 50-50, given that we saw that that DRAM module was not seated properly. That may or may not fix our problem. So let's power on and see what's what. So right away again, DRAM light is illuminated. Everything appears to be lit correctly. I wonder if this is just a prolonged training memory session. AM5 tends to take a while to do that. And if this DIMM wasn't seated properly, and now it is, it's gonna have to retrain from the start. That could take upwards of 30-60 seconds, sometimes even longer in my experience. I think it depends on the board and the BIOS revision. So we're gonna be patient here and just see if anything happens on screen. It's still pegged on DRAM. I don't like how tight some of these cables are routed. Bending these headers a tad. Oh, it just reset. So I went back to the CPU debug light. I know you guys can't see that from there. White VGA light. Could this be it? Come on. Green boot light. That's it. Boom. Yeah, that was it. That was all it came down to. Wow. At first glance, everything seems to be detected. We have both DIMMs at 64 gigs in total. It doesn't look like XMP or DSCP or Expo is enabled, but they are at least detected, which is a huge win. Of course, the CPU is and our four drives. I'm not sure which is the boot drive. Actually, it's a fifth drive. So it's a SATA SSD. That's a WD, Western Digital. So that's great. There's a lot of storage in the system. Again, it's a very high-end rig. This makes sense. But the fact that these are all being detected is a great sign. I want to click F1. I want to hop into the BIOS and actually run through some of this stuff. So when we enable Expo, that is going to reset this entire process. So the rig's going to take a long time again to boot up. That is perfectly normal. Again, it takes a little longer than you might expect for especially AM5 to boot up for the first time with new DIMMs or a new profile. I will say this CPU temp is extremely high. That is... Oh, that is my fault. I forgot to connect power to the AIO. Cannot believe I forgot these. Take care of the... Oh, yeah. So that's getting the fluid moving there. That should lower temps dramatically right away. And then we'll get this Type-C cable connected as well. And let's swing on over to our temperature. It's just going to go handheld here. Oh, yeah. Look at that. Falling by the second. Now, on that note, the BIOS revision on this board is 2007, which came out over a year ago. And you can see I can scroll all the way up in the support page. There are a ton more revisions that came out since. I'm going to update him to the latest stable one. It should be this one here, which is 3402. I'm just going to drag this renamed .cap file to the root of a USB drive. Safely connect said drive to the back of our motherboard. Now, I'm using the BIOS-specific Type-A port. This would be if you're using Flashback. So if you didn't have a CPU that's already compatible with your motherboard, you could run this and then click a Flashback button. And that would actually install the BIOS for you without the CPU install. We have a video detailing this. You want to check it out somewhere on screen. But for now, I'm just going to flash the old-fashioned way. Just going to use the same Type-A port that you normally would for the other feature. Then we're going to click F7 for Advanced Mode. I couldn't find the Flashback feature. Let's see. Is it under Monitor? Nope. Oh, EasyFlash. There it is. Okay, so we're going to click that. And then we're going to direct it to our bootable media. There's our .cap file. We'll select Enter. Make sure the system does not power off during this process. It will hard break your board. I'm going to click Yes. It's going to read the file and confirm. And I'm going to click Yes again. And here goes the process. Okay, I'm not going to lie. The fact that it powered off right away scared the crap out of me. You never want to power your system off during the middle of this because it's a bit like flashing the ECU of a car, right? If you cut it off in the middle of said flash, then you could have a corrupted software, which would prevent the ECU, or in this case the BIOS chip, from communicating with the rest of the board and other connected devices. In which case, you'll just have a system that doesn't post. You'll have to replace the chip in question, or just replace the outright board if you don't have a backup BIOS. And I should clarify, what I mean by backup BIOS is a second physical BIOS chip, something that you can roll back to if the primary one is corrupted. More expensive boards typically will have this option. Not sure if this one does. This is a fairly high-end X670 board, so it is possible. We always want to play it safe. And it looks like this one is still chugging along. Again, not going to touch anything until it's fully reset. And one more thing while we're waiting. I noticed that there are two cables the owner has routed for this AIO. And because this is one of those like iLink, I think it's like Corsair... Is it iLink or Link IQ something? I get all these names mixed up. Anyway, long story short, there's like this little daisy chain happening. And because he has two different cables, if I plug this Type-C one in, it's going to throw an error on the screen. I think there's a communication problem, because it doesn't know which way to send and receive data. I believe you only need one connected. So this one is just going to chill behind the motherboard tray for now. We are almost there. Probably under a minute to go. A bit of suspense now. So I've re-enabled Expo. Since the BIOS was updated, all of those settings were wiped clean. I think the owner controls his fan curves through Corsair software. So I'm not going to touch those. They aren't very loud anyway. Now I'm just looking for a boot into Windows. That's the last part of this process. If it does, because I believe we do have at least one Windows partition on one of these drives, then we'll have accomplished everything we set out to do in this video. And in decent time as well. Yeah, it definitely does take a bit to load up. I would say about 30 to 45 seconds before you get something on screen. So don't let that like freak you out. Again, it's not something that... Why do we keep going to this? Please ensure your CPU cooler is... Oh my gosh. So because we're controlling everything again through the Corsair software and those Corsair boxes that you get with the Lynx stuff, the motherboard thinks that we don't have a CPU cooler attached. So it's like preventing us from loading into Windows to save the CPU from overheating. Of course, that's not really a problem here. So we're gonna have to bypass that as well in the BIOS. And you can see down here, the board actually tells us how to do this. Consider dropping CPU fan speed lower limit or simply set to ignore in BIOS if problem persists. So let's do that. We'll click F1 and then we'll navigate to F7. I think we're gonna need to be under... Oh boy, where is this? Is it monitor fan speed? I think it's in here. It might be temperature monitor. Let's see. One of these two. No, actually, I think it is fan speed. Okay, so CPU fan speed, ignore. Ignore. We don't really need to ignore the others. AIO pump speed, you can see that one actually is being detected. That's 2400-ish RPM, which is perfectly fine. We'll go ahead and swing on over to exit. Make sure you select save changes and reset. I do think this should do it. No signal for now. Again, it reset because we made some changes in the BIOS. And yeah, this boot up process is just a bit long. There might be a couple things to enable in the BIOS to change that. But for now, I just I want to leave it as is because we've gone a long way here. And I think that the owner is probably okay with it taking a bit longer to boot up versus risking other things going wrong. He's really looking forward to having this up and running for the winter break. So there is our post again. I'm expecting to see some scrolly wheels at the bottom. Come on. A few moments later. Huh, looks like that DRAM light's popped back up. I wonder if that's expo dependent. Maybe these DIMMs aren't actually expo compatible. I haven't checked that. These are pretty high end though. These are Corsair Dom Titaniums, I believe. So the system is resetting once again. Let's see what happens this time. Oh, okay. Loading right up. I'm, look, I'm just, I'm just happy that this works again. I'm happy that it posts and I'm happy that it apparently loads into Windows. This is a big win, I would say. Given the fact that component prices across the board nowadays have been skyrocketing. So yeah, finally, here is Windows. This is mission accomplished. Things could have been so much worse. We definitely dodged a bullet or two or five in this one. And that's thanks to diligence with the socket. Thankfully, the damage itself wasn't too bad. We were able to, from the looks of it, rectify that with literally like minimal labor input and everything else appears to be running sound, save that slightly dislodged DIMM, which again, if that was an issue, and I imagine it was, was very simple to fix. It cost us nothing. What a great way to end this one then, with positive news all around a system that now posts once more, doesn't any longer have severe damage to its socket, and consistently loads into Windows. Is it loading into Windows? Oh, okay. I was just, the screen went black. I wanted to make sure that it didn't reset itself again. I guess that the screen timer kicked in. It's probably set to a few minutes. Big relief. Thank you so much for watching this one. Thank you for your support, for clicking these videos. These folks would have to be paying probably a hundred plus dollars just to diagnose an issue that said shop might not even fix. Like we've seen so much neglect in that industry. It's a shame. Sometimes we'll just cut corners and skirt by issues, and just, you know, they're looking for that quick pay. So they'll troubleshoot. They'll take your 100, 150 bucks, and then they'll say, sorry, there's nothing we can do. Where's my money? And that doesn't help anyone in the end. So the fact that we can keep rigs like these up and running, especially high-end ones in a climate where things are becoming increasingly expensive, that is fantastic. That is such a cool thing to be able to play a part in. And it's again, ultimately all because of you. It stems from your viewership. Thank you so much for watching and thanks for learning with me.