PC Tech Thread

Might be a good idea for a shop if there's one nearby? I've got a cradle you can borrow if you'd like, if not any from the bigger, better Chinese brands on Amazon will work fine (Ugreen, Anker, Sabrent et al).

Can you remove the drive easily?

Nope. You can see the drive in the photo above - it's hidden by the cpu cooler.

I think all the tech shops closed during Brexit didn't they? We're not allowed to have nice things. I wouldn't know where to take it - I'd either do it myself or in this case I just got QuietPC to build the whole thing and rarely touched it save for adding/removing cards.

Just watched a video of your cooler installation, it's just the four screws holding it in. You might be able to get that out yourself?

Either way, this place has had two recommendations on Reddit, for what it's worth https://maps.app.goo.gl/J13Lb3mgGF8BsXBm8

Edit: if you get really stuck and you're anywhere near SE11 I'd happily take gander.

I fitted one of those coolers in a PC (in fact I've giving that PC away if anyone wants a silent PC) and don't remember it being particularly tricky. I think it is just those 4 screws you can see to remove it.

Yeah, but I think I would need to redo the heat paste? I guess it depends how neatly it came off. It's been 20+ years since I fitted a CPU to anything :)

I guess I don't have anything to lose since it's already dead. I wonder if there's any way of getting eyes on the data on the boot drive. I can't even remember what was on it. I did try to keep most data on the other drive but you know Windows...

Still tempted to just bang Windows on the Data drive and run it until death. I'm just worried that might be sooner rather than later if it's component death time. Who's to say a mobo issue didn't kill the drive or the power supply or something?

You could use something like an Ubuntu Live which allows you to boot into Ubuntu using a CD or USB (no install). It's normally pretty good at mounting drives if they're readable. If the drive appears, you can have a look and see what's on it, you could mount an external drive and copy any data across, if it doesn't appear, it's probably dead.

I had that stuff in the past but it'll all be on optical discs and this doesn't have a CD drive, although I do still have an external drive so maybe. But the BIOS doesn't see it so I don't see how a linux boot cd would see it. I'm assuming it's very dead.

Yeah, you're right, if the BIOS doesn't see the drive at all, Ubuntu won't see it either, if the BIOS is just failing to see it as a bootable drive, it might. I think Ubuntu is normally better at picking up dud drives than Windows is but if the Mobo isn't thinking it's connected, it won't pick it up.

If you can get the drive out you might get lucky with it appearing if you stuff it in an external m2 enclosure but, as others have said, if the mobo can't see it then it might just be dead.

On the gripping hand, there's many a thing that's been fixed by simply unplugging it and plugging it back in again.

A tube of thermal paste is pretty cheap, and CPUs are very tolerant of how badly they are installed so you may even get away with just pushing the heatsink back on after removal.

I've plenty of experience with spinning rust drive failures/recovery but next to nothing with SSD/NVME failure/recovery.

To me, a reseat/enclosure check would be the first step in going forward. If it works in an enclosure and not on your mobo then that's a whole different kettle of fish.

I just had an idea. My partner's laptop has an m.2 primary drive I think, so I could pull hers out and put mine in (assuming I can get the heatsink out of the way) and test it that way. I knew I should've got an enclosure for her old drive, y'all talked me out of it :P

I knew I should've got an enclosure for her old drive, y'all talked me out of it :P

I'm about to order one based on this discussion. I only have two machines with NVMEs in but this kind of things means that having an enclosure to hand may be useful rather than waiting 24-48h for delivery of one.

https://nerdtechy.com/best-usb-c-nvme-ssd-enclosure

New GPU. Then figure out the old 675W isn't going to hack it any more.

Are we seeing 1500W PSU's in the future?

Hence new 1kW PSU.

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Scary what the RTX4090 will pull...

Did you try the existing 675 W? Looks like AMD only recommend 700 W, and actual draw is about 300 W.

If it is not seen in the bios nothing will see it.

Are you still near Santa Maria in west London?

I have some rs thermal paste, I think, can help if you want? Hey I'll even buy you a pizza.

Now am I trying to seduce hippy...or pizza in company is always good.

Not in my experience, it's been running quite happily on 850W. I've never seen the whole system use much more than 600W at the wall.

If I had to buy a new PSU tomorrow I'd probably go for 1000W, but it's far from necessary.

Yeah, near enough. Cheers for the offer. I've not done anything else with the machine yet but I might take you up on that if I decide to pull it apart. I've also asked QuietPC about potential upgrade path, ie. swap out the drives, maybe newer mobo but it's probably just easier to buy whole new machine and at that point I'm more likely to get another laptop and move this one to turbo machine duties.

having a bit of a wtf moment with my pc

Found the issue with this BTW. Somehow my USB front panel was stopping the motherboard from receiving power. Unplugged, everything works fine. Plug it back in, nothing works. Very odd.

Shorting somewhere?