Cringeworthy troubleshooting

FubarPilot · April 6, 2021

I messed up really bad and thought I should share, lucky I’m able to laugh at myself for being so stupid. (Pretty long story so if you don’t have time to read, moral of the story is I’m an idiot and laugh at me to make your day better.)

I’ve been into PC gaming since I was a kid but never took the time to fully understand what makes up a great gaming build or what components I should use to get the best performance.

I slowly started getting into LTT on YouTube a couple years ago but didn’t get serious about understanding everything on the PC until about 6 months ago. I had an i7700K, 1080ti and 850w psu that micro center helped me upgrade a few years ago that I used with my Oculus Rift CV1 for mostly online racing and a few other games. It handled it pretty well but when I saw the Reverb G2 coming out I pre ordered it and was hoping my machine could handle it.

After two days with the G2 it was clear that maintaining 90fps on iRacing with low settings and a full field wasn’t going to happen (or I wasn’t smart enough to figure out how to make work). I hadn’t looked into upgrading or buying a new PC but I figured it was inevitable.

Three days after having the G2 I went to turn my PC on and as soon as I hit the power button I heard a pop and saw smoke coming from the back of the machine. I instantly knew (didn’t troubleshoot or look at what caused it) that my psu sparked and was dead. It wouldn’t turn on so to me this machine was now useless.

After a couple weeks of it sitting around I decided that if it was dead I should try to sell the GPU and CPU to someone who could use it but I wanted to test it first. I had a 750w psu from a few years ago that I decided to try and hook up to see if I could get anything working. I used the power cable from my psu that died at first and no fans turned on and nothing lit up so I thought great, the entire PC is dead. I took the gpu to a local computer store to have it tested and they had it up and running in 5 min so I figured it was safe to sell.

After getting that sold I figured why not try and sell the cpu, but I wanted to troubleshoot the PC myself just to see if I could figure anything out. I decided to take the motherboard and SSD out of the case so I could unplug everything and plug in the 750w psu to see if that helped. I took it into a separate room away from my animals since everything was exposed out of the case and this time I used the power cable from the 750w psu and everything turned on and I could see all the fans running. To me unplugging everything must have reset something and that’s why it powered on.

After a few minutes I had this setup displaying on a monitor but I didn’t think the 750w psu would have been enough to play VR games plus I sold my 1080ti already. Since I had it up and running I knew I could sell my 7700k now. Just to test my “skills” I wanted to see if I could put it all back into my case with the 750w power supply that I knew worked to see if I was capable of building or upgrading my PC one day. I put it all back in the case and plugged everything in and took it back out to my computer desk to try it out. Since my old psu cable was already out there I decided to plug it in to the psu and when I went to turn it on nothing happened. This was really weird because I just had it up and running so I thought maybe I should get the power cable that came with the 750w psu.

When I was taking the old power cable out I noticed a flat burn mark about halfway up the cable and I sat there for a second thinking no way could the power cable be what caused all my issues from the beginning. I immediately grabbed the 850w psu that I thought was dead and plugged in the 750w psu’s cable and when I flipped the power switch on the fan turned on.

Thinking there was no way I messed up that bad I unplugged the 750w psu from the motherboard and plugged in the 850w psu and used the power cable that I knew worked and everything started running. I had sold my 1080ti and taken my pc completely apart all because of a bad power supply cable. I’ve made dumb decisions before but the feeling I got when that sank in was pretty low.

Now I was left with a running PC that only had a cpu and a market where gpu’s are basically non existent. I spent a few days feeling depressed at how extremely uneducated I actually was when it came to troubleshooting my own PC and decided that I might as well sell my cpu and look into buying a new PC from a company that could actually get a gpu.

If nothing else this ended up being a great learning experience plus now I know how to take apart my PC and put it back together. Unfortunately being as inexperienced as I was I bent a couple pins on my usb3_34 connector on my motherboard along the way but everything else seems to be working. I have to say thanks to the LTT team because in the end I was able to understand how to do all of this because of their videos and I learned I have absolutely no business touching a PC and I should leave it to the experts. That’s why I ordered a stupid expensive build from Origin PC and can only hope the ridiculous RGB will brighten my day when I get it in the next 30 to 100 days.