Very weird PC problem & advice on upgrade path.

Little*Freak

Little*Freak

Little*Freak

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31 Jan 2014
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Hiya everyone, trying to make a long story short but this one is long.

I built a PC for a chap at work years ago, it stopped working a few weeks ago & we finally found out why. His Child didn't tell us that it would turn on and off on it's own if he moved it slightly, the Power cord was too short and it was making/breaking contact 2 or 3 times per day. This seems to have killed his GTX 1050Ti & the 1 TB HDD. Got 5 beeps at startup every time & zero display, not even the BIOS screen. I tried various GPU's and nothing worked. Have fitted the cheapest Brand New GPU I could get at OC, the RX 6500 XT and a spare WD500 SSD that I had lying about cause the 1TB HDD wouldn't Boot up no matter how long I left it Loading Windows. Worked fine for awhile, then it stopped working, then started working, a bit confusing as you can imagine.

Have a few questions. Could the on/off, arching Power cord problem have damaged the Motherboard as well as killing the GPU & HDD ? If you move the leads around a bit and turn it off it doesn't always turn back on again. Due to getting 5 Beeps at startup I got another CPU on Ebay, a Ryzen 5 1600 but his 1200 seems to be working now, should I fit the better cpu anyway? Should I just ditch the Motherboard and get a replacement? Can't really explain properly how vexing this one was, nothing seemed to work until I swapped out lots of stuff. The Kid only really plays Valorant on his PC, with current specs (Ryzen 3 1200, AMD A320M-DGS m/b, 8Gb Ram, rx6500xt and a wd 500gb ssd), would it be wiser to source another Motherboard and fit the Ryzen 1600 as well or should I just get a newer Amd 4500 & Motherboard ? Money is super tight on this one but if new stuff needs to be got then it will be.

Any ideas or suggestions will be welcome, 2 days and an evening spent on this one. (at 1 point I even considered just buying them one of those pre-built Refract PC's to fix everything in 1 go)

Many thanks in advance for any advice.
 
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The arcing power supply could have killed literally everything inside the case AND the power button on the case because pretty much everything is connected to the power supply in some way. It's basically like a mini lightning strike each time it arcs. It is literally a case of checking bit by bit I'm afraid.

A good quality psu might have some overload protection but you don't say what brand of psu and based on what you've said it's likely not one with any protection.

The hard drive and gpu might not be dead....it could be the motherboard, cables, cpu even, did you check what you can with with another pc?

Have you not replaced the psu... who knows what sort of damage that has inside. Hell that could be damaged on the 24pin which then affects the motherboard..
 
Hi and thanks for the reply. Yes I am concerned by the PSU, can't remember the make but it was all bought from OC at the time. Fitting a Brand New GPU & SSD seemed to work, for now at least.
The Original GPU and HDD are dead, they won't work in my PC, they are Kaput. Fist time I have ever come across a dead GPU.

Anyway, from your reply I get the sense that I had better replace the PSU, the CPU and the M/B sharpish. I have an AMD RYZEN 1600, should I use that with a replacement M/B scrounged from where ever or just get a newer AMD RYZEN 4500 & Compatible M/B + Better/Faster RAM?
 
If the board is compatible you could try dropping the cpu into the motherboard just to check.

Obviously no idea of budgets but I'd probably edge towards all new stuff or second hand from a respectable seller... basically you have no idea what might happen long term with any left over bits, theres nothing to say the ram hasn't been damaged for all we know. It might even be worth looking into those old office pc's (optiplex) that pop up from time to time although you need to be careful with specs there.

Depending on budget you might actually get better bang per buck with intel on the budget side these days so if you're replacing the cpu/mb/ram might be worth checking both ways.

Also don't forget the longer kettle plug :P
 
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