A Chaotic Experiment: A Fixing of a Faulty Graphics Card

I apologize in advance for the chaotic nature of this experiment, but I'll do my best to walk you through the process. I'm going to show you just the corner of the screen here, so if we get a post, you'll notice something over here. I'm going to connect the HDMI cable to the card again and this time, we're going to mess with that hard drive LED pin set. So, power on, I'm going to try powering on with the case power button. All righty, so far, so good.

All right, so uh, that looks good now. Now, I'm going to connect the HDMI cable to the card again and this time, we're going to mess with that hard drive LED pin set. So, power on, I'm going to try powering on with the case power button. All righty, so far so good. That's not to blame, okay. So, then what is? You know, I've got to say, I've been tinkering with this off-camera for about 15-20 minutes or so and uh, I've swapped his card back in. I've rewired everything, I only had a few things disconnected - front panel obviously, to start. I had the USB 3.0 cable disconnected because it was in the way, and same goes for an RGB cable. But everything is literally back to the way it was. We've come full circle.

And now, the rig powers on consistently. The power supply checks out in our tester, no issues here at all. Looking very healthy, we know for certain that the card works in our makeshift test bench repeatedly. It powers on without issue and we prove that other graphics cards work just fine in here, including ones that rely on supplemental power similar to the config we have with the original card.

I really don't know what to do it, it it fires up instantly now every single time. I've tried it including off-camera, which has been about half a dozen times or so, it loads into Windows every single time other than the dust. I don't know what else I can fix here if Geek Squad was seeing the exact same thing I am here, I would have returned it exactly the same way. Minus the scratches obviously, but there's nothing really for me to do here. There's nothing really to fix here as far as I can tell.

I can't replicate the issue because I'm not even sure what I did to fix the issue. I just remove the card and put it back in essentially, and now everything's hunky dory. It still turns on, this is this is it, this is all I can do. Uh, always try my best in these episodes to kind of give you a takeaway something like "oh, you know, don't miswire your front IO or don't let this cable short here or always check to make sure your graphics cards installed correctly, etc., etc." Can't give you anything like that here because I still don't know what I did to fix it.

He did mention in his original listing that the original problem was that the system would power on intermittently sometimes. He would push the power button and get no reaction at all, and sometimes it would turn on and quickly turn back off, and other times it would load into Windows perfectly fine. Trying my best to get it to falter, it will not at this point. All I can think of was there was a short somewhere, some cable was being snagged, not plugged in all the way again maybe those fans and the graphics card, those cables were getting snagged more specifically. Uh, maybe front panel just was kind of hanging halfway out and I just couldn't tell because everything is so tight in there.

That's really the best I can offer at this point, but hey, at least it works again. I mean we tested everything that is is you know relevant to the system not powering, at least from what we could see out of the case, the graphics card, the power supply looks good, wiring looks good, I got nothing else. Becoming repetitious at this point because I just I'm kind of still in shock that it's working but it is what it is.

Technical Fix

Technically, it seems like the fix was simply to swap the card back in and rewire everything, while also messing with the hard drive LED pin set. The exact reason behind the initial issue is still unclear, as the tester doesn't reveal any obvious problems. However, the experiment did demonstrate that other graphics cards work just fine in this setup, including those relying on supplemental power.

A Future Conclusion?

One takeaway from this experiment could be the importance of ensuring proper connections and avoiding physical obstructions within the system case. While the issue has been resolved, it highlights the potential for internal components to become compromised or damaged due to external factors. The author stresses the need for regular testing and maintenance to prevent such issues in the future.

However, without further investigation, it remains unclear what caused the initial problem with this specific graphics card. As a result, it is impossible to pinpoint an exact cause for the fix. Nevertheless, the experiment serves as a reminder of the importance of troubleshooting and addressing potential hardware issues before they become major problems.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enwill not boot reliably sometimes it just bumbles to life other times it spins fans for a bit and dies have to shut off at the power supply to try again took it to Geek Squad and they did nothing almost 500 bucks on the ticket my friend has the service package so it was $150 and they claimed to have cleaned it that was a lie it was still Dusty inside they claimed to have fixed windows which I also must assume was a lie since the only thing they seem to have done was install a bunch of bloatware and the Norton virus Norton virus they claimed to have fixed the issue which was definitely a lie since it wouldn't boot at all when I got it back from them I reced the ram CPU and GPU and it returned to failing to boot randomly all they did was install crap and scratch up my case obviously I need help please this year is that viewers broken gaming PC I'm going to have to do a fixer Flop episode on this camera so it sounds as though this rig has been through a heck of a lot it's still quite dir dirty which apparently Geek Squad was supposed to fix for them that doesn't look to be the case at all and it's arguably in worse shape now than it was before Geek Squad got their hands on it because it was at least intermittently powering on and posting and loading into windows before whereas when the owner got it back again according to him the rig was not powering on at all and only after he started kind of unplugging things and reconnecting them did he finally get some sign of life back from it my goal is just to get this thing back up and running I'm going to try my best intermittent issues can be difficult to diagnose to troubleshoot to narrow down to to to remedy but said we're going to try I hope it's not a flop but if it is hopefully you'll be here for the ride are you ready stay with me thermal Grizzly cryos sheets are excellent substitutes for traditional thermal paste thanks to their graphing construction and extremely high thermal conductivity making them more effective than traditional carbonaut thermal pads they're super easy to install never dry out and can be purchased in various sizes ranging from 24x 12 mm all the way up to 50x 50 in theory you never have to change one of the making them peace of mind for servers gaming PCs and even high-end workstations and best of all no mess just keep in mind that these are electrically conductive so be sure to use them as directed check out thermal Grizzly's cryo sheets via the links below for your CPU or GPU today hey there my name is Greg and welcome to fixer flop in this playlist we attempt to fix viewer systems in and around the Orlando Florida area for free so we charge nothing at all for the service just you know troubleshooting itself we also do not charge for replacement hardware and that thanks in large part to your viewership we make money on the back end here by uploading these videos to sites like YouTube and your viewership is uh is what allows us to continue doing that so if we weren't making money there's no way we could offer this as a free service we're not doing this necessarily to the kindness of our own Hearts um some of you seem to think that we do and while that is flattering I have to be just brutally honest I mean the only way we're able to do this is because of YouTube because of our brand partners and all of that is essentially propped up by your viewership so again thank you so much for that I do want to go over briefly the specs in case you are curious so it looks like this rig is running a ryzen 7 7800x 3D which is an excellent gaming CPU an MSI b650 I Edge it's got a big old noctu cooler in there of course their Vengeance DDR 5 32 gigs in total and an MSI 380 TI one thing I noticed right away he's got rubber bands kind of just holding these two fans against the heat sink here for the CPU Cooler and while it does look a bit sketchy they actually interfere at all with the fan spinning so that's a good thing if I had some of the little wireframe mounts to get these you know actually fastened correctly I would give them to them I just don't have any I I don't save stuff like that uh but I just wanted to point that out right away because I'm sure some of you are wondering what the heck these are they're actually pretty functional the other thing you'll notice is how dusty this system is which apparently was supposed to be fixed by Geek Squad it very clearly has it it doesn't look like they've even take like a can of air to this thing it is just caked in all the right places and uh so maybe we can do something about that assuming we can get the system back up and running again in this video we're going to try for a post although it sounds like we likely won't get one but it's important that we have this starting point right so I don't know if you just saw that there's a truck that just drove by outside so it was a little loud the system powered on for about a split second and then turned right back off again uh that's that's an odd one but I'm I'm actually from a troubleshooter perspective I'm really happy that it's doing this this is repeatable so far reliable and means that we have something to actually hone in on because if it just powered up and loaded into Windows I mean what can I really fix yeah now it's not powering on at all this is pretty wild oh uh First Impressions power supply I'm definitely going to focus on that uh Second thing is going to be wiring make sure that all of our cables are connected where they should be and uh we can go from there first order business I'm going to confirm that cables are run where they should be that everything's connected properly especially around the front I/O area I've seen some really weird things when that's miswired now to make getting to the front IO a bit easier I'm going to remove the graphics card it's a bit crammed in here it's a small ITX build uh but while we do this we can also take the time to rule out the graphics card as a potential failure Point by powering the system on without it in there if I can find the there's like a jeez everything is just wedged back here 12 seconds later and uh yeah so if the system still gives us the same symptoms that we saw earlier then we know that the graphics card is not to blame you can see you had to Fashion this like aftermarket cooler assembly to the uh underside of this graphics card to make it fit in the fractal case that he's using this board conveniently or rather inconveniently has its jfp1 front panel header just above the 16 Lane PCI slot here off to the bottom left which is usually where you'll find your HD audio that's this connector here so looks like as it was it was actually where it should have been and it looks like this cable is actually an extension you can see the reset switch on the left which runs into the header is connected to the correct cable running from the case same for power switch and same for power LED try powering on again here uh effectively bypassing the power switch just in case but I think we are probably a here so right there those two pins look like it's powered on now it's running for a bit longer than it was before as well well this is weird hopefully it wasn't the graphics card um we could try putting that back in and then manually jumping front panel again now remember the CPU in here is a ryzen 77800 x 3D that definitely has integrated graphics and uh I want to see if we can get picture out from that chip with our monitor connected so we're going to try uh powering on again there we go so also give us a chance to see if we can you know repeat the power on cycle without it failing on us to the second or third time and would you look at that it's seems to want to post there it is all right and it's loading into Windows 11 I'm a bit worried at this point I know this seems a bit out there but I've actually got a hold of a proper gt1030 this time around for fixer flop troubleshooting and we're going to throw this in place of that 3080 I think it's a 3080 TI that's in his R currently and if we can get picture out through this but not through his card then it looks like his card might be cooked fun fact about this card I actually got it from Freddy of the tavarish YouTube channel I'm sure many of you are familiar with his work he's currently rebuilding that flooded McLaren P1 he had an older system that had this 1030 just laying in it and I said you know what this would make for a pretty sweet troubleshooting C and in an unfortunate turn of events it looks like the system now works with that tiny little 1030 in there which tells me that uh it's probably it's probably this bad boy right here now we can't say still for certain that it is the card and not these because uh notably the 1030 doesn't need supplemental PCI power cables who would have thought so we still have one more thing to narrow down will this graphics card work in a totally separate known working system I've got to just kind of assembled here makeshift on the side we're going to power it on at the rear really hoping that this works that would mean we likely have an issue with the original power supply would you look at that it does at least power on so that's a good start I'm just hoping for some sort of post come on give me something oh there it is it was power cycling a few times it was just training memory it's a new stick that I don't usually use here but uh that's it that's a post the card seems fine nothing like crazy hot on the card either nothing I would deem uh concerning at least right out of the gate so that's good I guess now we turn our attention to the power supply and in particular those supplemental eight pins this might seem a bit Reckless on the surface but I've got this GTX 1074 the wind here has been sitting in a box for a good while it has two supplemental eight pins just like our 3080 TI over there and I want to see if we can replicate the issue I'm not as concerned about losing this card since it's older it's a lot cheaper now but uh if we can get the system to either not power on or power on for a split second and then turn back off then I'm going to take the power supply out and run it through my tester so in she goes again it's all a bit tight in here but I like compact builds I don't blame the owner for wanting something like this all righty installed and then we'll get these two eight pins connected got a lot of stuff on this table already so I'm just going to slide things carefully this way pull the power cable from that power supply move it over here this is the stuff you guys normally don't see on camera since it's just messy all around HDMI cable coming with me over here where's the HDMI port there it is is all right so uh here we go make sure that card's slotted in all the way and Power on back here power on up front now if this does work I'm not really going to know what to do all right here we go whoa all right it's time to take a step back here let's walk through what we've already done we've proven that the original card Works in a different system that is not to blame we've proven that a separate know working card works in the original system that is not to blame we have not yet verified that the power supply is a okay at least according to our tester so that's going to be the first thing we do uh up next has a string hanging in front of the lens but then after that assuming that that power supply is okay and I imagine it is maybe front panel because we sort of just ruled it out we just disconnected it and I've been jumping ever since there was one loose cable though and I think it was the hard drive LED cable that was still wired technically to the board even though it's not you know that circuit is not closed because it's not connected to front paneling that that case doesn't have a hard drive LED it could still possibly be shorting on say the motherboard or maybe the graphics card back plate something to look into maybe we can replicate the issue by just I don't know manipulating that I'm talking about this cable right here for hard drive LED now the entire connector is not a factor now it's not connected to the board there's nothing sending power over this from the case side so it's kind of just chilling here you know we could short this against the uh you know back plate nothing nothing's going to happen there but when it was connected when when this was connected to the motherboard this one went unconnected because again the case doesn't support a hard drive LED but if we just shorted it like so for example it's possible that the motherboard sees that and thinks well that that's not good power's going where it shouldn't let's shut off so I'm I'm curious I actually want to try this first before testing the power let's see if we can replicate it all right so now this is going to be a pretty chaotic shot I do apologize in advance I'm going to show you just the corner of the screen here so if we do get a post you'll notice something over here I'm going to connect the HDMI cable to the card again and this time we're going to mess with that hard drive LED pin set so power on I'm going to try powering on with the case power button all righty so far so good all right so uh that looks good now now I'm I'm this is gon to be really cringey I'm GNA do it let's see nope nothing okay I thought it would do something but it's not so that's not to blame okay so then what is you know I've got to say I've been tinkering with this off camera for about 15 20 minutes or so and uh I've swapped his card back in I've rewired everything I only had a few things disconnected front panel obviously to start I had the USB 3.0 cable disconnected because it was in the way uh and same goes for an RGB cable but everything is literally back to the way it was we've come full circle and now the rig powers on consistently the power supply checks out in our tester no issues here at all looking very healthy we know for certain the card Works in our makeshift test bench repeatedly it powers on without issue and we prove that other graphics cards work just fine in here including ones that rely on supplemental power similar to the config we have with the original card I I I really don't know what to do it it fires up instantly now every single time I've tried it including off camera which has been about half a dozen times or so it loads into Windows every single time other than the dust I don't know what else I can fix here if Geek Squad was seeing the exact same thing I am here I would would have returned it exactly the same way I mean minus the scratches obviously but there's nothing really for me to do here I can't fix what I can't see and there's nothing really to fix here as far as I can tell I can't replicate the issue because I I'm not even sure what I did to fix the issue I just remove the card and put it back in essentially and now everything's hunky dory it still turns on this is this is it this is all I can do uh I always try my best in these episodes to kind of give you a takeaway something like oh you know don't miswire your front IO or don't let this cable short here or always check to make sure your graphics cards installed correctly etc etc I can't give you anything like that here because I still don't know what I did to fix it now again he did mention in his original listing that the original problem was that the system would power on intermittently sometimes he would push the power button he' get no reaction at all and sometimes it would turn on and quickly turn back off and other times it would load into Windows perfectly fine I'm trying my best to get it to falter and it will not at this point all I can think of was there was a short somewhere some cable was being snagged not plugged in all the way again maybe those fans and the graphics card those cables were getting snagged more specifically uh maybe front panel just was kind of hanging halfway out and I just couldn't tell because everything again is so tight in there that's really the best I can offer at this point but hey at least it works again I I mean we tested everything that is is you know relevant to the system not powering at least from what we could see out of the case the graphics card the power supply looks good wiring looks good I got nothing else I'm becoming repetitious at this point because I just I'm kind of still in shock that it's working but it is what it is thank you so much for watching and again I'm very sorry for the ending of this one I suppose it's still a fix technically even though I don't know how we fixed it but it is a flop in the sense that there's there's nothing really to take away from this one maybe just reating components checking that your cables are wired correctly and not being smooshed and chopped off by other things around your rig um that's the the one thing I would stress here but uh other than that going clean this thing up have her back to her owner in no time if you guys enjoyed this one give it a thumbs up consider subscribing that's that red button if you haven't already turn that Bell on so that you get notifications when videos like these go live and leave a comment down below let me know what you thought about this one and what you're looking forward to seeing next on the channel my name is Greg thanks for learning with mewill not boot reliably sometimes it just bumbles to life other times it spins fans for a bit and dies have to shut off at the power supply to try again took it to Geek Squad and they did nothing almost 500 bucks on the ticket my friend has the service package so it was $150 and they claimed to have cleaned it that was a lie it was still Dusty inside they claimed to have fixed windows which I also must assume was a lie since the only thing they seem to have done was install a bunch of bloatware and the Norton virus Norton virus they claimed to have fixed the issue which was definitely a lie since it wouldn't boot at all when I got it back from them I reced the ram CPU and GPU and it returned to failing to boot randomly all they did was install crap and scratch up my case obviously I need help please this year is that viewers broken gaming PC I'm going to have to do a fixer Flop episode on this camera so it sounds as though this rig has been through a heck of a lot it's still quite dir dirty which apparently Geek Squad was supposed to fix for them that doesn't look to be the case at all and it's arguably in worse shape now than it was before Geek Squad got their hands on it because it was at least intermittently powering on and posting and loading into windows before whereas when the owner got it back again according to him the rig was not powering on at all and only after he started kind of unplugging things and reconnecting them did he finally get some sign of life back from it my goal is just to get this thing back up and running I'm going to try my best intermittent issues can be difficult to diagnose to troubleshoot to narrow down to to to remedy but said we're going to try I hope it's not a flop but if it is hopefully you'll be here for the ride are you ready stay with me thermal Grizzly cryos sheets are excellent substitutes for traditional thermal paste thanks to their graphing construction and extremely high thermal conductivity making them more effective than traditional carbonaut thermal pads they're super easy to install never dry out and can be purchased in various sizes ranging from 24x 12 mm all the way up to 50x 50 in theory you never have to change one of the making them peace of mind for servers gaming PCs and even high-end workstations and best of all no mess just keep in mind that these are electrically conductive so be sure to use them as directed check out thermal Grizzly's cryo sheets via the links below for your CPU or GPU today hey there my name is Greg and welcome to fixer flop in this playlist we attempt to fix viewer systems in and around the Orlando Florida area for free so we charge nothing at all for the service just you know troubleshooting itself we also do not charge for replacement hardware and that thanks in large part to your viewership we make money on the back end here by uploading these videos to sites like YouTube and your viewership is uh is what allows us to continue doing that so if we weren't making money there's no way we could offer this as a free service we're not doing this necessarily to the kindness of our own Hearts um some of you seem to think that we do and while that is flattering I have to be just brutally honest I mean the only way we're able to do this is because of YouTube because of our brand partners and all of that is essentially propped up by your viewership so again thank you so much for that I do want to go over briefly the specs in case you are curious so it looks like this rig is running a ryzen 7 7800x 3D which is an excellent gaming CPU an MSI b650 I Edge it's got a big old noctu cooler in there of course their Vengeance DDR 5 32 gigs in total and an MSI 380 TI one thing I noticed right away he's got rubber bands kind of just holding these two fans against the heat sink here for the CPU Cooler and while it does look a bit sketchy they actually interfere at all with the fan spinning so that's a good thing if I had some of the little wireframe mounts to get these you know actually fastened correctly I would give them to them I just don't have any I I don't save stuff like that uh but I just wanted to point that out right away because I'm sure some of you are wondering what the heck these are they're actually pretty functional the other thing you'll notice is how dusty this system is which apparently was supposed to be fixed by Geek Squad it very clearly has it it doesn't look like they've even take like a can of air to this thing it is just caked in all the right places and uh so maybe we can do something about that assuming we can get the system back up and running again in this video we're going to try for a post although it sounds like we likely won't get one but it's important that we have this starting point right so I don't know if you just saw that there's a truck that just drove by outside so it was a little loud the system powered on for about a split second and then turned right back off again uh that's that's an odd one but I'm I'm actually from a troubleshooter perspective I'm really happy that it's doing this this is repeatable so far reliable and means that we have something to actually hone in on because if it just powered up and loaded into Windows I mean what can I really fix yeah now it's not powering on at all this is pretty wild oh uh First Impressions power supply I'm definitely going to focus on that uh Second thing is going to be wiring make sure that all of our cables are connected where they should be and uh we can go from there first order business I'm going to confirm that cables are run where they should be that everything's connected properly especially around the front I/O area I've seen some really weird things when that's miswired now to make getting to the front IO a bit easier I'm going to remove the graphics card it's a bit crammed in here it's a small ITX build uh but while we do this we can also take the time to rule out the graphics card as a potential failure Point by powering the system on without it in there if I can find the there's like a jeez everything is just wedged back here 12 seconds later and uh yeah so if the system still gives us the same symptoms that we saw earlier then we know that the graphics card is not to blame you can see you had to Fashion this like aftermarket cooler assembly to the uh underside of this graphics card to make it fit in the fractal case that he's using this board conveniently or rather inconveniently has its jfp1 front panel header just above the 16 Lane PCI slot here off to the bottom left which is usually where you'll find your HD audio that's this connector here so looks like as it was it was actually where it should have been and it looks like this cable is actually an extension you can see the reset switch on the left which runs into the header is connected to the correct cable running from the case same for power switch and same for power LED try powering on again here uh effectively bypassing the power switch just in case but I think we are probably a here so right there those two pins look like it's powered on now it's running for a bit longer than it was before as well well this is weird hopefully it wasn't the graphics card um we could try putting that back in and then manually jumping front panel again now remember the CPU in here is a ryzen 77800 x 3D that definitely has integrated graphics and uh I want to see if we can get picture out from that chip with our monitor connected so we're going to try uh powering on again there we go so also give us a chance to see if we can you know repeat the power on cycle without it failing on us to the second or third time and would you look at that it's seems to want to post there it is all right and it's loading into Windows 11 I'm a bit worried at this point I know this seems a bit out there but I've actually got a hold of a proper gt1030 this time around for fixer flop troubleshooting and we're going to throw this in place of that 3080 I think it's a 3080 TI that's in his R currently and if we can get picture out through this but not through his card then it looks like his card might be cooked fun fact about this card I actually got it from Freddy of the tavarish YouTube channel I'm sure many of you are familiar with his work he's currently rebuilding that flooded McLaren P1 he had an older system that had this 1030 just laying in it and I said you know what this would make for a pretty sweet troubleshooting C and in an unfortunate turn of events it looks like the system now works with that tiny little 1030 in there which tells me that uh it's probably it's probably this bad boy right here now we can't say still for certain that it is the card and not these because uh notably the 1030 doesn't need supplemental PCI power cables who would have thought so we still have one more thing to narrow down will this graphics card work in a totally separate known working system I've got to just kind of assembled here makeshift on the side we're going to power it on at the rear really hoping that this works that would mean we likely have an issue with the original power supply would you look at that it does at least power on so that's a good start I'm just hoping for some sort of post come on give me something oh there it is it was power cycling a few times it was just training memory it's a new stick that I don't usually use here but uh that's it that's a post the card seems fine nothing like crazy hot on the card either nothing I would deem uh concerning at least right out of the gate so that's good I guess now we turn our attention to the power supply and in particular those supplemental eight pins this might seem a bit Reckless on the surface but I've got this GTX 1074 the wind here has been sitting in a box for a good while it has two supplemental eight pins just like our 3080 TI over there and I want to see if we can replicate the issue I'm not as concerned about losing this card since it's older it's a lot cheaper now but uh if we can get the system to either not power on or power on for a split second and then turn back off then I'm going to take the power supply out and run it through my tester so in she goes again it's all a bit tight in here but I like compact builds I don't blame the owner for wanting something like this all righty installed and then we'll get these two eight pins connected got a lot of stuff on this table already so I'm just going to slide things carefully this way pull the power cable from that power supply move it over here this is the stuff you guys normally don't see on camera since it's just messy all around HDMI cable coming with me over here where's the HDMI port there it is is all right so uh here we go make sure that card's slotted in all the way and Power on back here power on up front now if this does work I'm not really going to know what to do all right here we go whoa all right it's time to take a step back here let's walk through what we've already done we've proven that the original card Works in a different system that is not to blame we've proven that a separate know working card works in the original system that is not to blame we have not yet verified that the power supply is a okay at least according to our tester so that's going to be the first thing we do uh up next has a string hanging in front of the lens but then after that assuming that that power supply is okay and I imagine it is maybe front panel because we sort of just ruled it out we just disconnected it and I've been jumping ever since there was one loose cable though and I think it was the hard drive LED cable that was still wired technically to the board even though it's not you know that circuit is not closed because it's not connected to front paneling that that case doesn't have a hard drive LED it could still possibly be shorting on say the motherboard or maybe the graphics card back plate something to look into maybe we can replicate the issue by just I don't know manipulating that I'm talking about this cable right here for hard drive LED now the entire connector is not a factor now it's not connected to the board there's nothing sending power over this from the case side so it's kind of just chilling here you know we could short this against the uh you know back plate nothing nothing's going to happen there but when it was connected when when this was connected to the motherboard this one went unconnected because again the case doesn't support a hard drive LED but if we just shorted it like so for example it's possible that the motherboard sees that and thinks well that that's not good power's going where it shouldn't let's shut off so I'm I'm curious I actually want to try this first before testing the power let's see if we can replicate it all right so now this is going to be a pretty chaotic shot I do apologize in advance I'm going to show you just the corner of the screen here so if we do get a post you'll notice something over here I'm going to connect the HDMI cable to the card again and this time we're going to mess with that hard drive LED pin set so power on I'm going to try powering on with the case power button all righty so far so good all right so uh that looks good now now I'm I'm this is gon to be really cringey I'm GNA do it let's see nope nothing okay I thought it would do something but it's not so that's not to blame okay so then what is you know I've got to say I've been tinkering with this off camera for about 15 20 minutes or so and uh I've swapped his card back in I've rewired everything I only had a few things disconnected front panel obviously to start I had the USB 3.0 cable disconnected because it was in the way uh and same goes for an RGB cable but everything is literally back to the way it was we've come full circle and now the rig powers on consistently the power supply checks out in our tester no issues here at all looking very healthy we know for certain the card Works in our makeshift test bench repeatedly it powers on without issue and we prove that other graphics cards work just fine in here including ones that rely on supplemental power similar to the config we have with the original card I I I really don't know what to do it it fires up instantly now every single time I've tried it including off camera which has been about half a dozen times or so it loads into Windows every single time other than the dust I don't know what else I can fix here if Geek Squad was seeing the exact same thing I am here I would would have returned it exactly the same way I mean minus the scratches obviously but there's nothing really for me to do here I can't fix what I can't see and there's nothing really to fix here as far as I can tell I can't replicate the issue because I I'm not even sure what I did to fix the issue I just remove the card and put it back in essentially and now everything's hunky dory it still turns on this is this is it this is all I can do uh I always try my best in these episodes to kind of give you a takeaway something like oh you know don't miswire your front IO or don't let this cable short here or always check to make sure your graphics cards installed correctly etc etc I can't give you anything like that here because I still don't know what I did to fix it now again he did mention in his original listing that the original problem was that the system would power on intermittently sometimes he would push the power button he' get no reaction at all and sometimes it would turn on and quickly turn back off and other times it would load into Windows perfectly fine I'm trying my best to get it to falter and it will not at this point all I can think of was there was a short somewhere some cable was being snagged not plugged in all the way again maybe those fans and the graphics card those cables were getting snagged more specifically uh maybe front panel just was kind of hanging halfway out and I just couldn't tell because everything again is so tight in there that's really the best I can offer at this point but hey at least it works again I I mean we tested everything that is is you know relevant to the system not powering at least from what we could see out of the case the graphics card the power supply looks good wiring looks good I got nothing else I'm becoming repetitious at this point because I just I'm kind of still in shock that it's working but it is what it is thank you so much for watching and again I'm very sorry for the ending of this one I suppose it's still a fix technically even though I don't know how we fixed it but it is a flop in the sense that there's there's nothing really to take away from this one maybe just reating components checking that your cables are wired correctly and not being smooshed and chopped off by other things around your rig um that's the the one thing I would stress here but uh other than that going clean this thing up have her back to her owner in no time if you guys enjoyed this one give it a thumbs up consider subscribing that's that red button if you haven't already turn that Bell on so that you get notifications when videos like these go live and leave a comment down below let me know what you thought about this one and what you're looking forward to seeing next on the channel my name is Greg thanks for learning with me\n"