- Oh, my God, is this the graphics card?
iss a heartbreaking story is one
of loss, betrayal, and pain.
This is just sad.
Oh my gosh.
This was a 2070 Super in a previous life?
Earlier this week, Spencer, AKA NeverLuckyChozo,
great username by the way,
posted this absolutely gut wrenching photo on Reddit.
His heartbreaking story is one of loss, betrayal, and pain.
You see, this was no ordinary computer.
You guys, this was his gaming rig.
His other child.
What once glowed and hummed in the night
is now charred and silent.
To that I say, no!
Is PC will rise like the Phoenix.
We are stepping into right this gross injustice
and all you have to do is prove
that your story isn't a bunch of internet bull(beep).
So, we offered Spencer a trade.
His PC for our PC.
And all I need to know is if what's in here matches
what he posted on Reddit.
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(light music)
(parts rumbling)
Oh, that is depressing.
(man laughing)
Now, anyone can get 70,000 upvotes with a good enough story.
Reddit's full of tearjerker posts from attention seekers
that turn out upon further investigation to be tall tales
and we weren't gonna build a brand new gaming PC
and send it to one of those people.
We needed proof which is exactly why
we had Spencer pack up his machine and send it over to us.
Our poor PCMR brother here.
So, the components lost in the blaze include
an AMD Ryzen 5 3600X,
a Noctua NH-U12S of which, as far as I can tell,
basically nothing remains,
an MSI B450 Tomahawk motherboard.
We've got the IO shield from that puppy.
I mean, should we try?
Let's try and find pieces of each one as we go.
I mean, this seems to be,
oh my God, is this the graphics card?
Oh, what was this?
- 2070 Super. - This was a 2070 Super
in a previous life?
Gigabyte GeForce RTX 2070 Super.
Oh, I think I found the CPU.
Yep.
So, here's the pads where the pins used to be soldered
on the bottom and we've verified Spencer's story.
This was in fact a chiplet design Ryzen processor.
You can tell from the multiple spots
where die components were attached there.
It had a two terabyte Crucial BX500.
I don't see anything resembling an SSD in here,
but everything checks out so far.
So, this is just, this is just sad.
Even the things you'd think
would remain relatively unscathed.
I mean, like metal doesn't burn in a wood fire right?
Oh, sure does.
Like this case is, I don't know, Colin.
We had intended to kinda try
to hot glue it back together to resemble its original form,
but I don't know, dude.
- [Colin] I mean, there's a chance.
- [Linus] So, there is your power supply.
Got a 500 watt EVGA something or other.
Oh, I found another piece of the graphics card.
- [Colin] Ooh, are those cables?
- [Linus] There's the display port and HDMI ports
from the inside.
Here's the mount for the water cooler.
So, this would go kind of here-ish.
Huh? - Yeah.
- [Linus] There you go.
Found his hard drive.
- Hey. - Got some, got some data.
- [Colin] I bet you, if you sent that to DriveSavers
they'd pull the data off it.
- [Linus] I bet if I sent it to DriveSavers,
they'd tell me to go F myself.
No, those platters are dead.
They're dead, Jim.
Okay, I'm gonna install the hard drive
in the front bay there. (hard drive rattling)
Hold on, I gotta, look the graphics card
is one of the most important parts
of the gaming computer.
- CPU. - Need a support brace for it.
It got a little bent in shipping.
- [Colin] There, yeah.
- [Linus] Okay.
- [Colin] Mint!
- Basically good as new.
Of course, even now this could be
any random burned computer.
In fact, Spencer here could have just gone to a pawn shop,
gotten a computer, and put it inside a dumpster fire.
So, what we need to see is if this is
in fact the same computer.
So, let's have a look here.
This is the original post on Reddit.
Oh yeah, there's our HDMI cable.
Here's our IO plate.
That does in fact appear to be the same IO plate.
Oh wow, it looks like the graphics card disintegrated
a little bit more on the way over here.
But, so far this checks out.
The goal here wasn't to go
all completely balls to the wall crazy,
it was to build something reasonable and comparable
to what Spencer lost in the blaze,
a sort of PCMR insurance.
So, we've gone with an ASUS Prime B450-Plus motherboard
and a perfect one-to-one replacement
of Spencer's old CPU, a 3600X.
Now, what happened to our 3600X from the shipment, Colin?
Did you catch where that? - Oh, where'd it end up?
I put it back. - Oh, did you install
it in the socket? - Yeah.
- Oh, that's wonderful.
Oh, beautiful.
Okay, got a small improvement.
We're gonna go from this to this.
Oh, getting dust all over my motherboard.
I guess I need a M.2
So, for a drive, we went with a 970 EVO Plus,
this is a two terabyte drive.
Wow, did Spencer have a two terabyte drive?
- [Colin] Sure did.
- Spencer, you baller.
Now you've got a new two terabyte drive.
Let's go ahead and get that bad boy installed.
Whoop, now it's time for cooling.
Now, we could have gone with a regular NH-U12,
but come on, this is LTT PC.
We gotta do the LTT edition.
Man, I am excited.
I'd love to see the look on Spencer's face,
but thanks to a little problem in the world called COVID,
I won't get too.
Fortunately we've actually arranged
for one of our YouTuber colleagues,
I guess you call him a colleague,
I don't know, whatever, compatriots?
Craft Computing to drop off the PC.
As it turns out, he lives like just up the road from Spencer
and had actually reached out first
to offer to build a computer.
But, then he was like, yo, Spencer, take the LTT computer
and I'll tell you what, I'll make sure it's any good
before I pass it along to you.
And I was like, Hey, you know, that's great.
Last thing we want to do
is accidentally ship Spencer a lemon
'cause it got busted in the mail or whatever.
Poor Spencer, then he wouldn't have his old busted computer
and you'd have a new busted computer, that sucks.
That's funny.
I didn't even recognize Noctua's mounting system
without a Noctua cooler on it.
Should we reuse his original mounting hardware?
I think it might still be good.
Just to have one little piece of his old computer in there.
You know what, let's do it.
Let's use the fire treated brackets.
I think this is the right move.
And you know what?
It actually even kind of matches the color scheme
of this board.
Like with these gray accents that it has on it.
We've got some Patriot Viper.
What is this?
3200 megahertz CL16.
So, this is a really good pairing
for that 3600X that he's got in there.
Looking good.
Unfortunately for Spencer,
we didn't have exactly the same case kicking around.
So, we grabbed this tempered glass side panel,
one from Gigabyte, it's fine.
Everything's going smoothly so far.
This is kind of a cheaper case
and just uses like punch out PCI covers.
So, we went and grabbed some
that we had lying around, all matching ones.
We'll throw those in
so the case comes together a little nicer.
We're also gonna grab some extra fans.
Just a pair of 140 millimeters for the front here.
There's not a ton of room for intake,
but with those drawing air across the motherboard
and graphics card, not too worried about it.
And then we can go ahead and pop our motherboard in now.
Sweet!
For power supply, we went with an RM650x.
It's not quite the exact same model that Spencer had before,
but it's pretty darn comparable,
80 Plus Gold, modular interface.
Apologies in advance Craft Computing,
this is not gonna be the most amazing cable management ever.
We got ourselves an Aorus RTX 2070 Super.
Oh wait, no we didn't, 2080 Super.
Hey!
I've got a nice little upgrade for Spencer there.
We woulda loved to do 3000 series,
but the reality of it is,
we have as much difficulty getting them right now as anyone.
So, the ones that we have, we need for benchmarking.
Sorry Spencer, you're just getting a small upgrade.
Just needed a BIOS update for support for 3rd Gen Ryzen.
And now, we are, wait, what?
- [Colin] You just shut it down.
- Oh, and I hit the button.
Now, Spencer didn't have a 4K monitor
and the one we're replacing it with isn't 4K either,
but I figured, hey,
we wanna make sure we're stress testing this thing
before it gets to him so he's gonna be getting
that LG UltraGear monitor, but we're actually running
at 4K Ultra Nightmare in Doom Eternal,
sitting at a casual 250 to 300 frames per second.
I think it's pretty fair to say the machine is working fine,
just fine and is ready to make its way down
to our neighbors in the South.
Very reasonable noise levels
and actually, considering how quickly I put this together,
I think pretty decent cable management.
Adequate? - Yeah.
- All right, thanks David.
That's what I was going for.
Yeah, so this is not the best deal
I've ever made trading one of these for one of these,
but I think it worked out all right for Spencer
And if you guys wanna see the look on his face
when he gets his new gaming rig,
go check out Craft Computing.
We're gonna have them linked in the video description.
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If you guys enjoyed this PC
because you're into that kind of horrifying techagore,
I actually don't know if we've ever done anything like this.
I don't know, sure, go check out ROG Rig Reboot.
We'll throw one of the episodes in there
where I build a PC actually with the intended recipient.
I would love to bring Spencer up here, but like COVID.