The Fixer Flop: A System that Wouldn't Break

As I began to work on this system, I couldn't help but feel a sense of excitement and anticipation. The owner had described a problem where the system would shut down randomly, and I was eager to get to the bottom of it. I love working with rigs like these, where the challenge is to diagnose a problem that may or may not be related to the hardware itself. In this case, the issue seemed to be more about the overall stability of the system rather than a specific component.

I started by running some stress tests on the system, pushing it to its limits to see if I could replicate the issue. I let the stress test run for over 30 minutes, well beyond what most people would consider a reasonable amount of time. Despite this, the system continued to run smoothly, with no signs of instability or malfunction. This was both a relief and a disappointment - relieved that the system didn't seem to be failing in a way that could be easily diagnosed, but disappointed that I couldn't find any clues as to what might be causing it.

As I delved deeper into the system, I realized that the issue wasn't necessarily with the hardware itself, but rather with something more external. The owner had mentioned that they thought the problem might be related to a bad outlet or power supply, and after some investigation, I agreed that this was likely the case. However, I also knew that without being able to see the system in action, I couldn't be sure what was causing the problem.

One of the things that struck me about this system was its relative simplicity. It's an M-ATX platform, with a compact design that should provide good airflow and cooling. This made me think that if there was a problem with the temperature, it might be something relatively easy to fix. So, I decided to focus on upgrading the case, looking for a high-airflow option that could help to keep the system cool.

I've already recommended some of these cases to the owner, and I'm sure he'll appreciate the advice. As someone who's been in the industry for a while, I know that a good airflow system can make all the difference when it comes to keeping components cool and stable. In this case, I think an M-ATX case with plenty of ventilation would be just what this system needs.

The Fixer Flop: A Lesson in Limitations

As I worked on this system, I couldn't help but think about the limitations of my own abilities as a troubleshooter. When I'm working on a rig like this, I know that there are certain things that I simply can't do - namely, see what's happening inside the system itself. This is where things get tricky, because without being able to diagnose the problem directly, I'm left relying on clues and assumptions.

I've come to realize that sometimes, even with all my expertise and experience, I just can't fix something if I don't know what's causing it. It's frustrating, but also a bit liberating - after all, there are some problems that are simply beyond my control. In this case, the system itself seems healthy apart from that immediate temperature issue that we wanted to address.

The Fixer Flop: What I Would Have Done Differently

If I'm being completely honest, I think what I would have done differently in this situation is charge for labor and the troubleshooting process. As a content creator, I know that my time and expertise are valuable assets, and I wouldn't be able to give them away for free forever.

That being said, I've always tried to keep things straightforward and accessible, even if it means not getting paid as much as I could. After all, the people who watch my videos are what make this whole thing worthwhile, and I'm grateful for their support - whether they're willing to donate or just leave a comment every now and then.

If you've got a broken system that you'd like me to take a look at, I'm always happy to help. Just be aware that without being able to replicate the issue myself, I may not be able to diagnose it accurately. But if you're willing to send your rig in, and we can work together to figure out what's going on, then I'd love to give it a try.

Thanks for Watching

Finally, I just want to say thanks to everyone who watches this channel. It means the world to me, and I'm grateful for your support. Whether you're watching this video because you're interested in PC building or just because you enjoy watching me tinker with hardware, I appreciate it all the same. So be sure to like, comment, and subscribe - and if you've got a broken system that you'd like me to take a look at, just let me know!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi Greg longtime viewer here and a fan of the fixer flop series never thought I'd be one of your subjects as I am pretty decent with PC Hardware tweaking this afternoon December 7th my PC hard crashed while playing Modern Warfare 3 and doesn't want to boot ever since whenever I press the power button all the lights and fans turn on for about half a second and shut off immediately my PC used to hard crash randomly about twice a day but it was not a deal breaker I mainly play cod using a controller I tried swapping Rams and in different slots clear the seos repace the CPU NADA and I don't think it's the power Supply as it provides power my PC was a pre-built that I upgraded over time hope you'll be able to find what's wrong with my rig thank you in advance until then have a great night this here is that viewer's broken gaming PC oh boy does this one sound complicated random reboots and powering off abruptly especially after only a few seconds of being powered on that's stuff you never want anywhere near your gaming rig and well it could be caused by a number of things so in this video we're going to dive into the issues hopefully fix whatever is causing this random power off situ situation and have the viewer back up and running again in no time it might not end that way but we're we're going to try our best and you're going to come along for the ride hopefully stay with me if you're sick of seeing that same activate Windows watermark over and over head on over to VIP SCD key where they have Windows 10 and 11 Pro OEM keys at a fraction of the price of retail just see the secure payment method like PayPal enter your product key into your PC settings window and say bye-bye to The Watermark and be sure to use your offer code skgs for That Sweet discount hey there and welcome to fix or Flop if you're new just know that everything you see us do in these videos is free of charge to the owners in question we don't charge for labor we don't charge for replacement hardware and it's because of your viewership that we're allowed to continue doing what we're doing in the Orlando Florida area I can monetize these videos on sites like YouTube and so they're gracious enough to allow us to film with their builds uh albeit broken at the time I'm going to give it my best shot I'm going to show you pretty much everything that I do to try to bring these rigs back to life hopefully you learn something along the way or at the very least you're somewhat entertained now you likely saw in the earlier screenshot the specifications of this rig a ryzen 7 3700x with the stock cooler an RTX 3070 this is actually an upgrade from the original 3060 that was in here according to the owner this is a sky tech gaming PC by the way has 32 gigs of ddr4 a 500 gig m.2 and a 550 wat gamus power supply if you can't already tell it is quite cramped in here in particular the graphics card is pressed very closely to the power Supply I am actually a huge fan of matx builds I love their use of space and their lack of empty space in most cases however the graphics card is a bit close here there's not much we can do without swapping cases or swapping cards which of course I don't really want to do unless I have to but I did want to point that out I also don't think this is the reason why the system is randomly shutting down even if one or two of these fans is partially covered it shouldn't be a reason for the graphics card to severely overheat there is some air getting to this card now I say we go ahead and just jump jump straight into powering this thing on we need to replicate the issue described which is random powering off which is why I don't have a screen here I don't think we're going to need one to see what we expect to see power strip is on are we getting LEDs at the front H nothing yet let's go ahead and attempt to power on there we go so far so good everything sounds healthy all the fans are spinning including those in the graphics card which is a good sign I know I've said this in earlier fixer episodes but uh I do want to point out that there are some instances where builds like these make their way into the office and work perfectly fine out of the gate we end up not even making videos around them in fact it's possible you might not even see what I'm recording right now because the rig ends up running just fine and it's some external Factor preventing the system from functioning properly say a faulty power strip or just dirty power from the wall you never really know so far this seems fine several minutes later and uh it's a good thing thing the system isn't having problems right now but uh it also means that we can't actually diagnose the situation I have no doubt that this system does have some sort of powering off issue in fact I asked the owner for a few videos that he captured prior to dropping his rig off and you can see very clearly after only a few seconds in most cases heck sometimes after only a split second the system immediately shuts back off again so my job for the last uh 15 minutes or so has been trying to get this thing to do that it doesn't want to do it in the idle state that it's in so I've asked for the owner's login password for Windows we're going to download a couple of burn in tests and see if we can trigger any shutdown that way I should note burn and tests are really only good for telling us whether the issue is thermal if we still don't get a reaction from the rig then I would probably on the side of it being a power supply issue although in most burn in tests you're actually pushing whatever component's being stressed to its power limit as well we'll have to just kind of P around until something pops up so we are in vermark now we haven't started the stress test but for some reason power draw on the card is around 20 to 25% this might have to do with the live wallpaper just another reason why I don't like using those uh the GPU itself is around 47° C which isn't alarmingly high but if this was truly idle I would say this is a bit concerning so far so good temps haven't immediately shot up to a dangerous level which is a good thing they are slowly climbing but I expect they'll level out within the next few minutes considering this is an aircooled card right now we're at about 65° c a few moments later I'm an impatient guy so I'm not going to wait much longer you can see temps have largely leveled off I mean 70° C there's nothing wrong here and they're certainly not going to jump to 90° or higher within the next five or 10 minutes it's just not going to happen with this air cooled stuff so uh we are going to shift our attention to the CPU now because I think the graphics card is fine despite it being as close as it is to the power supply over one fan this is nowhere near as alarming as I thought it would be now in it 64 Things Are a bit more concerning I just enabled the GPU stress test that's this Lower Blue Line but the two upper ones both at 87 88 this is CPU and CPU diode this is uncomfortable for I believe this is Zen 2 architecture right we're at 95° C now at the CPU diode so we are on the edge of T Junction at 95 degrees is the maximum temperature allowed for Zen 2 so I expect we'll see some sort of warning down here at the bottom telling us that the CP is being throttled because it's running too hot this could very well be why the system is shutting down randomly especially after several hours of gaming oddly enough though 10 minutes later we are still running this test we're still pegged at 9596 C and the rig has not thermal throttled yet and it obviously hasn't shut down either it's like I'm trying to bait it into doing what we've seen it do in the videos that the owner sent but it just doesn't want to for whatever reason it seems to be running healthily right now again apart from the temperature it's doing what it's supposed to do here we even set up a worst case scenario left side panel install the front panel is still on practically choking these front intake fans and we still can't get the system to falter but here's the thing we know this system can falter because we've seen these clips from the owner with our own eyes this PC clearly has issues staying powered on the issue is I can't account for every possible variable involved maybe he's dirty power coming from his wall and which case there's no way I could account for that without being physically present in his home or maybe if he's connected to a surge protector that protector is going bad again I don't have that either and I really should start asking for that in the future because that very well could explain some of the things seeing here what I can say though is that the temperatures we saw were not healthy and I still want to fix that now your average PC repair shop might say well the system runs fine yes it runs hot but we're not being paid to fix hot we're being paid to fix no power on or powering on and then right back off again and I understand that from a business perspective you don't want to just randomly start swapping things out especially if you don't plan to charge the owner in this case though we're doing it more for educational purposes and again I do want the owner to have a a healthy enjoyable gaming experience and right now those temperatures at the CPU level are just a bit too hot for me so here's the game plan firstly I want to examine the CPU Cooler I want to make sure that there's enough mounting pressure at top the IHS and that it's mounted properly and then I want to check the thermal paste underneath make sure that enough is applied and that it's spread appropriately then I want to swap that CPU Cooler out with something a bit beefier the only issue with this is that we might run into height constraints because this isn't a very wide case left to right so if we put a larger Tower cooler in here um it might not fit at which point we'd also need to upgrade the case I'm not inclined to do that even though I think the case could use um a bit of revamping especially from an airf flow perspective I think simply upgrading the CPU Cooler alone should solve a lot of his overheating issues I don't think it's a power supply issue we would have seen definitely some issues while running both of these heavy components under load and I don't think it's an issue with anything else because well again it was stable it was running Windows no problem and it was running multiple stress tests no problem the only apparent issue to me is temperature and that's why I'm only going to tackle the CPU Cooler in this case so this is what we'll be upgrading him to a pure rock 2 FX from be quiet this is a larger Tower cooler than what he's already got in the system does have some RGB functionality as well and it has a fairly High TDP where is that written right here at50 Watts so it's a high performer yes for the price but it's also a really goodlooking cooler B quite I think makes some of the sexiest cool is around if you're interested we're going to have this link below again I want to thank be quiet for being the continued product sponsor of the fixer flop playlist I not only love their products but I also love how organically they integrate and help out a lot of folks in the Orlando Florida area so show them some love down below let's start first by removing the original cooler and uh you know I just realized I haven't actually looked through this build yet um oh but there are some wow that's embarrassing okay I I'll just I'll just show you guys I've got the ISO turned way up and the reason why I say this is embarrassing is because well this is something I should have caught I'm not saying that the owner should be embarrassed in the slightest I've done this before but uh this uh 24 pin is not completely installed in fact I think I could just slide out this upper four pin yeah look at that it's it's not even it's not even fastened to the connector on the board that's not good that could very well be causing your power issue honestly it doesn't even look like this is clipped in it's not it's not it's not even clipped in all the way so you should hear here a resounding click and this top part here should be down if it's properly pushing there we go so now no matter what I do to it if I pull on it you know reasonable I'm not like yanking it out but if I give it a reasonable amount of force in the opposite direction it's not going anywhere whereas before it was lose connections will cause power issues I guess I was just so focused on getting the system to actually show a symptom that I forgot to check basic wiring and things that I would normally do in a fixer Flop video so I apologize for that cringe that said it didn't power off even as is um and so I can't confirm obviously that this will fix the power issues but it's definitely something that needed to be tackled the CPU temperature issue though is another one and we're still going to replace the cooler let's get this original cooler off again these darn hooks I'd say that's pretty good thermal paste coverage uh maybe a little more than you really needed and if we take a peek at the CPU Cooler we see thermal paste spread quite nicely here so it looks like we had adequate mounting pressure in fact there was much more thermal paste applied than there needed to be because a lot of it actually rolled into the uh pins here at the back which could also in theory cause some issues again I cannot confirm any of this but uh we're just going to try to tackle as many small issues as possible I've got a little nylon Bristol uh brush here I'm just trying to get as much of this paste out from in between these pins as possible there also plenty of crap around the sides of the CPU as well a lot of crusty thermal paste we're going to make this thing look as close to brand new as possible just one one more quick pass and here we are this 3700x looks really good now IHS totally clean also cleaned up a lot of the gunk between the pins underneath this chip so let's get it installed by the way socket looks fine no issues in here Chip's going to sit something like this it's a bit weird doing the standing up but for the sake of YouTube we're going to roll with it just notice this as well an incorrectly installed inme I really hope this was the owner of the system maybe as an upgrade down the line and not Sky tech gaming you might even notice in this drive's case it is sort of warped closer to the front right here it's leaning downward and it's more straight here at the rear so just another reason why you don't want to install it this way one of these should be in either your motherboard's box or your drive's box you use this to tighten the drive on top of the standoff so to be just like that mounting gear is in we've got pre-applied thermal paste remember we'll set the cooler like this right here and then we've got two more screws to tighten it all down by the way cooler clearance with the case is just about perfect maybe a few millimeters to spare cooler fan now attached and unfortunately we don't have an argb header to connect this fan to so it won't be able to eliminate as is without an adapter not a big deal though our biggest concern of course was temperature we'll get his Ram reinstalled and we're going to try to clean up cable management a bit at least on this side you know he's got like hanging RGB strips and things uh it just it kind of looks a bit tacky so we're going to try to clean this up for him he's missing a couple of screws back here we'll fix that form as well and here we are looking much better in my opinion cleaned up a lot of the cable management hid especially those RGB LED strips that were running along the sides looking a bit messy and that new cooler my oh my looking super juicy it is my hope that without changing anything in the Bios this cooler alone will bring CPU temperatures down quite a bit we'll of course be fair with the testing we'll put the left side panel back on and run ID to 64 again but of course chicken before the egg we need to make sure the thing actually turns on before we can test any any of that I think we've uh got it all rewired correctly it is blinking obnoxiously green um I'm not sure why I think that is just a motherboard settings there's not much I can do on my side without logging in and tweaking a bunch of stuff which I really don't want to do I'll mention it to him though I noticed he had the LED strips wired backwards in the header so when I move things around I flip that connector around so that it gets proper 12vt power now uh and so obviously it works it's just blinking a weird green color for some reason hey there we go and now let's log in and run Ida 64 you'll probably notice temperatures don't shoot up nearly as high as they did previously which is a good sign although given we're about 15 minutes at this point into the test and I think we've more or less fully saturated the air cooler in question we are still in the upper 80s that's still a several de Cel drop which is a notable Improvement however this is still uncomfortably hot I would would say especially for ryzen it's possible this chip is just poorly bined and of course the case is not helping things either one of the first things that comes to mind to remedy this is under volting AMD chips usually leave a bit on the table when it comes to voltage so tinkering that VC Cor in the Bios uh could in theory lower temperatures across the board it doesn't work for every chip again an especially poorly bin chip Won't Give Up much in the way of voltage but it is probably worth trying the other thing we could do is disable PBO of course that will hurt performance just a bit if you're mostly gaming it shouldn't be that noticeable just kind of weighing some options here that said at least for me comparing contrasting the two coolers I am much happier with the per rock 2fx it is doing a phenomenal job given its size it's not a super bulky CPU tower cooler by any means you can see it's lower temperatures by about 5 to 6° C Under full load which is welcome and if in the future the owner wants to upgrade his case to something much more air flow oriented we should expect to see another healthy temp temperature drop I'm sure a few of you were screaming Greg why not just replace the case as well you've done half the work give them an airf flowy chassis you've got tons of those right they practically grow on trees where you live and then you'll solve the temperature problem completely lower CPU temperatures lower graphics card temperatures that's a done deal there are two issues with that firstly no I don't have trees that grow PC cases or any computer hardware for that matter and two we aren't even sure if temperatures are the reason why the system was shutting off in these clips we can't account for anything attached to this system here and that more or less ties my hands if this was power related we certainly would have seen an issue with the power supply intermittent cutouts or maybe blue screens or the system outright shutting off none of that happened and I let the stress test run for again well north of 30 minutes and look I'll be honest I love that you guys love fixer flop I love that you keep coming back episode after episode and are just willing to watch you don't have to donate you don't have to uh join patreon or any of that crap you could just watch the videos and leave some comments every now and then that that's really the most I could ever ask for but I'm never going to stop being honest with you in this playlist either and I know that sometimes that Honesty will bite me in the butt I know that it's going to rub some folks the wrong way but I always want to be upfront about my intentions with rigs like these especially ones that maybe kind of sort of don't belong because the issue described isn't what matches up here it doesn't happen often which is a good thing but in these cases I can I can really only justify by giving so much Hardware away I think there are systems out there that have much bigger problems that I'd rather use that spare hardware for you know I think the owner has the best mentality here I just got off the phone with him and the first thing he said was that he was happy it wasn't something Hardware related or at least immediately noticeable from a hardware perspective I mean we we couldn't again get the issue to show up here but uh that likely means it's something else on his end something pretty cheap more than likely like a like a you know a bad wall outlet or maybe a bad search protector maybe a bad power cable running from the PC to that outlet or surch protector so who really knows but the good thing is the system itself seems healthy apart from that immediate temperature issue that we wanted to address at least partially here when I do meet him in person I'm going to let him know that the very next thing I would do is upgrade the case if possible this is an matx platform so uh if he looks for an matx upgrade there plenty of really high airflow matx cases on the market sub $100 that you could look into I'll be sure to recommend a few of those um if he's interested in hearing them but yeah overall I'm sorry that this wasn't like a super in-depth you know study of a broken system we just couldn't get it to break and while that might not make for the most enjoyable video I think it's the best case scenario for the owner with that if you enjoyed watching this video be sure to give it a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated let me know in the comments section below what you would have done differently especially if you were like a brick and mortar maybe you were charging for labor and the troubleshooting process what would you have done I mean in this situation here where you don't really have the ability to replicate the issue described I mean we saw the temperature problem and that that was something I wanted to address but beyond that I can't fix what I can't see I think that's the overarching theme of this video I cannot fix what I cannot see that's why these issues have to be easily repeatable because if not I'm just shooting in the dark and I'm not even shooting real bullets I'm shooting blanks because half the stuff I do might not even impact the stability of the system because I don't know what's actually unstable about it oh this is a this is a weird it's it's frustrating not not from you know I'm not frustrated at the owner of course I don't blame him if I had seen what he was showing us in these clips I definitely would have submitted my rig as well um it's just frustrating that I can't actually see the real problem and because I can't there's really not much I can do I don't know maybe it comes back in the future with a more repeatable issue and we can address it then but for now everything looks to be healthy apart from again those CPU temperatures be sure to subscribe by the way if you haven't already I haven't mentioned that and again if you have a broken system that you want a chance to have fixed for free in this series be sure to click the form linked below my name is Greg thanks for learning with mehi Greg longtime viewer here and a fan of the fixer flop series never thought I'd be one of your subjects as I am pretty decent with PC Hardware tweaking this afternoon December 7th my PC hard crashed while playing Modern Warfare 3 and doesn't want to boot ever since whenever I press the power button all the lights and fans turn on for about half a second and shut off immediately my PC used to hard crash randomly about twice a day but it was not a deal breaker I mainly play cod using a controller I tried swapping Rams and in different slots clear the seos repace the CPU NADA and I don't think it's the power Supply as it provides power my PC was a pre-built that I upgraded over time hope you'll be able to find what's wrong with my rig thank you in advance until then have a great night this here is that viewer's broken gaming PC oh boy does this one sound complicated random reboots and powering off abruptly especially after only a few seconds of being powered on that's stuff you never want anywhere near your gaming rig and well it could be caused by a number of things so in this video we're going to dive into the issues hopefully fix whatever is causing this random power off situ situation and have the viewer back up and running again in no time it might not end that way but we're we're going to try our best and you're going to come along for the ride hopefully stay with me if you're sick of seeing that same activate Windows watermark over and over head on over to VIP SCD key where they have Windows 10 and 11 Pro OEM keys at a fraction of the price of retail just see the secure payment method like PayPal enter your product key into your PC settings window and say bye-bye to The Watermark and be sure to use your offer code skgs for That Sweet discount hey there and welcome to fix or Flop if you're new just know that everything you see us do in these videos is free of charge to the owners in question we don't charge for labor we don't charge for replacement hardware and it's because of your viewership that we're allowed to continue doing what we're doing in the Orlando Florida area I can monetize these videos on sites like YouTube and so they're gracious enough to allow us to film with their builds uh albeit broken at the time I'm going to give it my best shot I'm going to show you pretty much everything that I do to try to bring these rigs back to life hopefully you learn something along the way or at the very least you're somewhat entertained now you likely saw in the earlier screenshot the specifications of this rig a ryzen 7 3700x with the stock cooler an RTX 3070 this is actually an upgrade from the original 3060 that was in here according to the owner this is a sky tech gaming PC by the way has 32 gigs of ddr4 a 500 gig m.2 and a 550 wat gamus power supply if you can't already tell it is quite cramped in here in particular the graphics card is pressed very closely to the power Supply I am actually a huge fan of matx builds I love their use of space and their lack of empty space in most cases however the graphics card is a bit close here there's not much we can do without swapping cases or swapping cards which of course I don't really want to do unless I have to but I did want to point that out I also don't think this is the reason why the system is randomly shutting down even if one or two of these fans is partially covered it shouldn't be a reason for the graphics card to severely overheat there is some air getting to this card now I say we go ahead and just jump jump straight into powering this thing on we need to replicate the issue described which is random powering off which is why I don't have a screen here I don't think we're going to need one to see what we expect to see power strip is on are we getting LEDs at the front H nothing yet let's go ahead and attempt to power on there we go so far so good everything sounds healthy all the fans are spinning including those in the graphics card which is a good sign I know I've said this in earlier fixer episodes but uh I do want to point out that there are some instances where builds like these make their way into the office and work perfectly fine out of the gate we end up not even making videos around them in fact it's possible you might not even see what I'm recording right now because the rig ends up running just fine and it's some external Factor preventing the system from functioning properly say a faulty power strip or just dirty power from the wall you never really know so far this seems fine several minutes later and uh it's a good thing thing the system isn't having problems right now but uh it also means that we can't actually diagnose the situation I have no doubt that this system does have some sort of powering off issue in fact I asked the owner for a few videos that he captured prior to dropping his rig off and you can see very clearly after only a few seconds in most cases heck sometimes after only a split second the system immediately shuts back off again so my job for the last uh 15 minutes or so has been trying to get this thing to do that it doesn't want to do it in the idle state that it's in so I've asked for the owner's login password for Windows we're going to download a couple of burn in tests and see if we can trigger any shutdown that way I should note burn and tests are really only good for telling us whether the issue is thermal if we still don't get a reaction from the rig then I would probably on the side of it being a power supply issue although in most burn in tests you're actually pushing whatever component's being stressed to its power limit as well we'll have to just kind of P around until something pops up so we are in vermark now we haven't started the stress test but for some reason power draw on the card is around 20 to 25% this might have to do with the live wallpaper just another reason why I don't like using those uh the GPU itself is around 47° C which isn't alarmingly high but if this was truly idle I would say this is a bit concerning so far so good temps haven't immediately shot up to a dangerous level which is a good thing they are slowly climbing but I expect they'll level out within the next few minutes considering this is an aircooled card right now we're at about 65° c a few moments later I'm an impatient guy so I'm not going to wait much longer you can see temps have largely leveled off I mean 70° C there's nothing wrong here and they're certainly not going to jump to 90° or higher within the next five or 10 minutes it's just not going to happen with this air cooled stuff so uh we are going to shift our attention to the CPU now because I think the graphics card is fine despite it being as close as it is to the power supply over one fan this is nowhere near as alarming as I thought it would be now in it 64 Things Are a bit more concerning I just enabled the GPU stress test that's this Lower Blue Line but the two upper ones both at 87 88 this is CPU and CPU diode this is uncomfortable for I believe this is Zen 2 architecture right we're at 95° C now at the CPU diode so we are on the edge of T Junction at 95 degrees is the maximum temperature allowed for Zen 2 so I expect we'll see some sort of warning down here at the bottom telling us that the CP is being throttled because it's running too hot this could very well be why the system is shutting down randomly especially after several hours of gaming oddly enough though 10 minutes later we are still running this test we're still pegged at 9596 C and the rig has not thermal throttled yet and it obviously hasn't shut down either it's like I'm trying to bait it into doing what we've seen it do in the videos that the owner sent but it just doesn't want to for whatever reason it seems to be running healthily right now again apart from the temperature it's doing what it's supposed to do here we even set up a worst case scenario left side panel install the front panel is still on practically choking these front intake fans and we still can't get the system to falter but here's the thing we know this system can falter because we've seen these clips from the owner with our own eyes this PC clearly has issues staying powered on the issue is I can't account for every possible variable involved maybe he's dirty power coming from his wall and which case there's no way I could account for that without being physically present in his home or maybe if he's connected to a surge protector that protector is going bad again I don't have that either and I really should start asking for that in the future because that very well could explain some of the things seeing here what I can say though is that the temperatures we saw were not healthy and I still want to fix that now your average PC repair shop might say well the system runs fine yes it runs hot but we're not being paid to fix hot we're being paid to fix no power on or powering on and then right back off again and I understand that from a business perspective you don't want to just randomly start swapping things out especially if you don't plan to charge the owner in this case though we're doing it more for educational purposes and again I do want the owner to have a a healthy enjoyable gaming experience and right now those temperatures at the CPU level are just a bit too hot for me so here's the game plan firstly I want to examine the CPU Cooler I want to make sure that there's enough mounting pressure at top the IHS and that it's mounted properly and then I want to check the thermal paste underneath make sure that enough is applied and that it's spread appropriately then I want to swap that CPU Cooler out with something a bit beefier the only issue with this is that we might run into height constraints because this isn't a very wide case left to right so if we put a larger Tower cooler in here um it might not fit at which point we'd also need to upgrade the case I'm not inclined to do that even though I think the case could use um a bit of revamping especially from an airf flow perspective I think simply upgrading the CPU Cooler alone should solve a lot of his overheating issues I don't think it's a power supply issue we would have seen definitely some issues while running both of these heavy components under load and I don't think it's an issue with anything else because well again it was stable it was running Windows no problem and it was running multiple stress tests no problem the only apparent issue to me is temperature and that's why I'm only going to tackle the CPU Cooler in this case so this is what we'll be upgrading him to a pure rock 2 FX from be quiet this is a larger Tower cooler than what he's already got in the system does have some RGB functionality as well and it has a fairly High TDP where is that written right here at50 Watts so it's a high performer yes for the price but it's also a really goodlooking cooler B quite I think makes some of the sexiest cool is around if you're interested we're going to have this link below again I want to thank be quiet for being the continued product sponsor of the fixer flop playlist I not only love their products but I also love how organically they integrate and help out a lot of folks in the Orlando Florida area so show them some love down below let's start first by removing the original cooler and uh you know I just realized I haven't actually looked through this build yet um oh but there are some wow that's embarrassing okay I I'll just I'll just show you guys I've got the ISO turned way up and the reason why I say this is embarrassing is because well this is something I should have caught I'm not saying that the owner should be embarrassed in the slightest I've done this before but uh this uh 24 pin is not completely installed in fact I think I could just slide out this upper four pin yeah look at that it's it's not even it's not even fastened to the connector on the board that's not good that could very well be causing your power issue honestly it doesn't even look like this is clipped in it's not it's not it's not even clipped in all the way so you should hear here a resounding click and this top part here should be down if it's properly pushing there we go so now no matter what I do to it if I pull on it you know reasonable I'm not like yanking it out but if I give it a reasonable amount of force in the opposite direction it's not going anywhere whereas before it was lose connections will cause power issues I guess I was just so focused on getting the system to actually show a symptom that I forgot to check basic wiring and things that I would normally do in a fixer Flop video so I apologize for that cringe that said it didn't power off even as is um and so I can't confirm obviously that this will fix the power issues but it's definitely something that needed to be tackled the CPU temperature issue though is another one and we're still going to replace the cooler let's get this original cooler off again these darn hooks I'd say that's pretty good thermal paste coverage uh maybe a little more than you really needed and if we take a peek at the CPU Cooler we see thermal paste spread quite nicely here so it looks like we had adequate mounting pressure in fact there was much more thermal paste applied than there needed to be because a lot of it actually rolled into the uh pins here at the back which could also in theory cause some issues again I cannot confirm any of this but uh we're just going to try to tackle as many small issues as possible I've got a little nylon Bristol uh brush here I'm just trying to get as much of this paste out from in between these pins as possible there also plenty of crap around the sides of the CPU as well a lot of crusty thermal paste we're going to make this thing look as close to brand new as possible just one one more quick pass and here we are this 3700x looks really good now IHS totally clean also cleaned up a lot of the gunk between the pins underneath this chip so let's get it installed by the way socket looks fine no issues in here Chip's going to sit something like this it's a bit weird doing the standing up but for the sake of YouTube we're going to roll with it just notice this as well an incorrectly installed inme I really hope this was the owner of the system maybe as an upgrade down the line and not Sky tech gaming you might even notice in this drive's case it is sort of warped closer to the front right here it's leaning downward and it's more straight here at the rear so just another reason why you don't want to install it this way one of these should be in either your motherboard's box or your drive's box you use this to tighten the drive on top of the standoff so to be just like that mounting gear is in we've got pre-applied thermal paste remember we'll set the cooler like this right here and then we've got two more screws to tighten it all down by the way cooler clearance with the case is just about perfect maybe a few millimeters to spare cooler fan now attached and unfortunately we don't have an argb header to connect this fan to so it won't be able to eliminate as is without an adapter not a big deal though our biggest concern of course was temperature we'll get his Ram reinstalled and we're going to try to clean up cable management a bit at least on this side you know he's got like hanging RGB strips and things uh it just it kind of looks a bit tacky so we're going to try to clean this up for him he's missing a couple of screws back here we'll fix that form as well and here we are looking much better in my opinion cleaned up a lot of the cable management hid especially those RGB LED strips that were running along the sides looking a bit messy and that new cooler my oh my looking super juicy it is my hope that without changing anything in the Bios this cooler alone will bring CPU temperatures down quite a bit we'll of course be fair with the testing we'll put the left side panel back on and run ID to 64 again but of course chicken before the egg we need to make sure the thing actually turns on before we can test any any of that I think we've uh got it all rewired correctly it is blinking obnoxiously green um I'm not sure why I think that is just a motherboard settings there's not much I can do on my side without logging in and tweaking a bunch of stuff which I really don't want to do I'll mention it to him though I noticed he had the LED strips wired backwards in the header so when I move things around I flip that connector around so that it gets proper 12vt power now uh and so obviously it works it's just blinking a weird green color for some reason hey there we go and now let's log in and run Ida 64 you'll probably notice temperatures don't shoot up nearly as high as they did previously which is a good sign although given we're about 15 minutes at this point into the test and I think we've more or less fully saturated the air cooler in question we are still in the upper 80s that's still a several de Cel drop which is a notable Improvement however this is still uncomfortably hot I would would say especially for ryzen it's possible this chip is just poorly bined and of course the case is not helping things either one of the first things that comes to mind to remedy this is under volting AMD chips usually leave a bit on the table when it comes to voltage so tinkering that VC Cor in the Bios uh could in theory lower temperatures across the board it doesn't work for every chip again an especially poorly bin chip Won't Give Up much in the way of voltage but it is probably worth trying the other thing we could do is disable PBO of course that will hurt performance just a bit if you're mostly gaming it shouldn't be that noticeable just kind of weighing some options here that said at least for me comparing contrasting the two coolers I am much happier with the per rock 2fx it is doing a phenomenal job given its size it's not a super bulky CPU tower cooler by any means you can see it's lower temperatures by about 5 to 6° C Under full load which is welcome and if in the future the owner wants to upgrade his case to something much more air flow oriented we should expect to see another healthy temp temperature drop I'm sure a few of you were screaming Greg why not just replace the case as well you've done half the work give them an airf flowy chassis you've got tons of those right they practically grow on trees where you live and then you'll solve the temperature problem completely lower CPU temperatures lower graphics card temperatures that's a done deal there are two issues with that firstly no I don't have trees that grow PC cases or any computer hardware for that matter and two we aren't even sure if temperatures are the reason why the system was shutting off in these clips we can't account for anything attached to this system here and that more or less ties my hands if this was power related we certainly would have seen an issue with the power supply intermittent cutouts or maybe blue screens or the system outright shutting off none of that happened and I let the stress test run for again well north of 30 minutes and look I'll be honest I love that you guys love fixer flop I love that you keep coming back episode after episode and are just willing to watch you don't have to donate you don't have to uh join patreon or any of that crap you could just watch the videos and leave some comments every now and then that that's really the most I could ever ask for but I'm never going to stop being honest with you in this playlist either and I know that sometimes that Honesty will bite me in the butt I know that it's going to rub some folks the wrong way but I always want to be upfront about my intentions with rigs like these especially ones that maybe kind of sort of don't belong because the issue described isn't what matches up here it doesn't happen often which is a good thing but in these cases I can I can really only justify by giving so much Hardware away I think there are systems out there that have much bigger problems that I'd rather use that spare hardware for you know I think the owner has the best mentality here I just got off the phone with him and the first thing he said was that he was happy it wasn't something Hardware related or at least immediately noticeable from a hardware perspective I mean we we couldn't again get the issue to show up here but uh that likely means it's something else on his end something pretty cheap more than likely like a like a you know a bad wall outlet or maybe a bad search protector maybe a bad power cable running from the PC to that outlet or surch protector so who really knows but the good thing is the system itself seems healthy apart from that immediate temperature issue that we wanted to address at least partially here when I do meet him in person I'm going to let him know that the very next thing I would do is upgrade the case if possible this is an matx platform so uh if he looks for an matx upgrade there plenty of really high airflow matx cases on the market sub $100 that you could look into I'll be sure to recommend a few of those um if he's interested in hearing them but yeah overall I'm sorry that this wasn't like a super in-depth you know study of a broken system we just couldn't get it to break and while that might not make for the most enjoyable video I think it's the best case scenario for the owner with that if you enjoyed watching this video be sure to give it a thumbs up that would be greatly appreciated let me know in the comments section below what you would have done differently especially if you were like a brick and mortar maybe you were charging for labor and the troubleshooting process what would you have done I mean in this situation here where you don't really have the ability to replicate the issue described I mean we saw the temperature problem and that that was something I wanted to address but beyond that I can't fix what I can't see I think that's the overarching theme of this video I cannot fix what I cannot see that's why these issues have to be easily repeatable because if not I'm just shooting in the dark and I'm not even shooting real bullets I'm shooting blanks because half the stuff I do might not even impact the stability of the system because I don't know what's actually unstable about it oh this is a this is a weird it's it's frustrating not not from you know I'm not frustrated at the owner of course I don't blame him if I had seen what he was showing us in these clips I definitely would have submitted my rig as well um it's just frustrating that I can't actually see the real problem and because I can't there's really not much I can do I don't know maybe it comes back in the future with a more repeatable issue and we can address it then but for now everything looks to be healthy apart from again those CPU temperatures be sure to subscribe by the way if you haven't already I haven't mentioned that and again if you have a broken system that you want a chance to have fixed for free in this series be sure to click the form linked below my name is Greg thanks for learning with me\n"