Gadgetory

okay so before you even begin troubleshooting your PC I recommend drinking a cup of coffee have an energy drink something along those lines now this isn't a sponsored spot on being dead serious drink something like this before you begin troubleshooting because you could be doing this for quite a long time hey everyone welcome to another video on the how to playlist this one hits close to home because I've been following the channel for quite a while you know that every now and then I do have something go wrong at some point somehow with one of my PC's this one right here is no exception this is an ITX pcs boarding an i-5 7600 k 16 gigs of RAM GTX 1060 and a fractal I think it's a 400 450 watt sfx power supply all packed into the fractal node 202 this is a classic example of a PC that will not post now that word is actually an acronym it's not just something we float around it means power on self test it's a checklist of sorts at the PC run sir when you first power it on to make sure all the components are functioning properly before you boot into your operating system this video will focus primarily on the post issue though I will briefly mention what you should do if your monitor isn't receiving any signal from your PC especially if the computer appears to be functioning properly these are just scenarios I imagine a few first-time builders will find themselves in at some point maybe you receive a do a part or you just didn't wire something correctly I also recommend checking out the link in this video's description tied to a Tom's Hardware forum post it's a beautiful breakdown of what you should do if your PC is not posting or if your system won't boot in general no power or if you're not receiving any video output to your monitor right so for the sake of time the length of this video because it could be hours long if I want to address every possible scenario I'm going to assume that you kind of already know what you're doing so you plugged everything in correctly maybe this isn't your first rodeo or you've used a YouTube channel like my own or website to help help you along the way as you build your PC I'm going to assume that you've wired everything correctly and that you're receiving power from the wall that you haven't tripped a break or anything like that so the basics you got that so in most troubleshooting cases especially if you do know to some extent what you're doing the specs themselves aren't going to matter as long as you're using the proper CPU for the motherboard the proper Ram it's DDR 3 or ddr4 videocard that's plugged in correctly and a power supply's delivering enough power to even boot the computer in the first place which usually isn't going to require a lot of power then the specs really don't matter now it just comes down to what component if it's a hardware issue is causing the PC to either boot loop or just not turn on period in the case of this PC here the computer will turn on for about five seconds turn back off and then cycle again and again and again repeat the exact same thing the first thing that I recommend you do ultimately depends on whether or not this is the first time you've booted up this PC so if your pcs been running for days months years it doesn't matter and now all of a sudden won't turn on the first thing I recommend you do is clear your CMOS what that will do is reset all of your BIOS settings back to the stock configurations that your motherboard had when it came out of the box let's say you had an overclock of 4.3 gigahertz on your CPU and a V core of 1.3 that might have been good a year ago but now thanks to the degradation of technology is just what happens over time let's see if you might require a bit more voltage it's not receiving that required voltage when you first turn your PC on it will continue cycling and if your motherboards are considerably old board then the BIOS won't reset itself newer boards will typically warn you after a few cycles and say hey we just reset to default settings because something in your BIOS was forcing this PC to trip and turn off and on again but older motherboards aren't usually going to do that for you so I recommend clearing your CMOS you'll find some kind of jumper at the bottom your board your motherboard manual will tell you how to do that some newer boards will have just a button you can click to clear the CMOS and reset the BIOS now assuming the opposite case so this is the first time you've ever turned your PC on and you're getting a boot loop or your system will not post in general I recommend starting first with system RAM remove one dim change the slots don't occupy all the slots just put one stick around in if it still doesn't work try each slot you might have one two three dead slots if you have four slots on your board or if you have an x2 9 9 X 99 your X 79 board you could have seven dead slots in one good slot it is possible for peace of mind sake I recommend taking one stick trying it in each of those slots and kind of narrowing down the possibility of a system Ram error remember it could be the DIMM itself or the slot itself on the motherboard either as possible I'll tell you right now the reason why this you see wooden post is because one of the RAM slots on this board the asrock fatalities ii to 70 gaming board which i reviewed right here by the way died on me randomly just a fluke thing now so I had both of these modules installed and all of a sudden just one time after benchmarking the PC wouldn't turn back on I decided to remove one of the modules kept one in try each slot I found out that the outside slot was dead and the way that I confirm that it wasn't the module itself that was bad was I tried a whole nother stick of RAM just a completely different stick from a different manufacturer and that would also not work on the outside slot but it worked perfectly fine on the inside slot so through the process of elimination you can figure out which slot is that if that is the case alright so if we assume a system Ram is not the issue we're getting the exact same errors on our PC then the second thing I recommend you swap out or remove to just test for the sake of testing is the graphics card remove the graphics card if you have an IG P you plug the HDMI cable into the motherboard directly to remove the graphics card as a potential issue if you get the exact same error again then you know that it's not the graphics card and if you get a post or even if you don't have an eye GPU that you just turn the computer on anyway and the computer doesn't give you some kind of error code or doesn't boot loop then chances are the graphics card is the problem if you've deduced that the graphics card is what is causing the boot loop you can either try moving that graphics card to a different slot on the board maybe it's just the PCI slot that's giving you an issue you could also check to see if you have the cables from the power supply plugged in correctly either six or eight pin or both if you're not getting enough power to the graphics card and that can be a reason why you're not getting any signal to your monitor and if both of those fail then it might just be a PCB issue in which case just return the thing and buy another cart because you're not going to be able to fix these really tiny things on the board itself now at this point if you're still getting a PC boot error or you're not getting a post period then be prepared to get your hands dirty because you're going to have to virtually disassemble what you've already assembled in your case this is why we recommend building your PC outside the case first to make sure that your components are working because if you have to start dissecting everything and troubleshooting individual components it's going to be a lot easier to do if everything is not already assembled in your case now I recommend verifying that your CPU is seated properly I've actually run into this issue a few times myself especially with ex 9 X 299 CPUs those are pretty large sockets the CPUs themselves are large as well and if you get any sort of improper pin contact then your PC will likely not post so remove the CPU cooler from your build also remove the CPU from the socket depending on to give an LG or PG a layout most AMD boards will have a pga layout so you can check the pins physically on the CPU make sure that none of those are bent you want proper contact remember if you have an LGA board usually with Intel then you can check the pins physically in the motherboard make sure that none of those are bent if they are I have a video right here that should kind of help you out I guess I mean you can try your best worst case you can go ahead and RMA it but if you can fix it yourself I mean to save you save you time long run you want to wait as long to have that bright and shiny new PC up and running once you've ensured that the pins are not bent go ahead and reseat the CPU into the motherboard socket reseat the CPU cooler atop the CPU and then try booting again it could just be as simple as removing the see-through from the socket and reinserting it may be that tiny little movement change is the difference between a post and no post and that is actually something I've experienced as well literally removing the CPU inserting it back into the socket for whatever reason fixes the post issue now at this point there's really only three or four other components in the system we can try testing and troubleshooting from just a general hardware standpoint to determine which of these is preventing our PC from posting I don't recommend starting with the power supply I'll discuss that later and also you can kind of narrow down if it's a drive issue or not because if your SSD is there's dead let's just say it just died randomly most of the time it's not going to write your PC from turning on you're going to get a post and your bios's either going to tell you that hey we can't read this drive or it's going to tell you that there is no boot drive present and it's just going to keep cycling to your BIOS over and over and over so if it's a drive issue that's usually what will happen if it's a hard drive and you have your OS on a hard drive oftentimes it'll happen if your hard drive starts failing is it'll boot up maybe for 10-15 seconds you might even get into Windows or whatever operating system you're running and then maybe it'll crash after that it with a blue screen of death that could just be because your disk is spinning fast enough or it's just not spending period so dry of troubleshooting is a bit different most of the time a drive is not going to prevent your PC from turning on in the first place you could check again to make sure that you've put an adequate amount of thermal paste between your seat it's cooler though even if you don't put any cooler at all atop the CPU and you just try to turn the thing on usually I'll get a post and your PC might even stay on for a while if it's just going to throw a throttle hardcore down to like you know 200 megahertz or so that shouldn't Alton Utley prevent the PC from posting in general even if you hit T Junction and pass T Junction you'll still get a post and it should still run for a few seconds at least so I wouldn't recommend going through the whole trouble like swapping CPU coolers I really don't think that's necessary for scenario like this at this point we've narrowed it down to just our motherboard and our power so remember this this PC here there was just a dead RAM slot but if you're still having issues and you've run through the previous mention steps and you've also have been kind of running through the checklist on the Tom's Hardware forum then all you have left are the motherboard and the power supply as potential hardware causes I recommend starting with a power supply first because it's just more straightforward you can either take a voltmeter and test each of your connection to all your peripherals make sure that proper power is being delivered to each of these peripherals that could take a lot of time though and you have to verify you know which voltage reading is on which pin it just gets complicated what I recommend doing is removing this power supply and going to Best Buy Micro Center just buying another power supply online if you have to and testing that power supply in the system if your PC boots then you've basically concluded that the power supply you had in there was already dead not delivering enough power to one of your peripherals but if your PC is posting but not sending any signal to your monitor then you can assume in most cases that your power supply is ok you can still swap it out just for peace of mind sake but if you're getting a post and no signal then your power supply is more than likely ok the last thing in our checklist then is the motherboard and at this point all I can really say is best of luck troubleshooting this thing you've already narrowed down the fact that your RAM slots are functioning properly and that if you have an LGA board you don't have any bent pins in the motherboard socket then you're really not gonna be able to troubleshoot much else on this board you can verify that the PCI slots aren't dead but that's why I told you to move the video cord from the top slot maybe to the next 16x lot but that's really it you could try removing the HD audio cable you could try removing the USB 3.0 cable most of the time those aren't going to trip your entire PC and prevent it from turning on it's difficult to and trying a new motherboard because that you can't just buy anywhere you can buy those at micro Sun or few other stores but for the most part in your city you're not going to have just a store you could go to to buy another motherboard to try troubleshooting with which means that you're going to have to order one online more than likely and completely rebuild your PC some other board is like underneath everything else in your build now that if you've never Devery thing else down and you're confident that it's not your graphics card you've plugged all these components into other pcs verify that they all work properly then yeah it's probably going to be a motherboard issue and even if it's not worst case you swap everything out and you still get an issue at least you know that it's not the motherboard so the old one you had is good just return the newer one at this point there are a plethora of reasons why your PC couldn't be turning on just reasons that I would say are kind of stupid for most of us especially if we've been building pcs for quite a while it could just be as simple as your power supply switch not being turned on and wondering why you're not getting any power period it could be as simple as maybe you plug the power LED header into the power switch header something simple like that so you're pushing the power button on your case and you're not getting any power because you wire that lead into the wrong header on the motherboard it could be as simple as maybe you plug the VGA cable and upside down or you plug the VGA cable into the EPS 8 pin cable up top and the motherboard it could be as simple as maybe you didn't see the graphics card properly into the PCIe slot it could be as simple as you didn't push the RAM module all the way into the slot on the motherboard I've done that personally so check all the simple things as well you can check those before you run to any of the serious troubleshooting steps up front again if you're confident that's why I move on to the bigger troubleshooting measures but check the simple stuff to you know keep it simple and and don't work harder than you need to so the most common issues are the simplest ones most often and I would say that you know checking all your connections up front is a good thing to do again though if you've checked all of your connections cleared your CMOS made sure that all of these components work outside of this PC and other pieces but they don't work in this one it could be I don't know maybe you just have a standoff that's like shorting out something on your motherboard if the list goes on I do recommend checking out the link in this video's description of the Tom's Hardware forum post it is a very informative I would say it's way more detailed in this video this one is just kind of me talking about some personal issues that I've run into when it when I build pcs some super simple things maybe you have something that's more complicated like a dead RAM slot but start with RAM and start with your graphics cards the two easiest things to remove also remember clear CMOS first and foremost if you're not getting a post and check your basic connections if you liked this video or at least appreciate the breakdown be sure to give us them a thumbs up it lets me know that I'm doing a decent job I appreciate that be sure to click the subscribe button if you haven't already that's a 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