iamdarkyoshi

I'd be curious to see crystaldiskmark speed tests to see if the drive's doing the speeds it should. I had a drive go all weird on me and run really slow and it showed up in crystaldiskmark.

The other thing I'd check for is if the battery is charging. Some laptops will disable charging and throttle back performance severely if they don't detect a sufficient charger connected.

Try opening task manager and see what the CPU's clockspeed looks like in real time. I'd expect it to turbo pretty quickly when you try to open programs and whatnot. If it's stuck st a low clockspeed, it might be a missing power management driver (unlikely) or the power management circuitry/firmware may not be allowing it to run at full power.

If everything else checks out, you might want to try updating the machine's BIOS. 

Sounds very much like you're tripping some over power protection in the PSU. The standby rail inside the power supply is usually a seperate circuit, and it's the one that just happens to run the RGB lights when the machine's in standby. The main part of the supply is seeing something it doesn't like, and it locks itself out from running until power is fully removed and re-applied.

There's two ways I would go about sorting or avoiding this issue. The first would be underclocking/undervolting your videocard, which is going to be the bulk of the power draw for your build. The second would be to find a used power supply on ebay or otherwise.

Corsair has a list of power supplies and what series cables they use, so you could try to find a "PSU only" for sale and upgrade to a higher wattage without even re-doing any of your cable runs. Here's links to their current and legacy cable charts:

https://www.corsair.com/us/en/s/psu-cable-compatibility

https://www.corsair.com/us/en/s/legacy-psu-cable-compatibility

Do not try to use another power supply with your existing cables unless it matches the type!

I managed to score two 1200w corsair supplies without cables for 30$ per unit and they're running great for me, but of course your mileage may vary when buying used.

52 minutes ago, keskparane said:

Depends on how you look at it.

 

I have a Cyberpower UPS. It has phone and ethernet protection built in as well. While it didn't prevent a lightning strike from taking my system out the Cyberpower warranty replaced eveything. I'd call that protection.

Fair enough, though I've personally never had much luck with "we'll replace affected equipment if it breaks" deals. Just like car insurance they've always weaseled their way out of anything they can, glad to hear you've had positive experiences though.

As for the UPS itself, the ethernet surge supression certainly can be beneficial but a lot of people see UPSs solely as surge supressors, even though they're mainly intended to be a battery back-up (hence the name Uninturruptable Power Supply)

They just usually happen to also include surge suppression features.

A good surge suppressor strip will do the same job as a UPS in this case as long as battery backup isn't what you need it for, many surge supressor strips have ethernet and coaxial passthrus for this purpose too. They often also offer device protection warranties.

28 minutes ago, JMak00 said:

Yeah, it appears that the lightning surge, in part, came into the house via a coax line and into the modem to the router to my PC. The ethernet port on the mobo i/o was burnt.  

 

Right after the lightning strike I attempted to power on the PC and while 2 of the 3 GPU fans spun up, nothing else in the case turned on, for example, the case fans didnt even start spinning. I purchased the same PSU, swapped it out and fired it up, but nothing turned on.  I quit after that.

 

Appreciate the suggestion on the for parts sale.

Yeah that's real unfortunate, sorry to hear that 

The surge into the ethernet jack very likely took out the motherboard, how far it went after that is anyone's guess. GPU/storage may work still, or it could have trashed nearly everything in the machine. Depends on where it stopped and how sensitive each part is to transients.

Case fans (if connected to the motherboard) may not be getting powered up since the board's control to them is likely toast.

An ethernet surge supressor may help in the future, but unfortunately there's not much that can stop a direct lightning strike. If it can travel through the atmosphere, it's gonna travel through whatever electronics are in its way too. When I redid my house's telecom wiring, I installed a big chunky coaxial grounding block for my internet and my TV antenna as close to the grounded electrical supply as possible. If lightning hits the cable feeding it, it's pretty much game over, though it may not travel as far down the chain of electronics. But if it strikes nearby and induces transients, that grounding block plus a surge supressor may save what comes after. I've not lost anything to lightning yet, but unfortunately it's a real possibility that it'll happen sometime.

As for your PCPP links, both builds look pretty solid. I've got a 13600K and I've been impressed by it, I went with a last gen board to keep some of the costs down though as it was kinda an impulse purchase.

I'm only running a rather ancient gen 3 SSD though. Can't really feel the need for much faster.

17 minutes ago, ImWilly said:

You might need to consider buying APC UPS for your next PC built

Unfortunately, UPSs aren't gonna do much in the event of a lightning strike. The most they could do in that case is surge supression, something a surge suppressor power strip will do just as well. 

I'd also personally steer clear of APC, at least the consumer stuff. I've seen reports of them using aluminium wire instead of copper in the transformers and not even crimping the wires to terminals, instead trying (and failing) to solder to the aluminium wire which doesn't work. I took apart one a friend gave me and sure enough it has aluminium windings with no proper connection to the wire.

As for the old machine, @JMak00 is there anything working still? What troubleshooting has been done on it? You may be able to reuse parts from the old build, such as the case at the very least. You could probably also sell the old machine on the classifieds here as a "for parts" machine.

What was it doing before the recap? Hard to tell from the photo but it looks like vertical linearity is way off

Update 1: Monitor works outstandingly well!

Next up is the C64!

I know I've been gone a hot minute but I'm back! A lot has changed in my life while I was gone from the forums, but that's a topic for another day.

For today, we've got a commodore 64 with matching monitor and disk drive , even have a joystick to go with it, But they're not in the best of shape at the moment...

I figured I'd make this a bit of a repair log, and post updates here as I make progress. Here's what we're working with currently:

The cats seem to be quite amused by the lot:

This is all well within my realm of insanity to get working again. I've even got a fully working C64 I can test chips in.

Stay tuned for updates! I go back to work wednesday night so progress will be halted until sunday evening rolls around, but I'll try to make some progress on the lot tonight, starting with the monitor.

Update 1: Monitor works outstandingly well!

Next up is the C64!

I'm at about 20-30 desktops, 10-15 laptops, several phones, 8 xboxes, 5 xbox 360's, and other assorted junk

3 hours ago, recreator665 said:

Well the activation isn't what really bothers me (but it would be nice to have) as the missing SN and model in BIOS. 

Sadly those are likely gone forever, unless you can get ahold of lenovo tools that aren't supposed to leave the factory, and you can get the BIOS into a mode that accepts being programmed...

3 minutes ago, SenKa said:

Windows 10 LTSC gets my vote, I run it on everything.

Ehh I'd just run regular enterprise. It feels like what pro was supposed to be

Stuff is broken in LTSC with the removal of basically all uwp applications 

They likely found a bios dump from another machine online and flashed it using an SPI programmer. The BIOS chip holds all that info, and I suppose they found a dump of another machine which had those values stripped from it.

I've had to do repairs like this at the store I work at (on the same model laptop too). Sadly all I was able to do was make the machine have the IDs from another machine, since that's what the dump of the BIOS chip contained.

Best bet for activation would probably be to use the windows 7 key off a machine you no longer use anymore, since the key stored in your BIOS is gone.

Step down (buck) converters generally need a volt or two higher than their output, and 6V to 5V is barely enough for even the higher end buck converters. Not to mention, the batteries will drain below 6V and cause more issues.

I'd go for a buck/boost converter, since it accepts above and below the desired output voltage, so as the batteries drain down to like 4V or lower, it'll still be kicking out 5V.

One thing I'd look into though is to see if you can find one with a fixed 5V output instead of a variable one. I'd expect them to run a bit more stable.

11 hours ago, tankingwrong said:

Were you able to update the BIOS or was the chip being bad make it a wash, had to abandon it?

In theory, I'd need a BIOS dump from the same series machine, and it'd work again. Never really bothered with it

Update:

It turns out I have a ripoff HDD. Inside was a recertified WD black...

Spent about 5 hours getting my stupid ass computer to write the backwards compatibility partition onto it.

But it works now!

8 minutes ago, Twilight said:

Iirc only some OG Xbox games are supported... 

I've tried 10 different ones from the list, including halo. All games play fine on my OG unit, but it only has component video

Haven't been able to find a definitive answer to this yet.

I've got a trinity xbox 360 slim. It was a virgin when I got it, tamper seal intact.

I'm trying to use it to play original xbox games on the projector in my bedroom, but I'm just getting the following message:

Everyone seems to be saying that I need an OEM HDD with that special partition on it. Is mine OEM?

Removing the HDD gives this error:

Not being a console gamer, I'm kinda at a loss. What's going on here? The main menu shows the title of the disc fine.

7 minutes ago, Gegger said:

well ddr3l is lower power ram, and by using ddr3 you might have just fried the mem controller

I suppose its possible, but I've never seen it happen, and I've been doing laptop repair for years now. Most DDR3L only systems will actually still work with DDR3, though some don't

I've got the same NUC here and mine had a corrupt BIOS chip...

3 minutes ago, 5x5 said:

That's normal when you're in idle and on battery - if your CPU runs at full speed, you'd get 1 hour of battery or lower

It should not be running that low, unless it only sometimes goes to 500mhz. If its stuck on 500mhz, try updating your BIOS. Download the bios update from their website, extract the contents to a freshly fat32 formatted USB drive, and then open the easyflash utiliy in the BIOS. Point it to the bios update file you downloaded and you should be good to go.

If it still doesn't fix it, try downloading chipset and power management related drivers from the same page you got the BIOS update from.

On 9/8/2019 at 8:55 PM, IsaacG said:

If I am unable to repair the header, would I be able to run the stock fan and an intel cpu fan all off that disk drive power cable at 12v? I know this is a little repetitive, but I don't have a hard drive and play all my games via the disk drive and a usb stick, so I need to make sure I don't fry the thing or I have to buy a new xbox.

Yeah, just source 12V off the disk drive header, it'll be able to power the fans you want to power

I would suggest trying to get the original fans working though, and get the ductwork in place to move air through the heatsinks horizontally. 

I believe the middle pin is ground and the two outer pins are the fan positives, but don't quote me on that

25 minutes ago, IsaacG said:

Would there be any negative consequences if I wire fans up to the dvd drive power cable (I play pretty much offline only.)

Just noise

The console would probably last longer since it'll be well cooled

Something must have gone up in smoke, look for small black components with a hole in the top.

Which board revision? My two consoles are Jasper and Trinity.

If you're unable to find any, you may need to wire the fans to a voltage rail inside but they'll run at a set speed.

1 hour ago, Windows7ge said:

-snip-

Pretty much exactly what I would have done. The 50mA difference on the fan really shouldn't be an issue. Worst I could see happening is it runs a tad warmer and the fan controller increases the speed to compensate, assuming it has speed control.

My guess is someone slid it into a rack and there was a cable behind it like a power cable and it dented the fan in. Dunno.

Either way it sounds like it's back up and running, overnight test should give us an answer as to if it survived.

49 minutes ago, jonnyGURU said:

I was talking about the enclosure (chassis) as well.  It doesn't look like a 2U and I haven't seen a 2U that accepts standard ATX PSUs.  This looks like a 3U.

 

2U's are only 3.5" tall.  

2U on the spec page. http://www.istarusa.com/en/istarusa/products.php?model=MAGE212U40-PCI-E

It makes sense, 1U servers use 40mm fans, 2U uses 80mm fans, which is what is inside a standard ATX PSU.

As for inspecting the PCB for damage, it sounds like a good idea. I have had a gateway PSU that took a fall and the transformer broke off the board.

27 minutes ago, jonnyGURU said:

First off:  That's a Zippy PSU.  One of the best PSU OEMs out there.  Might even consider just swapping out the fan.

 

Second:  It's a standard ATX PSU.  Not 1U, 2U or Flex.  Just good ol' PS/2 / ATX.  Not even the connectors are proprietary. 

 

Thirdly:  That's not a 2U chassis.  That's a 3U chassis.  Almost anything will fit in there.

Not 100% sure on the last one. If a 1U server is a little thicker than a 40mm fan, then a 2U should be a little thicker than an 80mm fan, which looks to be the case here.

I'd definitely agree with the fan replacement route though, Looks to be an NMB 12v 300mA fan, which should be super easy to find a replacement for if OP is comfortable doing a fan swap.