The Flop: A Disastrous Experiment with an Old Graphics Card

As I sat down to work on this ancient graphics card, I couldn't help but feel a sense of trepidation. The GTX 650 was an old relic from a bygone era, and I had my doubts about whether it would even boot up in the first place. But hey, I figured, why not give it a try? After all, it's not like I'm getting any younger or anything.

So, I plugged it into my motherboard, a trusty B550 board with a Ryzen 5 5600X CPU and a single DDR4 DIMM. The card looked like it had been through the wringer, with a badly soldered connection on one of its SMD components that looked like it was holding together by sheer force of will. I poked at it gently, trying not to damage anything further, before deciding to just leave it alone and move on.

I decided to test this card out in a video, hoping to see if we could get it to post. I powered up the system, waited a few seconds, and... nothing. No sign of life from the GTX 650 whatsoever. I was starting to feel a sense of disappointment creeping in, but I knew that old cards like this were notorious for being finicky.

As I examined the card further, I realized that there were some serious issues with its design. The shroud, which is meant to protect the GPU's heat sink from dust and debris, was actually covering up one of the 16-pin connectors on the motherboard. This meant that the card was physically obstructing the connector, preventing it from making good contact with the rest of the system. I couldn't believe how silly this was.

I decided to remove the shroud entirely, which made the card look like a sad, broken thing. But at least now we could see what was going on under the hood. And that's when I saw the damage: someone had clearly been inside the case and tampered with the card in some way. The warranty seal was broken, and I could see signs of forced reseating or other shenanigans.

I decided to take a break and come back to this later, but as I sat there watching the card's temperatures climb higher and higher without any sign of stress, I knew that something was very wrong. This card just wasn't getting hot enough, even though it seemed like it should be. It was like the GPU itself was being deliberately kept cool, which only added to my frustration.

I decided to try and power on the system again, hoping that this time we might get some sign of life from the GTX 650. I powered up the system, waited a few seconds, and... nothing. Still no post, still no heat. It was like the card had given up entirely. I was starting to feel a sense of disappointment creeping in, but I knew that this was what I got for messing around with an old, broken card.

In retrospect, I realize that I was foolish to spend $250 on this thing. Even if it did work, which is unlikely, it's just not worth that kind of money. The graphics cards are probably worth 10-20 bucks at most, the CPU is a waste of space, and the motherboard and power supply are basically worthless. And don't even get me started on the hard drive – I wouldn't even accept that for free.

I'm glad to have finally finished this experiment, if only because it's over. Thanks for watching, and I'll catch you in the next one.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthis here is a supposedly broken gaming PC that I purchased on eBay for 250 USD plus about 20 bucks in shipping I don't actually know what is even in this rig the original Ebay listing is taken down all we have at our disposal is this title now it does look like all of the primary components are in here albeit they seem to be very cheap the graphics card has DVI and VGA display outs which is never a good sign that means we're looking at something like a GTX 1050 possibly older the Intel platform is using a motherboard that is extremely small this is definitely several Generations old as well a single very tiny dim looks like there's not even a dim in here it's so small and the power supply from AA may or may not be questionable we'll have to dive into that in a bit the tempered glass on this very cheap mid Tower is just hanging on by a thread it's missing one of its four thumb screws to hold it together and the metal standoffs are questionable at best we don't have any rubber stoppers here to sort of insulate the glass and protect it from the metal so it just kind of flops around like there's nothing actually holding this you can see I've got the thumb screws tighten all the way down and there's still a ton of play in this glass um not great Vibes all around but again 250 bucks I I'm more worried about whether or not we can actually fix this side unseen and less worried about you know value so before I'm inundated with comments like oh Greg you're setting a bad example nobody in their right mind should ever spend this much money on a terrible value rig like this it's not about value at all I just want to know if I can fix a system again sight unseen that I know virtually nothing about I have no idea if this system even powers on so we're more in the dark here than we ever would be in a fixer Flop video which should be exciting for a lot of you and uh it's going to be pain and misery for me only time will tell stay with me if you're planning your next PC build then consider checking out our sponsor VIP SCD key their Windows 10 and 11 OEM Keys sell for a fraction of retail and will unlock the full potential of your OS it also remove those p SK activation watermarks click the links below to get started today and be sure to use our special offer code skgs for a sweet discount on a variety of options including Windows 10 and 11 Pro and home and more now before we power the system on for the first time here in the office I want to give things a quick once over visually inspect every area that uh well usually is involved with a broken system like this so namely your major connections 24 pin APN EPS want to make sure the graphics card is all the way inserted Dam's inserted properly we'll check the power supply as well make sure there aren't any burn marks and I can tell you just from a quick glance here at the rear I already see a big problem so a quick POV here you can see that four pin CPU power cable is fully inserted same goes for the 24 pin here I did triple check that this DRM is fully inserted although it is quite small uh the graphics card is fully slotted in one way you can tell very easily is if you can see any golden finger exposure there uh that is a Telltale sign that your card is not all the way inserted this this one is however sometimes that can go wrong in shipping so doesn't hurt to check that smaller cables look to be okay we'll confirm front panel a bit later although I would be pretty surprised if that was the only issue here but the thing I noticed at the rear behind the power supply you'll see this one little switch here that says 230 volts uh yeah the last time I checked the US a on 230 I've said it before and I'll say it again electrical circuits especially AC current was one of my toughest sub s in school so I do not claim to be anything even remotely close to an expert in this subject matter what I will say though is that most power supplies that have this toggle switch on them are either a quite old or B quite cheap in their design most modern power supplies will have the switch built internally it'll know automatically based on the input voltage what setting it should be in and it's likely that either there's a blown fuse in here because the wrong input voltage was selected or that the power supply is actually working okay because while it's not receiving the full 230 it's expecting it's still Distributing the power correctly I've seen this before in a few power supplies I do not recommend you run it at the setting if you're in a 110 or 120 volt uh country like the us but it yeah old power supplies like this I try to stay far away from them all that to say I do not intend to run the system in its 230 volt setting around A5 volt environment or 110 or 120 somewhere around there we're going to set it to 115 before powering on by the way the system shipped exactly as you see it here with this right panel like slightly inserted but not all the way and so you just it's kind of hanging like so uh this tells me that somebody's been in here I'm curious what it looks like behind the motherboard tray I really hope this shots in Focus difficult to get it to actually hone in on something that's just basically solid black here let's see what we're dealing with come on bit Jank for sure well yeah all right it is pretty messy you can probably get a better idea now of how old this poweray is katchup of mustard cables yeah also a lower gauge it's just not meant for higher end more modern solutions looks like we've got an RGB controller of sorts here this looks to be wired correctly we've got three fans connected to it the two up top and the one at the rear and let's check out this hard dis Drive I was curious about storage cuz it uh again wasn't me whoa what on Earth is going on here that is completely mangled oh yeah you bet we are definitely pulling this thing out you know I really want to know what eventually led to this I mean this is like the worst I think I've ever seen a hard drive mangled both SATA power and SATA data are completely trashed here just got bits of plastic just falling off of it like were they connecting the wrong cables to this like how does it get this bad I I don't think this is what was keeping the system from actually quote unquote working though this is kind of like an isolated thing you could very easily remove this in fact it was detached you saw when we took the right side panel off I don't think it was a part of the equation here uh we are going to now attempt to fire the system up as is with that hard drive disconnected and with the power supply switch at the rear flip to 115 I'm not sure if I should have a fire extinguisher on standby we're just going to go for it power on at the rear so far so good power on up front it would help if my power STP is on let's try this again oh would you look at that it does at least appear to power on somewhat okay yeah it doesn't look like that's going to happen uh let's try we don't have to worry about front panel I mean it powers on so obviously front panels already wired correctly we can try removing the graphics card and running off of integrated Graphics I don't know what CPU is in here this Intel chip looks old enough it looks like it probably does have integrated Graphics so we can try it directly through the motherboard and if that doesn't work we can test the power supply I have a feeling the power supply is going to be to blame here just again because of the previous setting that we saw and just how Jank it looks like things are wired behind here one thing's for sure this Intel stock cooler has not ramped down its fan curve at all since powering on it is just running full speed and that tells me that we probably haven't gotten through any bit of the postprocess I wow really hate these coolers I'd also like to point out while we're taking this out that just because the power supply was set to the 230 volt position that doesn't necessarily mean that it was powered on in that position it could have been I don't know swapped at the last minute for some reason it's it's very unlikely but still worth noting and for those wondering by the way this is an even older car than I thought a GTX 650 a 1 gig frame buffer on this bad boy I don't think this is going to work but I just want to rule things out by one here so we can remove the graphics card as a potential failure Point all right it does still power on the fan curve is still ramped up to 100% it doesn't sound like it wants to chill out I've got a sneaking suspicion we' a power supply problem that or the power supply used to be the problem and now there are multiple problems because it created them it maybe fried the motherboard maybe it fried the CPU who really knows a dirty power supply is so so dangerous and it can cost you a ton of money in the long run and still no picture I think it's time to test the power supply oh wow yeah it is not liking quite a bit about this power supply this is like an instant replace in my book if this was fix or Flop that's exactly what we're going to do here as well so this entire thing is just one big mess uh again not surprised what we can do very quickly here is try powering the system on with a known working unit we're going to take our trust night jar from Silverstone hook that up try powering on hoping it works if it doesn't then we have more than one issue with this rig which is what I feared a bad power supply can do a lot of damage and I'd be willing to bet this unit doesn't have a ton of fail saves in place really can't believe there's a GTX 650 in this pre-build I thought it was something a little more modern than that it's it it really just destroys any notion of value that this rig would have had all righty so that's in we've got our 24 pin connected and uh yeah let's uh let's cross everything we got here that it is only a power supply issue here we go the suspense I'm sure you guys already know by looking at the uh length of this video if this is actually the only fix required or not of course I don't know in the moment that's what makes it exciting nerve-wracking and a bunch of other things all combined power on CPU fan is at 100% just like it was before not really a great sign assuming the CPU Works how am I going to test it because it's probably on a platform that's much older than anything I have currently on hand and it likely won't come up in a fixer Flop video most folks have moved on from like fourth fifth gen Intel stuff like that my fifth gen this is definitely not fifth gen but you know what I mean it just like it it's just older than I thought and for 250 bucks it is an absolute ripoff I don't I don't know why I thought it was worth buying in the moment this is a DDR3 dim so we're talking fourth gen Intel or older now just a recap we replaced the power supply under suspicion that the old one was defective the tester pretty much confirmed that we still have the exact same issue the same symptom being exhibited where it powers on but doesn't post or send a picture to a monitor I have replaced his DDR REM module with one of mine a g skill Trident X dim and we still have the same problem I have tried both memory slots just in case we have a dead memory Channel either uh on the controller side the CPU side maybe a bad slot and still nothing I've also removed all nonvital cables so front panel USB 3 uh SATA you know SATA data USB 2 and then we also had HD audio all of that's disconnected literally the only thing connected to the motherboard apart from the CPU and memory is this single fan here which I highly doubt is causing any problems because it well it's working that would be strange and of course we have nothing nothing to show for it except for a black screen I do want to remove this Intel stock cooler here and at least see what CPU we're working with you know it does have USB 3 so it can't be that old whoa whoa whoa okay I stand corrected first off what the heck is a made in China sticker doing on top of the IHS this is this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in a pre-built and the CPU itself is actually much older than I thought it's an Intel Core i 5 2400 I did not know 2400 supported USB 3 I am awfully confused right now it's just crazy this thing's on there and it's just paper it's it's like a it's a sticker you know it's what you'd expect it to be made out of it's not made out of metal and even if it was that would create an an imbalance you'd have different heights across the IHS and that would still just absolutely obliterate your cooling so uh yeah we're definitely goingon to remove that even though I don't even know if this chip works the socket does appear to be in decent shape which I'm a bit surprised by I don't see any bent or missing pins I don't see any excess thermal Pace it worked its way down into here uh overall pretty clean in fact the entire motherboard for that matter looks pretty decent I do not know what brand this is I think this is just a straight from China you know rehash of something we'll have to dive a bit deeper later in the video you can see the made in China sticker at the bottom but otherwise no other indicator of who manufactured this it's not ASRock it's not gigabyte it's not Asus at least it's not apparent to me that it's any of those and uh so that leads me to believe that yeah some Corners were cut to assemble this rig there is one issue I did find it looks like this one capacitor here is slightly dislodged I'm not sure looks like uh we've got some stuff just oozing out of it as well and uh that could very well be why the system's not posting not entirely sure if this is the result of a crappy power supply or not but uh yeah it is clearly sitting crooked I don't think we have a proper connection here oh oh yes that is uh that's exactly what happened look at the burn marks on the bottom of this thing that is not good and that is right next to this other SMD here which looks partially dislodged it looks like there was some uh power related issue right here and the board just said nope and since then we haven't gotten a there's perhaps a better shot of that other SMD that I was pointing out earlier I'm not sure if this is like a transistor there's three connections there but uh one of them the the the connector closest to the camera looks like it is dislodged that is a really crappy solding job this might have just been manufacturer error can't say for certain I just know that the power supply wasn't great and this isn't great either the CPU is so old there's really nothing I can do with it at this point I'll keep it just in case we happen to come across a fixer Flop episode where we need something that old although I doubt it and same goes for this GTX 650 I want to test this in this video I want to see if we can get this thing to post but at the end of the day who really cares again it's so old and so cheap it's actually worse than a lot of integrated Graphics today if I'm being frank and so I almost feel guilty even giving this away to somebody because chances are if they don't have a graphics card at all they're probably better off that way than with this in their system that does sound pretty bad but it is true through in she goes then uh wait a minute this card is designed in such a way that the Shroud hangs over the Golden Fingers here this is the area of the card that slots into well the 16 Lane slot on a traditional motherboard this is really strange I I guess it worked in the original rig because the F length slot was at the very bottom of the board so there's nothing below it to obstruct uh and prevent the uh the Shroud from sitting where it needed to but in our modern board you can see it's hitting like the the seamos battery it's hitting a bunch of other stuff that it shouldn't be and well that's not the motherboard's fault in fact most cards don't have this problem because the Shroud is intentionally not located directly above the connectors this is just silly all around also worth pointing out that someone has definitely been inside of this card you can see that little warranty seal there is broken so I mean maybe it repaced that would actually be a good thing although for a card like this not sure if it matters much today so this next scene is not going to be cringe at all this is my sarcastic face I'm going to install a ryzen 55600 here a b550 motherboard a single ddr4 dim that I know works and I'm literally just going to set this cooler a top the chip no thermal paste no thermal pad just just just just literally for a few seconds I have the GTX 650s shroud entirely removed for obvious reasons we just discussed this is the only way to make it work with a modern motherboard which is just ridiculous I I I cannot believe what this is coming to now we're just going to power on and try for a post 12 seconds later so far we've got nothing card is also it's not getting very hot I don't feel it warming up at all which is not a good sign it should be getting should should be getting hot now I know through the thermal cam it looks like the GPU itself which is centered there is a lot hotter than it surroundings but in reality it's only about 20 maybe 15° fahit warmer than ambient that is nowhere near as hot as it should be I think we have a serious power delivery issue on this card and of course still no post so uh well this was just one big flop so yeah this was a disaster I don't know what I was thinking spending 250 bucks on this this isn't even worth $250 like fixed like working I it's it's certainly not worth that broken but even if we assume all these components work it's still not worth 250 bucks in my book the graphics cards maybe worth 10 20 bucks the CP maybe 20 bucks tops the motherboard maybe another $10 $20 the power supply I wouldn't even accept for free the hard drive probably the same deal I mean even if it wasn't mangled and the case is just a hot box it's cheap it's missing pretty vital stuff I don't know what this PC has been through but I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy thanks so much for watching that's about all I have left to say in this one let me know in the comments below what you what you thought of it and I'll catch you in the next one my name's Greg thanks for learning with me learning how not to spendthis here is a supposedly broken gaming PC that I purchased on eBay for 250 USD plus about 20 bucks in shipping I don't actually know what is even in this rig the original Ebay listing is taken down all we have at our disposal is this title now it does look like all of the primary components are in here albeit they seem to be very cheap the graphics card has DVI and VGA display outs which is never a good sign that means we're looking at something like a GTX 1050 possibly older the Intel platform is using a motherboard that is extremely small this is definitely several Generations old as well a single very tiny dim looks like there's not even a dim in here it's so small and the power supply from AA may or may not be questionable we'll have to dive into that in a bit the tempered glass on this very cheap mid Tower is just hanging on by a thread it's missing one of its four thumb screws to hold it together and the metal standoffs are questionable at best we don't have any rubber stoppers here to sort of insulate the glass and protect it from the metal so it just kind of flops around like there's nothing actually holding this you can see I've got the thumb screws tighten all the way down and there's still a ton of play in this glass um not great Vibes all around but again 250 bucks I I'm more worried about whether or not we can actually fix this side unseen and less worried about you know value so before I'm inundated with comments like oh Greg you're setting a bad example nobody in their right mind should ever spend this much money on a terrible value rig like this it's not about value at all I just want to know if I can fix a system again sight unseen that I know virtually nothing about I have no idea if this system even powers on so we're more in the dark here than we ever would be in a fixer Flop video which should be exciting for a lot of you and uh it's going to be pain and misery for me only time will tell stay with me if you're planning your next PC build then consider checking out our sponsor VIP SCD key their Windows 10 and 11 OEM Keys sell for a fraction of retail and will unlock the full potential of your OS it also remove those p SK activation watermarks click the links below to get started today and be sure to use our special offer code skgs for a sweet discount on a variety of options including Windows 10 and 11 Pro and home and more now before we power the system on for the first time here in the office I want to give things a quick once over visually inspect every area that uh well usually is involved with a broken system like this so namely your major connections 24 pin APN EPS want to make sure the graphics card is all the way inserted Dam's inserted properly we'll check the power supply as well make sure there aren't any burn marks and I can tell you just from a quick glance here at the rear I already see a big problem so a quick POV here you can see that four pin CPU power cable is fully inserted same goes for the 24 pin here I did triple check that this DRM is fully inserted although it is quite small uh the graphics card is fully slotted in one way you can tell very easily is if you can see any golden finger exposure there uh that is a Telltale sign that your card is not all the way inserted this this one is however sometimes that can go wrong in shipping so doesn't hurt to check that smaller cables look to be okay we'll confirm front panel a bit later although I would be pretty surprised if that was the only issue here but the thing I noticed at the rear behind the power supply you'll see this one little switch here that says 230 volts uh yeah the last time I checked the US a on 230 I've said it before and I'll say it again electrical circuits especially AC current was one of my toughest sub s in school so I do not claim to be anything even remotely close to an expert in this subject matter what I will say though is that most power supplies that have this toggle switch on them are either a quite old or B quite cheap in their design most modern power supplies will have the switch built internally it'll know automatically based on the input voltage what setting it should be in and it's likely that either there's a blown fuse in here because the wrong input voltage was selected or that the power supply is actually working okay because while it's not receiving the full 230 it's expecting it's still Distributing the power correctly I've seen this before in a few power supplies I do not recommend you run it at the setting if you're in a 110 or 120 volt uh country like the us but it yeah old power supplies like this I try to stay far away from them all that to say I do not intend to run the system in its 230 volt setting around A5 volt environment or 110 or 120 somewhere around there we're going to set it to 115 before powering on by the way the system shipped exactly as you see it here with this right panel like slightly inserted but not all the way and so you just it's kind of hanging like so uh this tells me that somebody's been in here I'm curious what it looks like behind the motherboard tray I really hope this shots in Focus difficult to get it to actually hone in on something that's just basically solid black here let's see what we're dealing with come on bit Jank for sure well yeah all right it is pretty messy you can probably get a better idea now of how old this poweray is katchup of mustard cables yeah also a lower gauge it's just not meant for higher end more modern solutions looks like we've got an RGB controller of sorts here this looks to be wired correctly we've got three fans connected to it the two up top and the one at the rear and let's check out this hard dis Drive I was curious about storage cuz it uh again wasn't me whoa what on Earth is going on here that is completely mangled oh yeah you bet we are definitely pulling this thing out you know I really want to know what eventually led to this I mean this is like the worst I think I've ever seen a hard drive mangled both SATA power and SATA data are completely trashed here just got bits of plastic just falling off of it like were they connecting the wrong cables to this like how does it get this bad I I don't think this is what was keeping the system from actually quote unquote working though this is kind of like an isolated thing you could very easily remove this in fact it was detached you saw when we took the right side panel off I don't think it was a part of the equation here uh we are going to now attempt to fire the system up as is with that hard drive disconnected and with the power supply switch at the rear flip to 115 I'm not sure if I should have a fire extinguisher on standby we're just going to go for it power on at the rear so far so good power on up front it would help if my power STP is on let's try this again oh would you look at that it does at least appear to power on somewhat okay yeah it doesn't look like that's going to happen uh let's try we don't have to worry about front panel I mean it powers on so obviously front panels already wired correctly we can try removing the graphics card and running off of integrated Graphics I don't know what CPU is in here this Intel chip looks old enough it looks like it probably does have integrated Graphics so we can try it directly through the motherboard and if that doesn't work we can test the power supply I have a feeling the power supply is going to be to blame here just again because of the previous setting that we saw and just how Jank it looks like things are wired behind here one thing's for sure this Intel stock cooler has not ramped down its fan curve at all since powering on it is just running full speed and that tells me that we probably haven't gotten through any bit of the postprocess I wow really hate these coolers I'd also like to point out while we're taking this out that just because the power supply was set to the 230 volt position that doesn't necessarily mean that it was powered on in that position it could have been I don't know swapped at the last minute for some reason it's it's very unlikely but still worth noting and for those wondering by the way this is an even older car than I thought a GTX 650 a 1 gig frame buffer on this bad boy I don't think this is going to work but I just want to rule things out by one here so we can remove the graphics card as a potential failure Point all right it does still power on the fan curve is still ramped up to 100% it doesn't sound like it wants to chill out I've got a sneaking suspicion we' a power supply problem that or the power supply used to be the problem and now there are multiple problems because it created them it maybe fried the motherboard maybe it fried the CPU who really knows a dirty power supply is so so dangerous and it can cost you a ton of money in the long run and still no picture I think it's time to test the power supply oh wow yeah it is not liking quite a bit about this power supply this is like an instant replace in my book if this was fix or Flop that's exactly what we're going to do here as well so this entire thing is just one big mess uh again not surprised what we can do very quickly here is try powering the system on with a known working unit we're going to take our trust night jar from Silverstone hook that up try powering on hoping it works if it doesn't then we have more than one issue with this rig which is what I feared a bad power supply can do a lot of damage and I'd be willing to bet this unit doesn't have a ton of fail saves in place really can't believe there's a GTX 650 in this pre-build I thought it was something a little more modern than that it's it it really just destroys any notion of value that this rig would have had all righty so that's in we've got our 24 pin connected and uh yeah let's uh let's cross everything we got here that it is only a power supply issue here we go the suspense I'm sure you guys already know by looking at the uh length of this video if this is actually the only fix required or not of course I don't know in the moment that's what makes it exciting nerve-wracking and a bunch of other things all combined power on CPU fan is at 100% just like it was before not really a great sign assuming the CPU Works how am I going to test it because it's probably on a platform that's much older than anything I have currently on hand and it likely won't come up in a fixer Flop video most folks have moved on from like fourth fifth gen Intel stuff like that my fifth gen this is definitely not fifth gen but you know what I mean it just like it it's just older than I thought and for 250 bucks it is an absolute ripoff I don't I don't know why I thought it was worth buying in the moment this is a DDR3 dim so we're talking fourth gen Intel or older now just a recap we replaced the power supply under suspicion that the old one was defective the tester pretty much confirmed that we still have the exact same issue the same symptom being exhibited where it powers on but doesn't post or send a picture to a monitor I have replaced his DDR REM module with one of mine a g skill Trident X dim and we still have the same problem I have tried both memory slots just in case we have a dead memory Channel either uh on the controller side the CPU side maybe a bad slot and still nothing I've also removed all nonvital cables so front panel USB 3 uh SATA you know SATA data USB 2 and then we also had HD audio all of that's disconnected literally the only thing connected to the motherboard apart from the CPU and memory is this single fan here which I highly doubt is causing any problems because it well it's working that would be strange and of course we have nothing nothing to show for it except for a black screen I do want to remove this Intel stock cooler here and at least see what CPU we're working with you know it does have USB 3 so it can't be that old whoa whoa whoa okay I stand corrected first off what the heck is a made in China sticker doing on top of the IHS this is this is the stupidest thing I've ever seen in a pre-built and the CPU itself is actually much older than I thought it's an Intel Core i 5 2400 I did not know 2400 supported USB 3 I am awfully confused right now it's just crazy this thing's on there and it's just paper it's it's like a it's a sticker you know it's what you'd expect it to be made out of it's not made out of metal and even if it was that would create an an imbalance you'd have different heights across the IHS and that would still just absolutely obliterate your cooling so uh yeah we're definitely goingon to remove that even though I don't even know if this chip works the socket does appear to be in decent shape which I'm a bit surprised by I don't see any bent or missing pins I don't see any excess thermal Pace it worked its way down into here uh overall pretty clean in fact the entire motherboard for that matter looks pretty decent I do not know what brand this is I think this is just a straight from China you know rehash of something we'll have to dive a bit deeper later in the video you can see the made in China sticker at the bottom but otherwise no other indicator of who manufactured this it's not ASRock it's not gigabyte it's not Asus at least it's not apparent to me that it's any of those and uh so that leads me to believe that yeah some Corners were cut to assemble this rig there is one issue I did find it looks like this one capacitor here is slightly dislodged I'm not sure looks like uh we've got some stuff just oozing out of it as well and uh that could very well be why the system's not posting not entirely sure if this is the result of a crappy power supply or not but uh yeah it is clearly sitting crooked I don't think we have a proper connection here oh oh yes that is uh that's exactly what happened look at the burn marks on the bottom of this thing that is not good and that is right next to this other SMD here which looks partially dislodged it looks like there was some uh power related issue right here and the board just said nope and since then we haven't gotten a there's perhaps a better shot of that other SMD that I was pointing out earlier I'm not sure if this is like a transistor there's three connections there but uh one of them the the the connector closest to the camera looks like it is dislodged that is a really crappy solding job this might have just been manufacturer error can't say for certain I just know that the power supply wasn't great and this isn't great either the CPU is so old there's really nothing I can do with it at this point I'll keep it just in case we happen to come across a fixer Flop episode where we need something that old although I doubt it and same goes for this GTX 650 I want to test this in this video I want to see if we can get this thing to post but at the end of the day who really cares again it's so old and so cheap it's actually worse than a lot of integrated Graphics today if I'm being frank and so I almost feel guilty even giving this away to somebody because chances are if they don't have a graphics card at all they're probably better off that way than with this in their system that does sound pretty bad but it is true through in she goes then uh wait a minute this card is designed in such a way that the Shroud hangs over the Golden Fingers here this is the area of the card that slots into well the 16 Lane slot on a traditional motherboard this is really strange I I guess it worked in the original rig because the F length slot was at the very bottom of the board so there's nothing below it to obstruct uh and prevent the uh the Shroud from sitting where it needed to but in our modern board you can see it's hitting like the the seamos battery it's hitting a bunch of other stuff that it shouldn't be and well that's not the motherboard's fault in fact most cards don't have this problem because the Shroud is intentionally not located directly above the connectors this is just silly all around also worth pointing out that someone has definitely been inside of this card you can see that little warranty seal there is broken so I mean maybe it repaced that would actually be a good thing although for a card like this not sure if it matters much today so this next scene is not going to be cringe at all this is my sarcastic face I'm going to install a ryzen 55600 here a b550 motherboard a single ddr4 dim that I know works and I'm literally just going to set this cooler a top the chip no thermal paste no thermal pad just just just just literally for a few seconds I have the GTX 650s shroud entirely removed for obvious reasons we just discussed this is the only way to make it work with a modern motherboard which is just ridiculous I I I cannot believe what this is coming to now we're just going to power on and try for a post 12 seconds later so far we've got nothing card is also it's not getting very hot I don't feel it warming up at all which is not a good sign it should be getting should should be getting hot now I know through the thermal cam it looks like the GPU itself which is centered there is a lot hotter than it surroundings but in reality it's only about 20 maybe 15° fahit warmer than ambient that is nowhere near as hot as it should be I think we have a serious power delivery issue on this card and of course still no post so uh well this was just one big flop so yeah this was a disaster I don't know what I was thinking spending 250 bucks on this this isn't even worth $250 like fixed like working I it's it's certainly not worth that broken but even if we assume all these components work it's still not worth 250 bucks in my book the graphics cards maybe worth 10 20 bucks the CP maybe 20 bucks tops the motherboard maybe another $10 $20 the power supply I wouldn't even accept for free the hard drive probably the same deal I mean even if it wasn't mangled and the case is just a hot box it's cheap it's missing pretty vital stuff I don't know what this PC has been through but I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy thanks so much for watching that's about all I have left to say in this one let me know in the comments below what you what you thought of it and I'll catch you in the next one my name's Greg thanks for learning with me learning how not to spend\n"