So this guy brings me a new PC his mate built for him and they don’t know why it doesn’t work
This is a perfect example of watching some youtube videos and thinking you know more than an expert because you “did your research” you have enough information to think you know everything but not enough to realize just how much you don’t know, this has always been a problem with technology, it’s a growing problem with with a lot of other things…..cough..anti-vaxers…cough… right wingers..cough cough.
CPU was in the socket the wrong way around, it doesn’t slide in the wrong way around so it would have had to be forced in like this and they actually screwed the heat sink down all the way really tight so bent pins all over CPU and damaged CPU socket
NVMe slot damaged, turned out to be mostly bent pins that I could straighten and it worked. The riser that screws into the mainboard for the SSD to screw into was missing so the SSD was just bouncing around not secured, they apparently lost the rest of the screws, luckily I had a spare to replace it with.
I was about to test the system and check the mainboard for any damage I might have missed and found damaged components just below the first RAM slot, 2 caps and a resistor broken and the corner missing off a generic driver IC.
There were two different pairs of RAM, one Gskill pair that is the new RAM and a pair of Samsung RAM i think it was, turns out the Gskill RAM had damaged pins, it’s not good to use unmatched random pairs of RAM like this, expect quirky unreliable behavior, I’m not even sure how that kind of damage happens. The owner is mostly playing games like league of legends so one 16GB pair is overkill, 32GB of RAM is super duper overkill.
Oh it’s also using one of those super cheap sub $100 higher than 500W power supplies that have a really high failure rate and barely have 80-plus rating or don’t
Click on photos for a larger view, captions on every photo, if you are using a smart phone or ipad and don’t have a mouse cursor then sorry no captions for you.
update 20-09-2022 Additional information I should have originally mentioned
with pin grid array CPU’s (the ones with legs on the CPU) it is possible to replace broken pins by transferring them from a donor CPU, they are actually soldered onto the CPU so don’t lose hope if you have a high end CPU with a couple of broken legs, it can usually be fixed stealing some legs from a really cheap/old CPU that uses the same size legs.
Northridge fix demonstrates this well in this video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WF3T4tzIi88
Also if you have an intel board with legs in the CPU socket that are badly bent or broken off, it is actually possible to replace the CPU socket itself and they generally cost $10-$20 AUD, so if you have a high end intel desktop board with a mangled socket it is well worth it to repair it. The legend himself DosDude1 is the only person I’ve seen make a video demonstrating this successfully.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SzMHJXHO120