As the price of PC parts marches from wildly expensive to downright
unobtainable, PC gaming on a budget requires some
creativity. We've shown time and time again that the best way to save money on
building a computer is to buy a broken part and then repair it. A gamble for
sure, but if you're smart, it is a gamble that can pay off. Today though,
we're gambling the whole house. We're not just buying one not working part.
We're buying only not working. We're buying only not working
parts and hoping to turn them into a working PC. Theoretically, we could have
four working computers at the end of this video, or I just spent $2,600 on
e-waste. But what isn't a waste is the segue to our sponsor, MSI. Their
ProZ890S Wi-Fi PZ motherboard features a
back connect design, which allows for easier cable management and cleaner
looking builds. Check it out today using our link in the description. Right out
of the gate, I would like to thank/blame Sven Wires who said we should do a full
PC build with only fixed parts called the Necro Build. Thank you very much. I
don't think this is going to end very well. To start off, Adam is going to help me pick out what components we
think are going to have the best bet of building a fully working computer with
just our knowledge from looking at them briefly. One of the toughest decisions
when we were starting this project was deciding if we wanted to go with LGA or
PGA cuz as you can see here, the pins on
this motherboard are probably bent and that's likely why it doesn't work. But
that also means that our CPU is not going to be easy to fix. In the end
though, we decided to go with LG 1700 because there were plenty of dead Intel
CPUs on eBay. Not so much for AM4. Hm. I
wonder why. Intel. And what I've noticed on this one specifically is there's a
lot of places where it looks like it's already been manipulated. Like there's like adhesive or something around the
CPU fan header. I feel like we got ripped off with this one. How much was
this? 50 bucks. And how much was this? 85. So it's the same one, but it has all
of the stuff on it and no bent pins. Yeah. Do we go with the recently dropped
fully stripped motherboard? I think we should evaluate other options first.
This one looks nice. So, was there any eBay notes on this?
Cuz it looks pretty good. None at all. Although, there's one hella bent pin in
there that looks like it's flat against the back of the plastic. Just looking at
the the condition of the box, it does not make me very confident. Uh oh,
that's great. With an open So, we had the retention bracket not mounted. And,
uh, an open socket that has now been jammed here. Bent pins in the
corner. I don't like the look of that one. I think that these are two best
candidates. I agree. So, on to the next components. For our CPUs, we have four
options. And I already know which one I want. Okay. Why? This
13700F right here. And for two reasons. First of all, because it's the F, it
doesn't have an iGPU. So, it is entirely possible that the person that tested it
just doesn't know what that means and thought that it wasn't posting. Another
thing that's possible is that since it's 13th gen, it could have been put into a
motherboard that didn't have an updated BIOS and they might have just been like,
"Oh, it didn't post." Even though the motherboard only had support for 12th
gen chip. This one's a 13900 K and that's faster.
It's a lot faster. It also cost us $200. $200. It's basically it's new. It's not.
The 13700 was 75. I think we go with that cuz it's just such a better value.
It's really Whoa, look at the damage on the corner there. Oh yeah, I think we
just have to cross our fingers and hope for the best. Would you ever in a
million years put dead RAM into your system? Is it like something that you
would choose to do to yourself? I mean, I wouldn't choose to do any of this. I
guess I personally, as someone that loves doing sketchy stuff like this,
would never put dead RAM into my computer. It's the sort of thing where I
just want to trust that my memory works. It's not very expensive right now, and
we've only saved like $10 on each one of these by buying it dead. The biggest
problem also is that memory errors can show up in so many different ways across
so many different workloads. And maybe it seems fine. I'd never trust it. I
don't even know how to pick. I think we just play the odds games. These three
came as a single stick. This one came as two, which gives us twice the
opportunity for one of them to work. Okay, let's go. I I trust you. Yeah, I
trust you. Now it's time for GPUs. I feel like it's really hard to tell if a
GPU is broken until you tear it down. Yeah, well, with the exception of this
one. This one is obviously broken. We should not have bought this one. What
are all the arrows? Two places where it is absolutely.
At least they like let us know. Okay, so no 2070. What about like a 3070 or what
are those? We've got a 6TN00 XT and a 6800 XT. both which I kind of like the
looks of because their warranty stickers have not been touched. Yeah, this one
has that rust here though. That doesn't
look very promising. I think my decision is the 6800 XT because it has no visible
damage but also it has a BIOS switch right here and I have seen it before
where a card will seem like it's dead and you just flip that switch and
suddenly it comes alive and whoever was testing it never thought to do that. So
we just need a cooler and an SSD, right? So, what are we going to do for cooler?
I think that this Enerax guy right here is our best bet. These are well known
for sludging up and dying, but also because they're well known for sludging
up and dying, fixing it is also quite well documented. Whereas the rest of the
stuff, who knows why it's dead. I just feel like like what could have gone
wrong with this outside of the fact that it looks like it was pulled from Chernobyl. I think that that's the
problem. So, we could go with this one knowing that it'll probably work. Even
if the fan doesn't work, we can just steal one from a case or something. It
is so ew. It is pretty groy. Look at ew.
Terrible but functional or terrible but perhaps totally destroyed. We could get
pancrass to fix this one. I love putting work on other people. Let's do it. SSDs.
I have no I don't even know how you'd fix one. I don't. Nope. I guess choose
the most normal one. Do you want to know which one I'm leaning towards? The
Optane. Of course you're going to do the Optane. This thing is so freaking cool.
This thing is so sick. Screw it. Let's do it. Let's Let's go Optane. I like
making bad decisions. Are all of these AS is? Like there's no side panels. So,
we got two four parts ASIS from eBay.
That's this one and that one. And then I got these two for free as e-waste.
That one has fans, though. Let's do at least one thing that's going to be nice.
All right. Okay. Case with fans, but no side panels. Cougar. Finally, we have to
pick a power supply. Now, everything is untested except for these. I took these
to Lucas, had him put them on the power supply tester to figure out what works.
One thing that's interesting is we got this box of 10 as a power supplies for
$10. Do you want to guess how many of these 10 work? Um, zero. I guess that
takes us to this bin. Yeah. One thing that four parts power supplies all seem
to share is that they are just missing cables if they are modular at all. I
don't need a modular power supply. And I feel like having the cables attached
means that we're not likely to plug in a cable that was not meant to be with that
power supply and destroy it. Go with the Corsair. This one right here. I think
that that's our best bet. Cool. Cuz this one's alive. Oh, yeah. Now we just have
to systematically test all of the stuff that we have chosen. We each have a test
bench. And David back there has one as well for the more tricky stuff. I'll
take the motherboard and try and repair those pins. Broken GPU in. Let's see if
it boots. Lights is good.
It works. It's just on. Okay. Sweet. Did
you flick the switch? I didn't do anything. I didn't touch it. Sweet. One
part down. Oh, what the hell is that? Oh, look at
that. Look at this. Oh, that is filthy.
Why is it green? It's mold. Or like that's a not mold. That's like, oh, got
to be living. Oh, yeah. I'm going to try
and clean this out. I'll try and flush it out a little bit, too, in the in the
bathroom or something like that. We bought this GPU for $200. Yeah. And it
retails for $550. 500. So, we just saved
$300 on a fully functional GPU.
I guess I'll test the RAM now. Meanwhile, I'm looking at this CPU
socket, and it looks like there's only one pin here that has gone bad, but it
has gone very bad. Getting it back might
be possible, but there's also a real chance that I just break it right
here. Come on. With that pin bent up, I'm going to
give it a try on my test bench. Tried it with both RAM sticks, got an error
light. Trying it with one RAM stick, error light. Oh, it's moved on. So, this
might be just a dead stick. Huh. I wonder if this has anything to do with
it. Fixable, maybe. Dan, I don't have a
mic. That might be speaking to my
chest. Speak to me like you always say when you speak to women.
Yeah, this looks uh this looks fixable. Oh,
sweet. So, we're probably just going to have ones. Yeah, I think one sticks
fine. No. Well, I'm glad that I was able
to take part of this and find two working components. Well, I guess best
of luck. Godspeed. Since testing all these components is going to take
absolutely forever, my helpers are going to be swapped out. And now I have got a
Dan. Hi. Who can try and test out this CPU and this SSD? Do we know what's
wrong with them? No. Oh, great. Over here, I've got that motherboard with the
bent pin that might no longer be bent. Let's give it a
try. Well, that's not good. Normally, if there's just a bent pin, you would
expect to press the power on button and it would do stuff until whatever that
pin does stops it from continuing. Whereas, this is doing absolutely
nothing. It's not like boot looping like it's not turning off and turning on
again. It's just like not getting to the first stage. My hopes are not good for
the dead CPUs. It's really No, generally a CPU dies. It like really dies. Yeah.
Grime around the edge is all gone and the fins are nice and clear. Yep. uh
O-ring is still intact, so that is good.
And then this guy came out okay as well. On the other side, though, it's got some
pretty good corrosion going on. So, this had actually a protrusion that I scraped
off, and I think that's actually metal deposits that had grown on there, but I
think this would be a case of could get it working now, but may not work for
long. Uh, I'm getting 00 and I mean the
cooler is getting pretty warm. Uh, I
assume 00 means very bad. Do you want to just start trying the other CPUs that we
got and hope for the best? I genuinely don't think you should ever buy a dead
CPU. 12700F. Okay, this one is also
saying 00. I don't know if this is a good sign. This is our dead Aorus
motherboard and even with the pins bent back up, it is doing absolutely nothing.
So, I'm going to try and flash the BIOS. My BIOS flash has finished and it still
does nothing. Absolutely nothing at all. This one's working, or at least
pretending to work. Is that our 12700 KF? Yeah. Look at that. You're into the
BIOS. 12700 KF. That's our broken CPU.
Yeah. It's seeing on both sticks of memory, which is great. Yeah. Oh,
you shouldn't have made noises. Oh, beans. Another thing that is good is I
thought that I fixed the pins on this motherboard, but there's other ones that I didn't notice were broken because I
was too distracted by We just got sand. I don't think I've ever seen just sand.
Right now, it's at 5,000. Let's just try something extremely low.
Maybe 30,000 MHz. All right, I got into Windows. Oh,
wow. My intuition is sometimes right. Yeah,
we're locked at 3 GHz. So, it's just
unstable. Let's try Cinebench multi-core and see if it'll even like make it
through at 3 GHz. So, I don't know. Does this count as working if you can't use
the full potential of it? I think we can call this one a win. The way that this
has failed really doesn't feel like a bent pin problem. It feels like a dead
motherboard problem. At some point, we had to run out of luck. We got eight
motherboards in a row that we're able to repair. The ninth, I guess, wasn't it.
I'm moving on. Coming into this, I knew that spending
$415 on four probably dead CPUs was a
really bad idea. Mhm. So, I have backup
i5 12600 KS. Okay. And how much did you
pay for these guys? Each one of those is about $200. So, this one's boosting to 4
and a half gigs pretty much all core. It's already hit TJ Maxx and it seems to
be working a lot better than the other one, obviously. Yep. Turns out that
buying a good CPU is a good idea. So, I think for our first build, we can use
this dead CPU and be like, "Oh, yeah. It's all dead parts." I'm going to throw
this card in and see what the hell this does. I've also got this motherboard
here, which is quite beautiful. 85 bucks for this is great, but there's nothing
obviously wrong, which might sound like it's good, but I really like to see
something and be like, "Ah, I can fix that." I just tried to boot this computer with the Intel SSD in it, and
it booted into Kobuku or
something. Should I format it? Do you want to lose the special Linux on there?
Can lose the special Linux. Throw on some Windows. And that's our boot drive
for the Necro PC. Power on ours is can I
see this in like normal values? So it's been on for five and a half years. So we
dump our drives also around that time. So this was definitely pulled from like
a server. So I'm calling this like good but old. I think you can start trying to
get motherboards to work because I am not having success. I tried to biosplash
this one and I'm getting the solid green light of it. No workie. Bye.
I was having a RAM problem, so I removed one RAM stick and now it's fine. We also
have only one RAM stick cuz one of our RAM sticks is dead. So, it's kind of a
match made in heaven. So, this one's probably the worst pin damage I've seen.
You can somebody lined this one. You can
see them coming back in line with the light. See the light reflecting on it.
So, that tells me that it's too low. They'll never be the same. They'll never
all reflect perfectly. Uh, but I'm calling this maybe good enough. So,
we'll try it. Okay, there we go. That's
great. The CPU is way too hot. I'm going to turn this off. Um, so the CPU is at
90 at idle, so maybe not. Um, okay. So, this one I'm going to call fixed. Yeah,
fixed motherboard. Yeah. And if we're lucky, this one as well. This computer's
basically built, but I now need to attach the cooler. And given that the
cooler is not made for this socket or
this case, it could get pretty interesting. This one worked out of the
box. Motherboard. Wow. So, we got uh what, four now? Something like that.
It's pretty good. This one has the worst pin damage so far.
Ooh, that's gnarly. That is gnarly. What
you can do is you can look up the pin
out for these CPUs. Yeah, we're missing an entire pin. And often there'll be
like big sections of pins which are one
thing. Yeah, there might be 50 grounds there. If that's the one that's missing,
then whatever. If it is the pin that goes to this memory
module, you're screwed. I just about
have the CPU cooler attached. I am using two zip ties that go through the CPU
cooler mounting holes, around the back, and then up through the heat pipes on
this cooler. I wouldn't recommend this, but also it kind of works pretty good.
This is my first time. Um, if that is
the right pin, looking at the pin out, it might be like one of the core um
voltagey thingies, which is probably a good sign. Normally, you can tell if the
system's actually doing stuff if either caps lock or numblock works. There you
go. Oh. Uhhuh.
There we go. So, we have one slot on
here that might be damaged. So, it's probably in the DRAM section. This one
has one working RAM slot. For a motherboard with a missing pin, I think
that's a pretty big win. Mhm. Well, so far we've been able to save four of the
seven motherboards that we had, which is excellent. And also, we have our first
finished Necro PC. Okay. Oh, everything lights up now.
Green light's good. Huh? High five. Yeah, this is an abomination.
Nice job. Nice job. I guess uh I'll
leave for your next buddy to come and give you a handler. Thanks, guys. Next
person. It's the start of day two. We have Jordan here and we are just going
to blast through testing as many components as possible. With any luck,
we will have enough to make a couple more working computers soon, even if we
need to bring in working CPUs and stuff like that. What do you want to test?
Computers. Okay, let's do it. Should we try our RAM at the same time? Mine has
already looped twice and the DRAM light is on. I don't think there's anything I
can do to save this besides just tell you don't buy dead RAM. Yeah, that's the
RAM stick that had brown water coming out of it.
I'm a genius. I'm awesome at fixing computers.
This guy is the RAM whisperer. Want to try yours? Sure. If that just
works for you, I'm going to be so mad. No way. Why is it working? Why does it
work in your bench? So, what this means
is that four out of the five RAM sticks that we bought just work. Yeah. Which
means that buying dead RAM's a good idea.
RTX
3070 straight to full fan speed and not
slowing down is not a great sign. What I've got here is a BIOS flasher.
Basically, what you do is you connect this to a computer and then these pins
go directly over top of the BIOS chip on your GPU. This can allow us to load a
BIOS onto the GPU without actually being able to boot into Windows. So, if the
BIOS is corrupted, we could potentially solve it with this thing. I switched
over to the onboard video and I have the
test card still in here to see if it'll show up or not. Uh, we're just checking
in device manager to see if it's here. It's not under display adapters. So, I'm
checking under the uh other devices here. Our card is not being detected in
Windows at all. Well, Jordan looks at that 3070. I have the 6TN00 XT that has
very clearly taken a couple of hits. Is it just me or does it look like
someone's been at those solder joints before? I have some form of radio on
here that just says no video on it. Uh with no other
markings. It feels kind of old to me.
Oh, they were liars. There's video. There's
video. Uh, looks like this is a Radeon
RX6800 XT. Soldering a GPU is very
difficult. It uses a multi-layer PCB and on many of them there will be an entire
layer of copper which helps with heat dissipation and it also just makes for a
very easy ground for the engineers. What that means though is that when you put a
soldering iron up to it, it won't get heated up as much as you would like and
all that heat just gets spread out across the entire board. So, in order to
solder this stuff, you need to heat it up. That's this incredible contraption
that I have right here. Normally, you would have an official like station for
this kind of thing, but we do not at the moment. Our 6800 XT appears to be
perfectly fine here. Uh, turns out it came from Dell. We just finished our
benchmark in firmware
here. After a little bit of soldering, these are all actually attached to the
GPU now, which is great. I don't think I did a fantastic job, but electrically
connected is electrically connected. Rocket ship fans
again. Well, I think we can chalk this 3070 to trying our best and not
succeeding. We paid $130 for this piece of
e-waste. We did attempt to do the BIOS flashing through this little tool, but
unfortunately, this only reads F, which makes sense because the card itself is
dead. In total, we were able to get two GPUs working out of six, which is pretty
bad. But also, you can think of it as we spent just over $1,000 and we got just
over $1,150 worth of working GPUs. So, I
guess that's a win. Okay, our first SSD is perfectly fine. It just passed our
smart tests. So, we have uh how much?
240 gigs of storage. Oh, that one's bad. Oh, which drive is
that? That is the 800 gig Intel. Well,
we'll try the WD next. It's not even detecting
it. I think this SSD is brand
new. It's got zero megabytes written and
it wasn't initialized in Windows Disc Tool. So, I suspect someone plugged it
into their computer, didn't know how to format it, and said it's broken. Zero
bytes written, zero bytes read. It's been powered on eight times. That is a
brand new drive that someone didn't know how to initialize. I'm moving on to
testing some coolers here. This one right here from NZXT cost us only $15
and it came with these three Corsair RGB fans, which means we kind of already won
with this one. But the problem is that I don't see any way to turn on the pump.
There is this little USB port here, but I'm guessing this will not work because
all the power is likely delivered over these pins and we don't have the cable
for that. And yep, it's not working. My thought to get this to work is there's
probably some power pins here. So, if you put 5 volts across the correct ones,
it'll probably turn on. Which ones exactly those pins are? I don't know.
Let's try and take it apart. Opening up this cooler on the inside. There's a
bunch of water. That's uh not what you
want around the electronics for your pump. That is for sure. And now we have
our final guest, Elijah. Jordan was an excellent help. So, we know how many
SSDs we have. And also, we have one more GPU that we can turn into a working
computer. Do you want to look at those coolers over there? That's all we have
left. I will do my best. Let's start with the NZ XT1. Before you do that, do
you want to see what I'm doing here? This other NZ XT1 does not have the
power connectors. So, I'm thinking we just find out where to apply power and
then maybe it'll work. Let's put that there. I'm very out of my element
here. Oh, I did it. It's on. Alex, do
you remember what was wrong with this when you bought it? It says incomplete
as is untested. Missing screw. I think you will get what you see in the photo.
Oh, if it's just missing a screw, that's easy. Oh crap. Okay. No, I am missing a
bit more stuff. I'm missing a standoff
to go between these cuz otherwise this would put way too much mounting pressure
on the CPU. Get on there. And now it's a Molex
powered pump. Hopefully there's something in here that will work. Oh,
that might work. Oh, that looks promising. I think those will work.
Yeah, let's just The method we're going to try here is we're going to try to
bypass the standoff because you can actually screw all the way through the
back plate. So, if you had enough clearance behind your motherboard, you
might be able to just kind of go really, really deep with the screws and then
secure it, you know, by feel.
There. There. Oh my goodness. Look at
the
gap. It works. I'm going to look at our last AIO here. It's got the right
mounting. It's got the spacers and the whole thing. Oh, we have the power
connector. Incredible. I've got this Deep Cool AIO that as far as I can tell,
nothing's wrong and nothing's missing from it. So, I'm just going to plug it
in and see if it's happy. Okay, now plug in the cable that I thought I was
missing. And then I think this might actually just be working. So, our
solution was just four screws. Hopefully. Hey, we have actual lights.
This is working. Oh, no way. So, was it
just a working pump or did you have to do anything? I think it's just working.
Oh, I just felt air bubbles. Oh, I just felt a whack ton of air bubbles go
through. Did we just get two working AIO's?
Yeah. How much was this one again? This one was 15 bucks. Normal 155.
That's a steal. That is sick. I think we're about at the point where we can
put together two computers and have a game.
All right, we have our two Necro builds built and they are
um computers that technically exist. I
think it is very safe to say that you should not be buying broken GPUs or CPUs
because they are both expensive and the chances of them actually working is very
very low. As for power supplies and
RAM, you can Our results were not too
bad between them. Like a lot of our RAM just worked and a lot of our power
supplies did as well. Would you ever trust a system that has a broken power
supply or broken RAM in it? Not to run longterm. you should definitely run a
stress test on it before you permanently deploy it. That said though, the storage
I was really shocked. A lot of it just straight up work. Some of it was brand
new. And if you already have an OS, getting like game storage, it's actually
not the worst idea ever. And motherboards again are an awesome thing
to try and buy broken. We were able to revive a whole bunch of them and we were
actually able to fix them. And same sort of thing if you get an AM4 CPU that has
some bent pins. Awesome thing to try and fix. But should we have a little game on
these? Let's game. Uh, I changed to 1080p and I have appeared to crash.
Well, I can play video games. This is a
12600. 12600. Dude, you're getting like 350
sometimes touching 400, but I'd say around the 350 mark. It's where your
average seems to be sitting. That's pretty good. Are you having fun gaming,
dude? I actually love video games so much. This is my favorite part about PC
gaming. Reboots. I'm still on a black screen and no signal. Okay, let me try
one more time. No, we had this working, dude.
It's almost like that buying all broken stuff for your computer isn't a good
idea. It is a very big gamble. I swear that computer was working before we
turned the camera on. So, in total, we did manage to fix
$3,345 worth of components, which is more than the $2,600 that we spent on
everything. We have a total success rate of 53.3% which means that we fixed our
stuff more often than not. But if you look at the total breakdown of the
money, uh, we fixed the cheap stuff for
the most part. So, should you buy a computer with
only broken parts? Uh, probably not. No,
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watching, guys. Hit like, get subscribed, and if you want to watch something else, maybe watch when we
repaired a whole bunch of motherboards. That's one of the few things here that you actually should try and repair.