this here is another viewer's broken gaming pc this one's a pretty small one it apparently
turns on but does not show a picture which can be an extremely annoying thing to diagnose for a bit
of context this bill was put together only a few weeks ago which makes this at least in my eyes a
brand new pc the only recycled component is the case which is an origin pc case but
everything else in here is again virtually brand new purchased from either amazon or newegg now the
issue arises when it comes to the return policy window especially with amazon i believe for most
tech products it's only 14 days so if you've owned a product for more than 14 days and you
find out that it's not working well that return window usually your sol amazon has made some
exceptions including for me but most of the time you're not going to be able to get your money back
at least from amazon they're going to tell you to go through the manufacturer and the other problem
with that is going through a manufacturer takes usually weeks sometimes even months and nobody
wants to deal with that especially in a new build that you just spent a pretty penny for so that is
why this thing is here and i'm really hoping we're going to be able to figure out what's wrong with
it so we can fix it in the studio and give it back to the owner within a day or two versus
right several weeks i think i'd choose the former so without further ado let's get into it stay with
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forward slash greg salazar to get started today so let's first reveal what is in the box
oh yeah no discreet graphics card so the specs of this build are amd ryzen 5 5600 g which explains
lack of a discreet card uh 16 gigs of corsair vengeance 3200 megahertz ddr4 a 240 gig mp510
nvme ssd and a 750 watt corsair sfx power supply now the fact that this has a 5600 g in here and
he's saying that he's not getting picture out but the system boots up just fine that tells me a heck
of a lot about what i think this is i think it's a bios compatibility issue see a lot of these amd
motherboards especially older ones but even newer ones that are reliant on b550 and x570 chipsets
don't include native 5000 series amd ap support at least not natively so if you went to amazon.com or
maybe a big box retailer like micro center and bought yourself a pretty modern b550 motherboard
you would assume that it would work with one of amd's more modern cpus right like the 5000 series
apu so 5600g should work with the b550 motherboard out of the box but it doesn't and that's because
these motherboards a lot of them were manufactured long before these apu's were ever even announced
so you need to update your motherboard's bios in most cases to get it to work in post with one of
these modern apus and i've got a good feeling this individual did not do that not that i really blame
them because again you would assume that these two would just work they would just be compatible by
default but one of the downsides one of the only downsides really of recycling the same platform
the same socket am4 over and over and over is that they don't just you know things just don't work
right away usually you have to have a cpu that's already compatible with the bios in the board
to post to get into your bios and then you need to update your bios that way right some boards
have what you'd call a bios flashback function which we have a video talking about i'm going
to have that linked in the video description if you're interested it shows you how to update your
motherboard's bios without having an already compatible cpu in the socket the unfortunate
situation here is that this motherboard doesn't appear to have a bios flashback function at least
i don't see anything back here that indicates it does have that function so we're going to have to
swap the apu in here out with another older cpu that i know works natively and then we'll update
the bios that way i'm going through all this up front because i have a really really good feeling
that is the only thing wrong with this build and the fact that everything else is new i mean
there's no there's nothing really to warrant me to suspect that something terrible is wrong with
this build apart from just simple software and compatibility that is very easy to fix if you have
an older cpu first thing we're going to do though before we try anything is turn it on and see if
we get the same symptoms exhibited that the viewer described so with the pc powered and
our portable monitor connected we're going to try to turn the system on believe that button there
this board does not have a doctor debug or anything of that sort
you might have some led indicators on here actually i don't see that either
this is um a more bare bones b550 itx board here so yeah this is the typical
this is the typical symptom of an incompatible bios everything appears to be working all the
fans are spinning but we're getting no picture now at this point there are a few things we could try
we could swap the motherboard out but that doesn't really solve our our problem at the end of the day
we need to get this bios updated and we can't do that by removing the board what we should be doing
is swapping cpus and i have a 3400 g here this is a generation old apu that i think works with this
b550 board it still depends on the bios but i'm pretty sure it supports these if it doesn't worst
case we can swap it with a 3600 which i have in the closet that will work out of the box with any
b550 board at least it should and then we'll have to throw in a cheap discreet card at least then
we can power the system on we'll get a picture we'll get a post and then we can update the bios
that way because as far as i'm concerned there's no native bios flashback function included with
this motherboard so we have no choice but to swap it out with a compatible cpu or a dud you can get
direct from amd but that takes a few weeks now of course the less likely scenario here is that the
cpu is doa i highly doubt that but if it is we'd still need to swap these chips out to confirm that
again my initial impression with this system is that all that is needed is a bios update and that
is a relatively straightforward assuming you have an already compatible cpu on hand so we're going
to remove the 5600g we've already cleaned off the thermal paste and we're going to insert the 3400g
and instead of using thermal paste for this since we're just swapping these out very quickly i'm
just going to use a thermal pad this actually isn't even the correct size but it should still
pull enough heat away i'm not worried at all about thermal throttling ask me how i know and with
that taken care of i think it's time to try for a post i do expect this will work now if it doesn't
then it's probably just the bios still i i didn't check to see what this motherboard shipped with oh
there we go well that was super easy so it was definitely a bios issue i i'm almost certain
that it's not the cpu itself most cpus aren't just randomly going to die on you um so yeah uh
and there you go so p1.00 that's the bios version definitely not the correct bios for the 5600g
and a very easy way to take care of this is to first hop onto your motherboard's product page
so you can see this is our board b550m itx ac we can confirm this in our bios i want to scroll
down here to the support tab click here and then we'll want to click on the bios button you can see
these are all the available bios's for this board starting with the most recent here at the top and
you can see under all three of these updates it says to support 5000 series g processors it
requires to update the bios with matisse renoir or vermeer um okay i just realized something so
we just installed what i believe is a picasso apu i get all my code names mixed up matisse is
the generic 3000 series zentu processors renoir is i believe the 4000 series g apus and vermeer
is the 5000 series zen three cpus not the apus so i think why it's telling us that we have to
have one of these three installed is because when we do flash this bios we're gonna lose support
for the apu that's already in there the 3400g which isn't good because you don't want anything
to happen to your system while you're flashing a bio so you could break your board i really didn't
think about that very much i'm going to leave all this in the video of course so that you can
kind of learn from my mistakes and and look ahead before swapping cps that i would have just put a
3600 in here if i had known that it was going to erase support for the 3400g once we flashed it
but the reason why they do this is because you can only fit so many compatible cpus and apus into a
bios package and the memory chips for these bios are really small so every time you include support
for one set of processors you typically have to eliminate support for another and our poor 3400g
is not going to be supported on any of these three bioses here whether it be 1.8 1.7 or 1.6 all three
of these require at the very earliest matisse and our poor picasso apu is just um yeah it's not
quite matisse so i'm going to download version 1.8 save that to a thumb drive it does include
5000 series g support uh and it does include a few against updates and things for better
stability but i'll have that on a thumb drive and we'll swap the cpu in here out for a 3600 or 3600
x we'll have to put a discrete card in the system i know this is kind of annoying but this is what
so we have to deal with if you want you know am4 to work with all these different cpus which is
good in a lot of ways but this is the one downside uh and then then we'll be able to throw his 5600g
back in here and hopefully get a post right so now we've got a 3600 in here which remember has
no integrated graphics processor so that's why we had to also throw in a gt710 which is just a very
cheap graphics card i wouldn't recommend gaming with it but it does allow us to get a picture out
and we should see a post again i don't know why we wouldn't i've confirmed that both of these things
work in separate systems if we do see that post then we'll be able to update our bios with this
3600 install we'll still have support for the 3600 after the bios has been flashed and then we'll be
able to swap this chip for his 5600g any second now there we go what does that say new new cpu
blah blah okay let's get into the bios and just like that with a little time lapse our bios was
updated and after restart we got this screen right here which indicates that there's no operating
system on the drive in here and that makes sense because he just built this system according what
he told me and didn't get a post from day one or didn't get a picture at least so uh yeah he
couldn't of course installed an operating system if he couldn't see what he was doing on screen
with that now i'm going to swap the 3600 in here with the 5600g we're going to take the
discrete processor out and we're going to attempt to get a post with a picture this time i i'm 99.9
sure this is going to work in fact the only reason this wouldn't work is if the cpu is actually dead
and it was just a coincidence that the bios was also incompatible with the chip i highly doubt
that but it is i guess a slight possibility so let's drop the apu in here i'll reapply thermal
paste since that's what he had to begin with we'll do our x pattern with a few dots and just lock it
in place we'll remove this graphics card say bye-bye gt710 you are not needed and let's try
for one last post hdmi cable connected to the back of the motherboard power cable connected
let's cross our fingers it's doing this little power cycling thing trying to train memory and
the like any second now i'm gonna look really stupid if this was not the fix
come on come on you'll get there i'm rooting for you
picture picture picture
oh oh yeah that's a post there we go now you can see our same board b550m itx slash ac we're
now on p 1.8 instead of 1.00 and our ryzen 5 5600g with radeon graphics is good to go and
now that this build is functionally good to go i do want to address a few aesthetic issues if
you want to call them that cable management is a bit lacking there's a few cables just kind of
running all across the motherboard and like it looks a little messy so i'm going to try my best
to clean that up this case is rather limiting in that aspect because there's not a ton of space at
all behind the motherboard tray so i think we'll still have a bulk of our cables sitting right here
under the power supply but i do think we can clean it up just a bit so let's give it a shot
and here we are you know while i was in the middle of filming all this i realized that his left side
panel is actually not even like windowed it's it's perforated but you can't actually see in here so
not that huge deal that this cable management looked the way it did honestly could have been
just fine the way i had left it but i did change a few things i streamlined the cables
so that it looks a little cleaner i swapped the power supply around so that it was pulling in
air from the left because again the left side is perforated granted the right side is two but
this just helped with cable management a bit more as well so now i've got two fans facing
kind of inward which will look pretty cool we've got an exhaust fan up top and a smaller exhaust
here at the rear all of that air for the most part again is going to be pulled in from the side so uh
pretty cool layout i did confirm after doing all this that the system still posts uh the only thing
he needs to install now is an operating system and because there wasn't one already on here because
again he he couldn't have possibly installed one unless he was bringing a drive that already
had windows over to this new system because he couldn't get a picture so i'm not going to install
windows on here just because i'm not entirely sure what he's going to want to do with it but
that said everything else is ready to go the system is working now and it ultimately just
came down to lack of a bios update that's one of the things you should really look out for when
building an amd pc in 2021 one of the side effects of having a platform that is so versatile and so
inclusive is that you're gonna have plenty of bios out there that frankly overlap with each other
in terms of cpu compatibility my rule of thumb is to always check the manufacturer's website always
check e-retailer listings like amazon and newegg read the descriptions double and triple check that
the motherboard you're buying is compatible out of the box with the cpu you intend to pair it
with otherwise you'll end up in the situation we were in here where your build is otherwise
fully functional but you get no picture you get no post it's because the bios is more than likely
not compatible with the cpu you paired it with and this is mainly an amd thing there were a few
instances where you could have this situation occur with intel but mostly amd and again it's
it's more or less a consequence of just how versatile am4 is so there's a plethora of benefits
associated with that obviously you can use b350 boards with some of the latest amd cpus out there
and then they were released like three or four years apart that's really cool the downside is
well you can only fit so many different cpus or c you can only support so many different cpus
in a given bios and as a result of that you'll need to do a bit of flashing sometimes to get
this stuff to work but uh not to worry this viewer system is now good to go and i'm glad we were able
to help him in this video with that if you guys enjoyed this one be sure to let me know giving
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cool and leave a comment down below letting me know what you want to
see next year on the channel my name is greg thanks for troubleshooting with me