This here is another viewer's broken gaming pc and this one is rather modern we're talking like ryzen
5 3600 circa somewhere around there we'll check it out in more detail in a second i do know that
this graphics card is an rtx 2060 asus strix model very nice and the viewer suspects that this card
is to blame for the computer not sending a picture out yeah in 2021 that is um
that's a big ol it's a bit of backstory this system was working just fine a few weeks ago the
owner bought a wi-fi card that connects directly into one of the pci slots on the motherboard
uh he turned the system off connected that card powered it back on everything was working just
fine except for the card itself the wi-fi card apparently needed drivers or something so he
went to the manufacturer's website decided that looked a little too sketchy i think this was like
a knock-off wi-fi card and the website just yeah it just it didn't really sit right with him and
look at your system you're the probably the best judge of character there if you think it looks
too sketchy that's fine he towered the system back off and just removed the card i think he
was going to return it and he was going to stick with the usb wi-fi dongle he was using previously
well after doing that for powering the system off pulling out that wi-fi card and then powering a
system back on suddenly no picture out what's up with that so he thinks it's possible that during
this process he bricked his graphics card that that would really suck and i'm not even sure
really how that could have happened if all you were doing was inserting and removing a wi-fi card
and if you were doing it correctly look this isn't rocket science just make sure your system's off
when you're swapping these things in and out um it shouldn't really impact graphics
card integrity at all so we're going to have to really dive into this one the first thing
i think i want to do and i don't usually do this but i think what i want to do right away
is take this card out and put it into my system if i can get picture out through this card in my rig
then we know it's not a graphics card problem but of course before that we need to plug the system
in and see if we can replicate the symptom he's describing here this one's gonna be interesting
and i'm not entirely sure i'm gonna have a fixed form if it ends up being the graphics card because
i don't have too many of those manufacturers don't like sending cards to youtubers who refuse to make
reviews of their cards um yeah i'm just i'm not making videos like that if the card in question
isn't being sold at msrp pretty much anywhere or it's not even being sold at all it's out of stock
at launch which makes no sense why would you launch a car that's not even in stock
at launch um they just don't like sending cards for for for that and i understand right i mean
it's their choice at the end of the day they can choose who they want to send review kits to
but they want reviews and i refuse to make reviews of cards nobody can buy so that's my stance and as
a result i don't have many cards like at all but we might be able to make an exception here if it
ends up you know being that this card is bricked so we'll see we need to investigate stay with me
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day and you can get started for free by clicking that link below for those who are new to the fixer
flop playlist what we do here is attempt to fix viewer systems in and around the orlando florida
area for free we don't charge any of these viewers anything to at least take a look at their systems
and see what is wrong when it comes to hardware it's pretty much black and white nothing i do here
is very difficult there's something special about it you don't need a college degree heck you don't
need a high school diploma i know kids who can do the exact same thing i'm doing in this playlist so
there's nothing special about me or the situation that i'm in apart from the fact that i can take
videos like these monetize them put pre-rolls in them product placements youtube adsense all of
that that's how i make my money here which is why i don't offload any of that cost to the viewer it
just feels wrong to charge a viewer when he or she is already being gracious enough to loan me
the system with which i'll make the video i only asked two things of viewers who loan their systems
the first is that they be patient because sometimes this takes five or six days i have to
wait for parts to get here if i don't have them on hand and uh yeah there's nothing really i can do
there i have to wait for shipping the other thing i ask is that they don't set their expectations
too high i don't make any promises about upgrading hardware although we have done that in the past
i also don't make any promises about actually being able to fix the system at hand hence why the
playlist is called fix or flop most of the time if it's hardware related we can narrow it down
and get it fixed but um yeah i'm i'm not gonna make any any promises i've seen a lot and there's
a lot that could go wrong at this point we've had dozens of viewer pcs make their way into the
studio whether it be for the fix or flop series or the pcdc series and i can't say i've seen too many
that look cleaner than this cable management has been taken care of the the hardware is actually
very complimentary the graphics card and the cpu as far as i'm aware those are very balanced you
can tell the viewer really knew what he was doing when he was assembling this and judging from the
age of the hardware i'd say the system is no older than maybe one to two years that said this
build is virtually useless one giant paperweight without a picture out and that's what we're going
to attempt to diagnose here we're going to plug this into my portable monitor first attempt to
replicate the issue described by the viewer and if we do in fact get no picture out from the graphics
card i think the first thing i'm going to do in this case is swap this graphics card out with my
personal graphics card i'm gonna actually see if this card runs in my in my own rig and if it does
then we've ruled out one of the potentially more catastrophic hardware failures in this build again
nobody wants to hear that the graphics card has died in 2021 it's like talk about bad timing now
as i've said before it is always important to test drive the build when a viewer describes something
going wrong you need to make sure that what you see in person is the same thing they're describing
if that is not the case then it's possible something else might have happened either in
shipping or transport and you don't want to deal with that can of forms especially as a business
so i'm going to connect power here and we're going to flip the switch at the rear and let's see
let's see what we get
everything everything sounds fine everything looks fine
but we're not getting picture out i saw that the graphics card fans were spinning
they're not spinning now that they have the zero zero rpm function that's perfectly normal leds are
all lit up fans are all spinning elsewhere in the build but yeah we're not getting a picture
this this could be pretty bad a few moments later who would have thought look at that we have a post
and i know you didn't see what just happened between clips because it literally took seconds
to do and i was just going to run through this as a precautionary measure i cleared the cmos that's
really all i did i just cleared the cmos there's no dedicated clear cmos button on this motherboard
this is an x570 board but you have to jump the two pins uh jbhat1jb81 for those interested
but this here is a post and all we needed to do to get this system to post was clear that cmos
there's actually a debug led little section at the top right of this board and i noticed as we were
power cycling there was no led lit up at all for anything the cpu the ram vga none of that was lit
up the system looked like it was booting looked like it was trying to post we just had no picture
out the leds on the graphics card especially the one above the eight pin uh supplemental pci power
connector that was lit up that tells me that the cards receiving power appropriately the fans were
spinning everything told me that this build should be working and i noticed that right off the bat
the only issue was we weren't getting a picture out i was maybe concerned that it might have been
like an hdmi port issue that's very rare but still you know if you're connecting and disconnecting
cables all the time i'm sure you could probably screw something up in the long run if you're
not careful but uh yeah clear the seamless there you go you know i get some hate in the comments
section every now every now and then it's not bad there's just a few people everyone who complain
about my troubleshooting process why are you bothering to clear the cmos you should have
jumped straight to the power supply you should have known that was a power supply issue relax
my friends this is just a i just run through this just as a quick little checklist because it takes
literally seconds you're trading seconds for peace of mind because you never know it might come down
to just something as simple as clearing the cmos folks that that could be it i've seen it happen
so many times and not just in this case here where you're not getting picture out sometimes
the build will just flicker on and off and you'll think okay well that's probably a power supply
issue why are you not just going straight to the power supply why are you checking ram why are you
clearing the cmos because they take seconds to do and you want to roll out those simple fixes first
because you're going to really shoot yourself in the foot if you run through a bunch of different
hardware swaps only to find out that clearing the cmos was all you needed to do to remedy the issue
now at this point mission accomplished right we got a post we fixed the issue that's the
point of the fix or flop playlist we could just give this back to the viewer and call it a day
but i want to take just a few more minutes to further investigate what exactly was causing the
no picture issue i have a feeling that if it's happened to this viewer it could happen to some
of you so i've got my own wi-fi card here we're going to connect this to this viewer's build and
attempt to replicate the no picture issue we saw earlier in this video i have a good feeling that
since all we did essentially by resetting the cmos was reset bios settings there was
some setting enabled in the bios by default when he connected his wifi card and when he
removed it that setting remained the same and that possibly prevented his card from functioning the
way that it should not that running on something like eight lanes would prevent picture out you
could run a 2060 on eight lanes no problem that maybe there was some setting that was turned on
when this was connected i'm going to see if we can notice the difference here in the bios we're going
to check first since everything's vanilla kind of run through make sure it's all good to go should
all be set to auto more or less then we'll connect this and see if anything in the bios changed now
admittedly this wi-fi card here is not a sketchy one this is a tp-link card and these are actually
very good i use these all the time for my builds just want to connect to the internet very quickly
not deal with ethernet drivers or anything like that usually this is plug and play but the point
should still get across no problem if we connect this i imagine it'll do the same thing to the
board that his sketchier wi-fi cord did so this here is the bios again we're going to run through
and just make sure that things are all vanilla we'll check settings i'm assuming all this is
going to be set to auto let's see cpci subsystems pcie link configuration x16 auto auto auto
we can check the overclock tab here let's see so everything is set to auto so with that confirmed
all i'm going to do now is power the system back off and connect this wi-fi card and i'm not sure
which pcie slot he connected this to we'll try a few of them i think i'm going to start with the
second lowest uh smaller probably it's like a four-lane slot we'll see if that does the trick
i looked up this motherboard's manual online and confirmed that every pcie slot with the exception
of the very top 16 lane slot is controlled by the pch so when he inserted his wi-fi card into one of
these more than likely that might have changed one of the default configurations with this 16
lane slot up top and this is the slot where his graphics card is connected so we're going to try
the second lowest single lane slot we're going to connect our wi-fi card route the antennae through
and it's literally as simple as that right there we won't bother screwing
it in we're going to remove it in a second anyway and back in the bios again you can
see pcie subsystem settings have not changed we're still at 16 lanes with that uppermost
full full-length pcie slot these other two are set to auto these control the pcie generation
this is an x570 board so it does support gen 4 and even though our rtx 2060 can't take advantage
necessarily the additional bandwidth uh the cpu and the motherboard both support it so that's why
when we check on this other page you can see that this slot which is populated with our card
is default set to gen 4. so that's confirmed full 16 lanes we can also swing our mouse a bit over
here to the left which is actually further down the motherboard and you can see that
it says unknown vendor other network controller running it one x or x1 but that's just a single
lane there so this is our network card it is detected it is functioning now let's power off
and remove the wi-fi card and that's the result we weren't looking for despite this being the end
goal so let's try a few more things well i've tried pretty much everything i can think of to
screw this up and i can't the system continues to post which is a good thing now at least clearing
the scene will fix that but i can't i can't seem to figure out what exactly this viewer did it may
have just come down to the type of wi-fi card he had and if it was a very sketchy one maybe it was
unbranded or something similar to that uh then that could have been the issue although that's
very that's very strange i've never run into that before there are a few other things that i have
noted though that i think you should know about as well just in case you're wondering why things work
the way they do so i've never run into this issue before with any other motherboard i've ever worked
with that i can think of if you click the delete key at just the right time when trying to get
into your bios right as the system is attempting to post you'll just end up with a black screen
an example here see it's all connected plugged right into the hdmi port at the back of the 2060
here we got nothing this looks awfully similar to what we started with right and it's just
because i happen to time the pressing of the delete key improperly that should never happen
another slightly more obvious case for a black screen is in the event that you're in your bios
and for whatever reason you decide to switch display ports not just display port like dp
but also hdmi could be anything we were in one hdmi port and now we're in the other and
you can see we now have a black screen no signal that's weird isn't it but it's because i believe
the graphics card drivers haven't kicked in yet so it's not like you could run multi displays right
you're only getting one display out in a post screen in your bios because the drivers haven't
initialized for this graphics card and if you switch that connection to another you know another
display out connector like hdmi or if you switch to displayport or whatever without restarting the
system if all you're trying to do is get into your bios you get a black screen like this so that's
um that's another one just in case you weren't aware funny thing is if you remove that connection
and slide the cable back into the original hdmi port you can see we have a picture again
so that's kind of cool and to further drive this point home once windows has been loaded into
through the boot drive you can see that when we switch hdmi ports now we should
still get a picture and see that's because the graphics drivers have already initialized the
system hasn't loaded graphics drivers when it's just in the bios because it hasn't booted into
the boot drive that has those files in it so that's why this works here and it doesn't work
in the bios but all that said you really shouldn't have a system adding a wi-fi card like this one
into a build especially if your your motherboard doesn't have built-in wi-fi one of these can
come in very handy if you don't have access to a hardwired ethernet connection so don't
be afraid of using one of these especially from a name brand like tp-link there are plenty of
asus ones and others that are also really good but yeah don't let this single event here scare
you away from these they're actually a really good solution if you need wireless connectivity so this
is about the point where i would start talking about the long and arduous process we had to go
through to get the system working again when in reality all you had to do was clear cmos now it
wasn't as easy as just clicking a button with this particular board you do have to physically jump
two pins that requires some piece of metal i would recommend using just your phillips head
screwdriver if you have one but uh yeah i mean it was very very minimal effort and i'm not gonna try
to like sugarcoat it and make it seem like i did more than i did in this video it literally took
five seconds and for those who again keep saying why are you clearing your cmos it's obviously this
it's obviously that if you see a comment like that in the future just link them this video okay just
the proof is in the pudding sometimes it is as simple as clearing your cmos if you are not
getting a picture out and you were five seconds earlier the first thing you should do in 99
of cases is clear your cmos it takes two seconds and it just removes that doubt from your mind that
it could be something that simple because you're really going to be banging your head against the
wall once you find out after swapping tons of hardware that all you had to do was hold
a phillips head screwdriver against two pins for about 10 or 15 seconds smaller at the side i'm
really glad we didn't have to swap anything out in this build the graphics skirt appears to be in
really good shape in fact the entire build for that matter looks to be in great shape
at this point i would usually start focusing on cable managing i try to clean these builds up a
bit before i return them to their rightful owners but this build is is pretty much already good to
go i mean there's a few questionable choices but all in all i mean he did a really good job with
the build and i don't see any immediate needs here so yeah i just sent the viewer an email
telling him that good news his graphics card is not dead his system is actually fully functional
and uh he'll be able to pick it up in a few days now if you enjoy this video despite it not being
anywhere near as long as some of our other fictional videos and that's because this only
took like 10 seconds to fix and look it's all out there i'm not trying to hide anything or act like
it's more intense than it needs to be sometimes the solution is as simple as clearing your cmos
i would appreciate you clicking that thumbs up button that goes a long way thank you very much
for that support also just watching this far into the video really does help and if you are
not subscribed what the heck are you doing get subscribed i'll give you a few seconds
how you doing you subscribed yet and i'll catch you in the next one by the way i'm
looking at buying a van yeah that's a thing i'm looking at buying a work van that i can use to
travel around the country fixing viewer systems for free i think that would be a really cool
like fixer flop on tour style series we'll probably just incorporate it into this playlist
here it'll just be season two or whatever but with a different premise obviously we're going to you
we're driving to your area uh so that we can fix your systems in our van i don't know how well
or how not well that's gonna go but um worth a shot and i think you guys will enjoy it either way
my my only real issue is just trying to source enough components or like
i'll have to pack a lot of components just in case things need to be swapped
out etc and when i'm on the road for weeks at a time i'm gonna have to get extra parts sent to me
in my van which is not stationary so i'm not sure how that's gonna work either might have to reach
out to some friends in the area i happen to be in at the time to see if i can get a hold of those
components and then otherwise i'm up to just stuff the van with a bunch of stuff that i might need
when i'm troubleshooting swapping things out replacing things and the like i don't know
how that's going to go i'm still working it out but i am in early talks i'm looking at some vans
and i'm gonna need a van that's big enough to have like a desk in it and um we'll be able to
mount some smaller cameras and things i'd like to be able to sleep in it too that'd be pretty
cool i would have to buy you know hotel rooms everywhere i go you know anyway it's just just
the thought for now we're trying to work out some numbers seeing if it's viable i think it will be
at the end of the day it's a flop and i guess that fits with the playlist as well anyway thanks
for watching i will catch you in the next one my name is greg thanks for troubleshooting with me