I Built a Working PC using only Broken Parts

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.

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Check it out today using our link in the description.

Right out of the gate, I would like to thank slash blame Sven Wiers, 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 gonna 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.

Because 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 LGA 1700 because there were plenty of dead Intel CPUs on eBay.

Not so much for AM4.

Hmm.

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?

Because 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 condition of the box, it does not make me very confident.

Oh, that's great.

With an open...

So we had the retention bracket not mounted and 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 our 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, yeah, 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 chips.

This one's a 13900K and that's faster.

It's a lot faster.

It also costs us $200.

$200?

It's basically new.

It's not.

The 13700 was 75.

I think we go with that because 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 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 f***er.

At least they like let us know.

Okay, so no 2070.

What about like a 3070?

Or what are those?

We've got a 6900 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 bio 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 Enermax 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 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 grody.

Look at ew.

Terrible but functional or terrible but perhaps totally destroyed?

We could get Pankratz to fix this one.

I love putting work on other people, let's do it.

SSDs, I don't even know how you'd fix one.

I don't.

Nope.

I guess choose the most normal one.

Do you wanna know which one I'm leaning towards?

The Optane, of course you're gonna do the Optane.

This thing is so freaking cool.

This thing is so sick.

Screw it, let's do it.

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 as is 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?

Zero.

Yeah.

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're 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, because this one's alive.

Oh, yay!

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 it's not mold that's like oh gotta 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.

Speak into my chest.

Speak to me like you always say when you speak to women.

Yeah, this looks fixable.

Oh, sweet.

So we're probably just going to have one stick.

Yeah, I think one stick's 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.

No, generally as CPU dies, it like really dies.

Yeah.

Grime around the edge is all gone and the fins are nice and clear.

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.

I'm getting zero, zero.

And I mean, the cooler is getting pretty warm.

I assume 00, it 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.

So that our 12700KF.

Yeah.

Look at that.

You're into the BIOS.

12700KF.

That's our broken CPU.

Yeah.

It's seeing on both sticks of memory, which is great.

Yeah.

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 them.

But we just got sad face.

I don't think I've ever seen just sad face.

Right now it's at 5,000.

Let's just try something extremely low.

Maybe 3,000 megahertz.

All right, I got into Windows.

Oh, wow.

My intuition is sometimes right.

Yeah, we're locked at three gigahertz.

So it's just unstable.

Let's try Cinebench multi-core and see if it'll even like make it through at three gigahertz.

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 were 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.

So I have backup i5-12600Ks.

Okay.

And how much did you pay for these guys?

Each one of those is about $200.

So this one's boosting to four 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.

Yeah.

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?

You can lose the special Linux, throw on some windows and that's our boot drive for the Necro PC.

How we're 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 worky.

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 because 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 add somebody, somebody line this to 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, 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 gonna turn this off.

So the CPU is at 90 at idle, so maybe not.

Okay, so this one I'm gonna call fixed.

Yeah, fixed motherboard.

Yeah, and if we're lucky, this one as well,

This computer is 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.

Another motherboard.

Wow.

So we got, 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 num lock works there you go oh aha 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.

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.

Ah!

High five!

Yeah!

This is an abomination.

Nice job.

Nice job.

I guess 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're 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.

If we try a 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.

We're just checking in device manager to see if it's here.

It's not in display adapters.

So I'm checking under the other devices here.

Our card is not being detected in Windows at all.

Well, Jordan looks at that 3070.

I have the 6900 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 with no other markings.

It feels kind of old to me.

Oh.

They were liars.

There's video.

There's video.

Looks like this is a Radeon RX 6800 XT.

Soldering a GPU is very difficult.

It uses a multilayer 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 the stuff, you need to heat it up.

That's this incredible contraption that I have right here.

Normally you would have an official station for this kind of thing, but we do not at the moment.

Our 6800 XT appears to be perfectly fine here.

Turns out it came from Dell.

We just finished our benchmark and firm mark 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 a thousand dollars 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 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 Disk 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 of 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...

five 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 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 NZXT one.

Before you do that, do you want to see what I'm doing here?

This other NZXT one does not have the power connectors.

So I'm thinking we just find out where to apply power and then maybe it'll work.

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?

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 because otherwise this would put way too much mounting pressure on the CPU.

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 gonna 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 gonna 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 AIOs-ish?

Yeah.

How much was this one again?

This one was 15 bucks.

Normal 155.

Oh, 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...

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 long-term.

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 works.

Some of it was brand new.

And if you already have an OS, getting like game storage,

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 bend pins, awesome thing to try and fix.

But should we have a little game on these?

Let's game.

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 is 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 at 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, we fixed the cheap stuff for the most part.

So should you buy a computer with only broken parts?

Probably not.

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A huge thanks for 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.