Let's make a gaming PC - The Bear and Badger

GooberTheHat

Yeah, it's a bit fucked at the moment.

voices

I stand by my choice of getting a second hand 3080.

Blue Swirl

I think my computer is dead. Yesterday it was slow to react to the power button being pressed, now nothing happens at all when I try to turn it on. I've done all the usual stuff; making sure cables are seated (inside and out), and that everything else is "on" (like the power strip the cable goes into is still switched on), and nothing. (The monitor and speakers are plugged into the same strip and they still work.) Currently it's a multi-hundred pound brick.

The biggest thing I've learned from this project is that it's not worth the effort to build your own machine.

GurtTractor

Did you try a BIOS reset?

Blue Swirl

How would I do that when it doesn’t power on? (Not being belligerent, genuine question.)

GurtTractor

When you say it was slow to react when pressing the power button, do you mean it was slow to boot into Windows? Or was the actual hardware, lights/fans/etc, slower to turn on than usual? Because the latter might indicate a power supply problem.

GurtTractor

Blue Swirl wrote:

How would I do that when it doesn’t power on? (Not being belligerent, genuine question.)

The BIOS can be reset by either removing and reinserting the little battery in there, or shorting some jumpers, or pressing a button if your mobo has a BIOS reset button. It doesn't require power to do that.

GurtTractor

And I think you're supposed to wait a few minutes after removing battery before putting it back in, though usually it doesn't take that long.

Blue Swirl

GurtTractor wrote:

When you say it was slow to react when pressing the power button, do you mean it was slow to boot into Windows? Or was the actual hardware, lights/fans/etc, slower to turn on than usual? Because the latter might indicate a power supply problem.

The latter. I’d press the button and nothing, but then a wee while later everything would start up. It was fine for a while after that, but now nothing happens at all.

Hopefully the PSU isn’t fried.

GurtTractor wrote:

The BIOS can be reset by either removing and reinserting the little battery in there, or shorting some jumpers, or pressing a button if your mobo has a BIOS reset button. It doesn't require power to do that.

Ah I see. I’ll check the manual. Cheers.

GurtTractor

Yeah try a BIOS reset, just turn off the power then remove that battery or use the jumper.

If that doesn't work then my money's on the PSU being shit, but you might also want to try a CPU/RAM reseat just to be thorough.

Blue Swirl

I’ll see what I can do. Cheers.

Blue Swirl

No luck with the jumper or popping out the battery. I’ll try component reseats later.

b0r1s

Fingers crossed it’s just the PSU. The good thing there is you can order one, try it and if it doesn’t work return it. Bit of a pain I know.

GurtTractor

If you do order another PSU let me know and I can recommend one.

Diluted Dante

Have you pulled everything and tried booting it bare bones?

Blue Swirl

b0r1s wrote:

Fingers crossed it’s just the PSU. The good thing there is you can order one, try it and if it doesn’t work return it. Bit of a pain I know.

Fingers crossed the reseat works! And returning things is a bit more difficult with the language barrier. I might lug it to a local shop when CNY ends and ask if I can try a PSU before buying it.

GurtTractor wrote:

If you do order another PSU let me know and I can recommend one.

That’d be good.

Diluted Dante wrote:

Have you pulled everything and tried booting it bare bones?

Like, all the components connected, but not in the case?

GurtTractor

Bare bones in this instance would just mean unplugging anything that isn't required for the thing to boot. So you could try turning it on with the CPU/RAM/PSU/GPU(if your chip doesn't have onboard graphics) connected, but nothing else, even the SSD and mouse + keyboard. You might want to do that when troubleshooting these kinds of issues to see if some other component or cable has like a short or something weird in it that that's causing the system to not boot properly.

It might not help anything tbh but it's worth a try at least.

Blue Swirl

Oh I see. Good idea.

Blue Swirl

Guessing it’s a bad sign that I took the CPU cooler off and the CPU came with it.

GurtTractor

No that can happen with AM4 chips, you should be careful though not to drop it down again and bend pins on the chip, a common issue unless you carefully wiggle it off and possibly part of why AMD has gone to LGA on the latest chips.

Blue Swirl

Ah, OK. No, the pins look fine. Everything is back in, and I've unplugged everything external (monitor, keyboard, etc.), and still no luck. I'm hoping the PSU is fried, because that sounds like less of a ball ache than the motherboard being borked.

Blue Swirl

I found a repair shop right around the corner, and it seems like everything is working. Well, I can't get the case lights to be anything other than purple, and the fans are always spinning at a middling speed (rather than ramping up and down with CPU temperature, as I set in the BIOS), but I can boot into Windows, play games, and write documents, etc. The problems I have now are the same problems I had before.

It turns out it was the power supply. So they put a new one in and even installed it for me, for about 60% of what the same unit* would cost in the UK. So I thought I'd spring for the installation, because I couldn't be bothered wrestling with the wiring, and it was a bargain anyway. I even asked the bloke if I had made the right choice with my power supply, just in case I'd bought a duff one. He thought it should be OK, so it looks like I just got unlucky with the original.

Even better, the power supply is one of the few things I hadn't lost the receipt for when I moved apartment, so hopefully I can take it back next weekend and get a refund.

*MAG A650BN

Blue Swirl

Next up, potentially dumb questions, because I'm dumb. Apologies in advance.

Could I have fried the PSU using a dodgy power strip? I would have thought the power strip would have popped before the PSU did if there was a surge or anything, but like I said. Me is dum. Would it be worth getting a longer cable for the PC itself, so it can be plugged directly into the wall, and the monitor etc. can share the power strip?

Could it be down to the case fans always spinning at the default speed? As the power supply heats up over an extended play session (I've been addicted to Sable recently), could that have tipped it over the edge?

I'll probably think of more questions in the mean time, but I'm off to leave the repair shop a 5* review on Google maps, and play some Sable.

Oh, and thanks to everyone that helped me, both building my rig in the first place, and with suggestions when it went pop.

Blue Swirl

Hang on, I may have realised what went wrong. I think I put the original PSU in upsidedown. In my build, the fans on the PSU faced the mesh on the inside of the case, but the repair bloke has it with the PSU fans facing the mesh on the bottom. I thought it'd be fine my way around because there's loads of fans keeping the air moving, but maybe my PSU was just drinking down hot air from the rest of the system. The repair bloke's way, there's like two thermal zones, one for the motherboard et al. (drawing air from the front and ejecting from the top), and one for the PSU (drawing air from the bottom and ejecting from the back).

Fuck me I'm a blithering idiot.

GurtTractor

Blue Swirl wrote:

Could I have fried the PSU using a dodgy power strip?

Probably not, though cheapo power supplies may be more susceptible to surges or brownouts etc due to lower grade components and lesser design. The fans thing wouldn't make a difference they draw fuck all wattage. No PSU should be able to be damaged by the power being drawn from it, they should have good overvoltage protection etc.

IIRC your PSU seemed like it was included with the case? I think I saw some reviews for it where other people had them fail, probably just a cheap naff design. This kind of thing is why I always always recommend never cheaping out on power supplies, sometimes they can be basically fine but it's just better to be able to have some confidence in the most essential component. Also if you like quiet PCs low end power supplies can be a menace due to constantly spinning fans that you can't easily replace.

Blue Swirl

That's good to know.

No, all the components were bought separately.

GurtTractor

Blue Swirl wrote:

Hang on, I may have realised what went wrong. I think I put the original PSU in upsidedown. In my build, the fans on the PSU faced the mesh on the inside of the case, but the repair bloke has it with the PSU fans facing the mesh on the bottom. I thought it'd be fine my way around because there's loads of fans keeping the air moving, but maybe my PSU was just drinking down hot air from the rest of the system. The repair bloke's way, there's like two thermal zones, one for the motherboard et al. (drawing air from the front and ejecting from the top), and one for the PSU (drawing air from the bottom and ejecting from the back). Fuck me I'm a blithering idiot.

Nope, either configuration is fine as long as it's able to breath some air. I mean unless your computer was getting stupidly hot in there, like with no intake of cool air at all and super power hungry CPU/GPU running at max, and even then that shouldn't be a problem if the component has been designed properly with overtemp protection.

It was just a shit power supply. Almost certainly not your fault.

GurtTractor

You can test to see if your case has adequate ventilation by running CPU and GPU stress tests simultaneously for 15 mins or more, then taking off the side panel and seeing how different the temps are. HWiNFO in sensors mode and with the graphs that can be brought up by right clicking on temp readings is great for this.

Unless you have fairly high end parts temperature is unlikely to be any kind of concern though, and everything should and usually is designed to have automatic overtemp protection.

Blue Swirl

GurtTractor wrote:

It was just a shit power supply. Almost certainly not your fault.

Oh good. Phew. I mean, I was careful to make sure everything could breathe. I have watched the infamous Verge video, and basically did the opposite.

I'll look into doing the stress tests and such. At the moment, I'm just going to breathe easy knowing everything (almost) works again.

GurtTractor

I think in the Verge video he had the PSU's grille up against a flat closed surface on the inside of the case, which is a poor idea though still shouldn't actually kill anything. Having the PSU draw air from the interior of the case on the other hand is quite common and has been done for ages, it should make little difference if there's sufficient airflow coming into the case. I have mine drawing from the inside as it happens, though I have a weird inverted layout case so it kind of has to be that way, and with how I've set it up it's been perfectly happy running like that for ages.

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