one the following video contains footage of a PC that has been intentionally
damaged for educational and entertainment purposes species was fully functional it was sent to us by origin
but we broke it the makers of this video urged viewers exercise caution and respect when handling Electronics
origin PC told me to give away this Kronos V3 small form factor gaming PC
and that is their right they did sponsor the video but I have been spending a lot
of time on r slash malicious compliance lately and while they did stipulate that
I have to give it away they didn't say it had to be in working condition so
here's the deal Kelvin if that is your real name from the time you touch this
computer you have two hours to fix it needing all of these criteria if you
succeed you take it home with you ready to game if you fail I give it to someone
else you may right now visually inspect the
PC visually but don't touch not that I think you'll
be able to glean any useful information anyway our team of skilled customer to
Service Experts burned the Midnight Oil making sure that this was going to be
extremely challenging anybody say something you can you don't have to you
can just touch the computer and try and fix it okay touched it set the thing set the thing
here we go oh oh and this is great
because while he's trying to think right now is a perfect time for me to go
through a few more really important details that I'm springing on him at the
last second here oh and springy on Origin they had no idea you see I put
together a few little bonus prize packs of my own but to get them he has to
complete the challenge in a lot less than two hours every 30 minutes I'm
going to open up one of these envelopes and I'll read out what's inside them but
once I say it you no longer get it oh
isn't that fun and the best part Calvin
is that absolutely nobody is cheering for you because if you fail there's a
separate giveaway for another Chronos V3
for all the fine folks watching from home but it's just one unless you fail
too isn't that great no hard feelings though man the contract says I have to
give it away it doesn't say that I have to give it away to you ouch
wow it really doesn't say anything it doesn't even say that I'm not allowed to
distract you it's great do you have any experience
fixing computers Calvin because it really doesn't look like I've built my own before wow this is tough he has to
post boot into Windows have all the parts detected in Hardware info there's
a lot of stuff in there core I9 3900k RTX 4080 Founders Edition 32 gigs of
ddr5 RAM more than one drive okay to
figure out exactly what drives are in there and score at least 37 000 in
cinebench R23 and 2250 in classroom yeah
you gotta run benchmarks too that half an hour one is going to be basically
impossible you're removing a say to drive what exactly is it that you're
hoping to achieve right now well it was disconnected and I could not fit my
fingers in to reconnect it hopefully there's not too much other stuff that's
disconnected it's going to be doing a full tear down and rebuild of this thing
too bad you can't use Origins 24 7 lifetime support did you watch our
previous troubleshooting Challenge videos as prep
oh that would have been really smart you didn't did you
goodness gracious almost eight minutes gone already where does time go when
you're having fun should I give him any hints if I figure something out
he's one of the people who likes my evil Persona okay I'm gonna poke my head in
here David one thing I can see is something that's very clearly hanging
out there
what's this what's going on here
doesn't seem very good at about 15 minutes in there's definitely things
that I'd be doing differently I don't think he's being nearly aggressive
enough in his disassembly he knows we've messed with this thing and he's trying
to look for surface level problems like is the back of the power supply switch
off you know stuff like that the first thing I'd be doing is tearing stuff out
of here to validate that it's actually connected at all
oh he started oh
we dropped the RAM ah
to watch now I get how you guys feel in just 11 minutes and 23 seconds I get to
reveal the first thing that you're missing out on it's funny how you change
the dynamic right he started this shoot ready to win something in two hours but
now all he can think about is what he's going to lose in 30 minutes
man you could be gaming at like 4K 120
frames per second in just an hour and 40 minutes or you could be driving home in
disappointment in just an hour and 40 minutes
you cannot get that another word out here nope
uh some things still plugged in that's the thing about small form factor builds
is when they're done right they're packed tight hey I came up with that on
the spot not bad sleep deprived brain this must hurt to watch hey no I'm
having a blast I'm feeling particularly malicious today had a very bad night
it's still an hour and a half there's yes and it's four seconds and four
seconds which means it's time to open the first envelope if
you had completed the challenge in just 30 minutes you would have received in
addition to your origin Chronos V3 gaming PC damn a Xenon Flex
virtuoso RGB Wireless XT headset K100
keyboard and a dark core RGB Pro really
it's a two thousand dollar monitor oh yeah that would have been nice yeah it would
have been nice well hopefully there's something good in the next one truthfully watching him read that did
kind of hurt I'm feeling a little bit more benevolent now so with that in mind
I will say that half an hour in I probably would have put a little bit
more work into isolation so taking my individual components and evaluating
them one by one okay I got my GPU is it
plugged in on one end is it plugged in on the other end okay spit roasted GPU
good to go take my motherboard you know where are all the different points it
needs to be plugged in I want to go one thing at a time this cable will be the
death of me you got to have confidence
you know what I've come around I'm rooting for Kelvin now
okay you got to have confidence you gotta just you gotta pull it out
uh is that a piece of motherboard just from The Edge right here so yes this is
the word you were looking for yeah can I have a look at that please sure
it's cosmetic thank God
oh God's Not Gonna help you with this keep it far far away
there's a couple more things that origin PC wanted me to mention about the system
it fits up to 620 millimeter case fans
which means it's easy to attach a 360 millimeter AIO cooler which is really
impressive given the size of this thing the one that we've got is the IQ h150i
Elite and it supports up to a 1 000 watt sfx power supply which is that what they
happened to put in here yes this is a thousand watt power supply
one issue I'm noticing with Calvin's approach is that he's thinking very
Inside the Box in a literal sense he's
trying to do everything inside the Box by this point I would have everything
spread out hanging out the side whatever
it takes to just get my individual components attached in the bare minimum
way and isolated doesn't need a GPU to
post the system he doesn't need a cooler he started with absolutely no response
whatsoever he doesn't even need a power button he just needs some way to jump
those pins and see has anything I've done improved anything there is
something that's troubling me we don't like viewer interactions to end
negatively that was one of the reasons that I cheated in PC or no PC awarding
the top prize to both participants regardless of what they actually earned
but there was so much audience backlash when I did that because people felt that
it removed all the stakes that I will never do it again if we said
you fail you lose that's how it has to be okay come on Calvin what does this do
carrier board where does it go so where does it need to go liberate it where
pray tell Calvin would you normally find the front i o things plugged in on a
motherboard or on the sides of it so do you see anything on the sides that looks
like sort of unusual ASUS has done something very interesting with this
board there are two male long male type
c connectors along the bottom right edge of the board and they appear to be
designed to plug into this daughter board which has two female receptacles
now if I was the average user I might look at a USB type-c and go well that's
for USB but if I were me having seen all
the weird shiz that motherboard manufacturers do over the years I would
look at it and go they have reused an industry standard connector and they've
done all their own pin out for it so they're using these usbcs for my looks
like front panel USB 2 SATA front panel
connector oh would you look at that a little indicator light okay getting
somewhere did you find the front panel connection i o connector yeah oh it's
just really you
know connector crap in here okay well what you need to do is you need to find
where the front i o connector is but before you can do that I really do need
you to open this envelope because I said I would make you do it so I could have
had yeah a Xenon 32 inch yeah hs80
headset k70 keyboard and iron claw RGB
Wireless still great stuff but um a significant downgrade over last
time we're definitely trending in a like this direction I'm going to help you
with that that is an extremely misleading manual there is no power
button there oh there's a label here that says power button though
what the devil are they talking about this is about those few switches back I
mean these few prongs back here you think
oh interesting that was weird okay well
that's a good sign yeah I would turn this off really quickly though yeah yeah
47 minutes oh no it's getting intense
it's been intense for me for a while you just didn't know it yet one of the most
difficult things about troubleshooting Under Pressure whether it's a client
breathing down your neck or a deadline is thoroughness you always miss things
when you're under pressure and one of the things that I would be making sure
that I'm doing at this stage is taking a second regrouping slow is fast have I
missed anything I need to isolate say for example an SSD
well we know from the requirements that
there are drives we saw one two and a
half inch Drive which means there are some other Z somewhere okay a more
direct hint if something's not working there's no time you just need to press
forward every time something costs five minutes at this point it is costing
one-ninth of the remaining amount of time you got to think about it that way
real talk David at 30 minutes do I jump
in and help I think you should is that violating the spirit of the challenge
because they never said I couldn't help I mean they never said I had to do this
to him at all but will people be upset if together we achieve it I don't want
people to feel like you know everything's wigged here because I
really don't know the answers maybe I can help but I can't touch it
yeah that's a good idea I can tell them what to do do you think that's compromise you guys good we good okay 12
more minutes I will start helping in our Earnest okay it just has to run does it
need to be in the case to run well we did say the case panels had to be closed
we never said that I did you did I did why did you say that well I said that
because I thought that that would be reasonable he was mistaken we take it
back no it's established it's Canon okay it's
like the Bad sequel Star Wars movies we're stuck with them we're eight and a
half minutes from the third and final envelope and
I hate to tell you this another surprise twist okay I'm not looking forward to it
Tech tip two of the four screws on that
motherboard are easier to access than the others Tech tip the panels have to
be closed we didn't say anything about components left outside of the panels
put in only two screws go go go whatever ones are easiest
isolation what do we need to do now storages uh SSD we need to boot it up
for longer than five seconds right keep your eye on the prize
all right yes I'm sorry last time
last one yeah a scepter 20 inch 1600 by
900 fake airpods I'm not gonna miss those Amazon Basics keyboard Amazon
Basics Mouse okay well hey at least you already had lost most of what you were
going to lose before but the second twist is I'm gonna be helping you in
Earnest with the one rule being that I can't touch it okay I'll take anything
let's go find that damn power switch thing and put it on the damn thing let's
go there's no power button you see this power buttons right here and the
orientation is this way so the bottom two
finally okay that's on it's powered on okay let's see if we get an output we
still have 26 and a half minutes we're gonna get them there well we're gonna
try I'm really sorry but if you don't complete it I actually can't give you
the computer and I know okay I understand
I would power cycle it once though wait okay okay that's something step one okay
okay this tells us our m.2 drive is working that's good so
that means that the drive that wasn't
working was probably the SATA one okay it looks like it's already at defaults
that's fine so okay yep so we're gonna reset here all right now let's think
what do we still need to do we're not
going to do anything we don't need we have 24 minutes uh hard drives so that
hard drive must go in it must get power we must get this stupid SATA thing
plugged in okay okay however we don't need to move that power switch you can
deal with that at home get it plugged into the proper thing later at your
leisure right so just get this in get the SATA on here get that in and let's
see if we can get that drive detected
we've got two ssds now excellent
um let's get the GPU in okay that should be the right spot so you got to support
it at the back and push it in push push push there you go yeah it's in great hey
these blender benchmarks is this GPU or CPU GPU GPU okay and the cinebench score
is a single pass single pass okay okay now is a good time to sanity check if
our pump is working we can do that with our ears
the answer is yes I didn't have to touch it okay so
Hardware info uh what do we need to show up all parts detected including GPU
which we obviously have the RAM uh okay is all of our rent 32 gigs RAM is that
right that's right yep drives well we know both of our drives are here make sure they're in Windows Explorer they're
not okay now hold on we gotta check the rules exactly have all parts detected in
hardware and for including the GPU the RAM and the drives we have to run the
benchmarks we don't need to get this drive detected in Windows Explorer you
can do that later okay but we need but we need cinebench R23
and we need blender with the monster junk shop and classroom benchmarks okay
we've got a we gotta strategize do we think it will be faster to solve
assigning a no you know what it's probably faster to assign it because where does the software stored onto is
it on the m.2 probably on that two and a half inch drive that's probably why we
have to figure out yeah okay what the crap it's not picking it up okay this
forget it we're not solving it then okay okay yeah we're not solving that uh okay
so let's download cinebench R23 I might be already here is it I don't oh there's
a folder here exe yes okay we need 37
000 we didn't turn on XMP we might need XMP in order to get that score we should
also really have Hardware info open to make sure that our CPU is not overheating it doesn't help that our
fans are pointed down at the table uh we'll deal with that later
um okay CPU CPU package looks fine what's our score 37 988 let's move on
okay let's see if we get these scores
GPU fans definitely spinning up all right we need to uh we need to put the
side panels on leaning tower of side panel I consider that on okay great me
too put it just put it on just on on just yeah on the top on top yeah just
okay on here put this on so if the benchmarks don't pass we can go back
into the BIOS enable XMP but we already passed the CPU Benchmark so we're in
pretty good shape the one thing I'm worried about is right now that second
Drive specifically says it has to be detected
in Hardware info it doesn't say it needs
to be detected in the BIOS I didn't see it in Hardware info so let's get this
Benchmark done then we know we're clear we have 10 minutes to figure out why
that drive is showing up in the BIOS but not in Hardware info yeah yeah in the
meantime I'm going to figure out if there's a way for us to cheat okay yes
yes monster in the monster Benchmark
absolutely monster numbers we passed everything we need the last thing we
need to do is we need that drive to show up in Hardware info so everything's
validated let's reboot this computer so turn it off yep
don't worry about it good okay we're in uh
wait maybe I was mistaken that drive is not
okay no this is good though because it means whatever is wrong is universally
wrong I was really worried when it was in here and not there so I think what's
going on is that cable is whack it's
like bent uh no not that one the one on the motherboard this okay that is like
oh it is bent it is bent you're right so you get that it's very loose here yeah
let's make sure that's in there it is possible that we have actually ruined
the SATA connector on that little daughter board there's a second one we
can try that next Power It Up and then worst case scenario I have a
little trick up my sleeve this is why they have to be really careful when they
build rule sets yeah I'm participating
no still not there okay shut it down let's try the other Port we still got
five minutes what's easier at this point plugging the SATA connector into the
daughter board and putting that in uh yeah or just taking the entire thing out
what entire thing this uh oh yeah yeah take the daughter board out plug it in
put that back in that might actually be easier at this stage in the game
two minutes it's time for the trick up the sleeve uh this is a USB to SATA
adapter nothing says we can't use it so oh sorry
I'm not allowed to touch get get that drive disconnected okay
just rip it out okay
plug this in 45 seconds oh okay I have to put these
on put them here faster
they're on something don't worry about it storage d
there's a problem with this drive but we don't care about that hold on Hardware info Hardware info quick
no no you're good uh no down here
yeah it's detected okay zero seconds
oh my God oh my God
thank you
that's crazy that's crazy
the letter of the law not the spirit
anyway don't thank me thank you origin PC
makers of the Chronos V3 a computer that
looks a lot better when they ship it to you than when I fix it
for real though the one that you could win at the link in the video description
it would look more like when this started and not like when it finished
but fully functional without us having messed with it a Tanner what the hell is
wrong with that drive okay so um what was wrong with that drive when uh I
touched it was the SATA cable was unplugged
in fact that was a lot of the problems with it the front panel connector was
also unplugged what was the other thing that was wrong with it wait there were
only three things wrong with it well there were also two software things okay
because I had the CPU underclocked and I
had the GPU under clock but I on that one forgot to set MSI afterburner to
launch on boot that's so
that one's on me okay originally I just
wanted the power uh the power button to be unplugged but as soon as I tried to
unplug that the whole daughter board came out yeah so when the whole daughter
board came out I thought man that sure does look like it's still plugged in
let's just leave it that's gonna be a thing the clock behind me did not help
at all just seeing it like tick down
uh were these helpful no no this was an innovation that came up with
at the last minute the first one hurt the most
oh oh yeah that Xenia on Flex yeah great
monitor great monitor but the good news is that even if you don't
have a Xenia on Flex this is a sick computer and now you get to take it home
and build it
tear it apart and then put it back together now that would be best yeah
yeah uh if you guys enjoyed this video uh maybe you like the energy go check
out one of our RG rig reboot videos we'll we'll pick a nice one for you and
we'll put it in the video description