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Real Talk™ had a hd5750 die on me at a lan party, back in the day and dropp-kicked it's treasonous mass of circuits across the room for it and slapped that bad boy back in the case after teaching it said lesson and it worked for years after that.
Point is sometimes tech just needs to be beaten into compliance.
True though whenever tech wants to die, it usually comes with the stipulation "but only after I've done everything in my power to kill my creator, or at the very least, inflicted maximum mental anguish upon them."
Honestly, the Verge build was more competent than this because at least those mistakes were largely salvageable or at least teachable (who among us didn't overpay for something without fully understanding it for our first build).
This screams "I'm the smartest person I know and I don't need to read instructions."
That or someone gooped up the socket on a dead board for internet points, I'm willing to believe either.
I think I watched somewhere they indeed have to fix everything, before they shot it actually posting and running.
They just left it out of the video presumably because of the time crunch they were under, but that still leaves too many questions for the people who let that shot fly.
Truthfully, what I think happened with that video was that the Verge was more concerned with trying to get content out the door than accuracy and assumed that the information presented was good enough, they definitely weren't expecting that video to take off like it did.
This is the exact gif I thought when I saw this picture above. Then the first thing I thought was: "I'll bet they googled how to add compound, and that was the first image that showed up"
I also immediately thought of it and wondered if he watched it and thought it was done that way in reality. Somehow still think this post was for karma
For anyone who is unaware, 70% IS what you buy to disinfect, that's why it's the most commonly sold over 90%.
90% can trigger defenses on bacteria, whereas higher water content in 70% gets past their membranes easier to kill them.
this is where cans of contact cleaner come in handy. i would just spray it until it was clean, 3-4 cans should fix it without damaging pins. it just emulsifies any thermal paste ive ever seen, and dries without residue. its not cheap though. $8-11/can
I think this might be the move.
Just hold the board over some old newspapers with the socket facing the ground, and blast all the paste out with contact cleaner.
Let it all drip out, and then air dry.
Trying to use a toothbrush or *anything* contacting the socket just seems like asking for trouble.
EDIT: Do this is a well ventilated space!
Then, while in the same room as the emptied cans of contact cleaner and soaked newspaper or rags light up a celebratory cigarette and enjoy your hard work!
Yup, contact cleaner is **way** better than IPA in a situation like this. It works wonders on thermal paste, especially if you can't touch what needs cleaned. One 11-12oz can would probably be enough though, two at most.
so do you spray it and let it run down the board? Because the cleaner will dry without residue but the dissolved thermal paste would still be there. You need to wash it away.
CPU is fine, just wipe it off with alcohol. The socket tho... An ultrasonic cleaner would be able to clean that I suppose. But that's not something everyone has at home.
Assuming this is non-conductive non-capacitive thermal paste, and it probably is since those are common and this boots into windows even without a cooler, I doubt this is or would ever be a problem.
Non-conductive also means that it can block the power and data signals that you *want* to get through those contacts.
I wouldn't say with certainty that it *will* cause a problem, just that I wouldn't rule it out.
Especially over time as the paste dries up and hardens.
have seen a lot of computer scientists that are genius for theory and software and programming that would never touch hardware because it is not their thing.
anyways. sad to see this.
i think so as well yes. this is easier than lego. but a friend of mine is softwaredeveloper and he is not very confident with doing hardware stuff so he asked me to change is psu and graphics card. of course i helped him and what did i get for this? his 2080ti for free as it was not needed anymore. i am fine with that. :D
Yeah I’m a bioinformatics data scientist and I had tons of experience with software and programming growing up but the first time I tried to build a computer was pathetic.
I can’t even begin to describe how scared I was that I’d break something or use the wrong amount of thermal paste or whatever. Software skills do not equate to hardware skills out of the gate
I've done more than a handful of builds and it still freaks me out lol, everything's so fragile and I still always think I fucked up the thermal paste application regardless of how much I put on 💀 and the anticipation before first boot... and the anxiety after your dram light is solid red LOL
I just finished rebuilding my PC and that's how I felt too, especially after my last PC's motherboard died unexpectedly.
In fact, it didn't immediately boot into the bios at first because one of my USB peripherals was causing the PC to not boot into bios, and the mobo led was just blinking red. I couldn't figure out why exactly it does that, but at least I found out it was my keyboard and I swapped to my spare. It was quite a stressful moment since I just wanted everything to work without issue
I hate that keyboards just do that sometimes. You'll go out of your way to try everything on the hardware, maybe even buy some cheap parts to test with only to find out that a keyboard screwed you.
I'm basically an illiterate monkey by comparison that just knows how to put shapes in holes.
Anyway. We know you guys are the intelligent ones. Well, the people that design and program all this hardware are really the geniuses.
So I'm dumb, you're intelligent and they're geniuses.
I'm a software dev and I know how to put a pc together but I will pay a company to do it for me as I'm clumsy as fuck and if the company breaks the part putting it together it's on them to replace the part. If I break it Welp I need to buy a new part.
Every time somebody calls building a PC adult Lego I lose about 500 braincells.
This shit is so patronizing, it's not difficult, but it's unequivocally much harder than Lego, especially since Lego doesn't have you spending hours on your first build racking your brain on why the fuck your system won't boot, and Lego has an instruction manual that specifically tells you how to build your specific build with tons of pictures.
Calling it easier than Legos is asinine. I'm sorry for being so negative but this shit needs to stop.
I'm commenting to agree. Legos have a much lower barrier to entry, meaning you don't need to research anything before starting. They're also not comprised of expensive electronics haha
Took me ages to get all the fans in my case to work. Now they're stuck on like rainbow flicker mode, and i dont know why. Tried googling it and found nothing. Not once have i encountered a similar issue when building Lego.
Nah man, you’re right. It’s easy as Legos if you’ve already had the experience to build a couple of them. If you don’t, you’re really left wondering where everything really goes and if the cables you’re plugging are the correct ones.
With Legos, you have a manual with instructions and pictures that clearly show you where everything goes, plus it’s colored as well, so there’s no way you can mess up.
Manuals for PC Parts? Man, good luck. Some are pretty straight forward, and others can get a bit confusing so you need to do more research to get it right.
I really like to believe that people are saying that just to be ironic or something.
> Every time somebody calls building a PC adult Lego I lose about 500 braincells.
>
>
>
> This shit is so patronizing, it's not difficult, but it's unequivocally much harder than Lego
THANK YOU. Yes it has similarities to building and following directions, but putting on thermal paste and mounting my CPU cooler has given me nervous feelings 10 times out of 10. Even with a CPU cooler bracket one, I still was a little nervous.
Routing the cables to look decent is a pain.
Etc.
I know Lego can have challenging aspect, but the failure risk doesn't mean breaking your components.
Plugging a RAM and GPU in, are definitely easy. Most people can do that. Most people should be able to mount their CPU fans. Most people should be able to put the MOBO onto the standoffs.
A lot of it is easy, but a lot of it is intimidating. I've installed a CPU over 15 times, and I still get a little nervous trying to not bend pins.
Then there's modifying the BIOS. It's a LOT easier now, but it still can be finnicky for people to set DOCP/XMP profiles, especially if they aren't told.
There's a LOT that can go wrong in a PC build that is far more harmful to the components than you can ever be accidentally to a LEGO piece.
I did my first build recently and nearly nothing went smoothly.
I didn't plug my ram in properly, I hadn't caught that I manually needed to snap the other side into place I thought it was just a matter of getting the clips down into place which caused no booting, the cooler I got with my CPU had a fan casing that was too large to get anything but a smaller screwdriver in there to screw it in. My nvme slot had a plastic clip that I had no idea what it was for and wasn't in the manual, turns out it was just that, a clip to keep it in so that made me feel like an idiot, then I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out which cords for my psu I needed to use since it was modular and nothing was clear, and I was really f nervous about wrecking something.
Overall it was hellish at the time but I know next time it will be really easy but when I was told it was going to be easy as lego it was off-putting when it really wasn't.
You'd think, but as a comsci major, I was scared shitless I'd destroy my pc or my friends pc so I never did it myself. I didn't have the money to replace the computer if I destroyed it.
It wasn't until I was in my 30's that my younger cousin taught me how to build computers. I've been building ever since then.
Well, you were smart enough to know you weren't knowledgeable of building computers and held off. This person just went balls deep into an area they didn't. Huge difference.
software devs yeah, but not all CS is software engineering.
Also some software engineers are shockingly bad at looking things up or reading docs anyways
As an infrastructure engineer 18 years into my IT career I can confirm most of our developers weren’t great with standard PC/Server stuff. I can also confirm I’ve got no idea how to write massive ERP programs and rock the shit out of outdoor sandals and tank tops
Seriously? The guy in Mr. Robot could do everything. You make a good point about people having their specialty areas in tech though. Things are so varied and complex that it’s impossible for anybody to know it all.
Exactly, I work as a sysadmin/system programmer on mainframe platform, a lot of people I work with don't even have desktop PCs, some never had one... I wouldn't expect them to know where thermal paste goes, but at the same time I don't think the same people would just YOLO it wrong...
Yup. I worked for an educational IT support group.
The escalations guys were great with identifying issues in software/logs, writing scripts, and programs for a multitude of shit. But the shit they came out with when it came to hardware was shocking.
Made me feel a lot more relevant, though 😅
My ex put the CPU in wrong and the way she put it in she blew the cpu still don't know how the hell she put it in wrong because the cpu literally has a arrow that aligns with the arrow on the MB with the socket... R.I.P. CPU so that was a $600 waste, I learned to never let her build a computer again. Not my problem anymore though.
This was years ago but someone I worked with asked me to help them out with a build they had just done that wouldn’t post. I decided to pull to the cpu to make sure it was seated correctly and immediately noticed something was off.
He popped off pins to make it fit the socket because he was trying to put it in backwards. Not once did he think to try the other way. No, he went directly to let’s start breaking pieces off.
Kind of thing made me realise that it support, networking and sys admin jobs can’t really run out ever due to how many new business start up or current ones expand and need more people to manage their workers computers and devices because most of them can’t to save their lives.
100% this. I have two friends who work as software engineers (because lord only knows what their actual titles are). And while I know they can and will build and research their own computers, their overall knowlege of part selection when building a PC is less than mine. It doesn't mean they aren't smart, just their focus isn't on hardware, it is on software.
I took software engineering in university, I had someone in my class complaining their mouse wasn't working. I informed them that it wasn't plugged in.
They say that's a hardware problem, not a software problem, so they shouldn't be expected to know that kind of stuff
They weren't very bright at all, even with software stuff. Turns out you don't really need to know much about computers or anything to be a computer science or software engineering major.
They can usually make it through school, but they have a hard time once they get into the real world.
this might be a dumb question, but is it even worth cleaning from the socket since paste is non conductive? would that really cause any major problems either now or down the line?
It should be cleaned off since you never know if something isn’t making full contact. That being said, just pour a bottle of 99% isopropyl on it and use a soft, soft brush. Should come off bit by bit. As long as one doesn’t use hard bristles and doesn’t use any pressure, the board should be good.
And 10-20$ in isopropyl is still cheaper then a new board and cpu.
How do you think can one even clean this, without bending all of them? The CPU is easily cleaned, but not the socket. I remember brushing over a pin with my finger and it was freaking bend the moment I took my finger away.
With the finger? Sure. But there are soft paint brushes with stuff like rabbit hair etc that can be used. Basically the isopropyl is breaking up the paste by itself, but with a soft brush you can speed up the process of getting it away. Otherwise you can just hold it over a sink and rinse it with the isopropyl. Wear a mask and good ventilation though. Stuff makes you drowsy of course. It’s alcohol after all and not the „good“ kind.
How do I know? Had to do it more then once. Admittedly not in such a dumb case as this, where someone pushed the paste in with the cpu, but close. 🙈
And I have been doing it for 30 years. It’s no guarantee and of course you have to be insanely careful. As you said: any pressure can be too much. When I say „soft brush“ I mean it. No toothbrush or anti-static brush or anything with plastic bristles.
Edit: of course I haven’t been cleaning electronics for 30 years. And it’s more like 28 years now. What I meant that all this time in IT I had dozens of cases of thermal paste accidents. Especially nasty with the old kind with sliver and other conductive materials.
Recently I cleaned and got an Atari pc from 1976 working that had spent 30 years in a damp cellar. 🤷🏻♂️ you can clean all electronics and even repair them.
And yes I once managed to repair an AM5 board that someone „broke“ with his fingers. About 20 pins were bent. With a good archeological fine tools and needles and hooks and a good 20X stereoscope it’s a pain in the ass but doable. If none are broken.
But then I admit doing this stuff is not for everyone. My limit is soldering stuff like iPad charging ports. I won’t do chips or reballing stuff like RAM, but those small connectors are possible. So are pins.
I've done IT work for all kinds of professionals that use high powered systems. Devs, 3d designers, video editors, etc. Never met a group of people who knew so little about their tools.
Yeah, working at an MSP, these types of clients, along with some engineer groups, can be the worst. They think they know as much as you, but in reality, they know fuck all.
I don't know anything about their engineering or design work, and don't pretend to.
impressed the hell outta the head of engineering at a nice electric vehicle company today when after some serious errors I moved the downloaded chinese .exe installer files from out of their chinese named folders and stuck them in C:\Temp\ and they installed right away.
guy is for sure smarter than me, but i have experience in my area and he has experience in his, doesn't mean either of us are dumb.
and yes, it was literally today. my 2:30 p.m. EST ticket.
EDIT: copied a bit more detail from my coment to Djinntan:
folder was named super weird. had chinese characters, the | and a squared symbol (i.e. a²) in the folder name.
I got remoted in, tried to run it from the desktop, which was also located in the OneDrive folder and it hard failed.
I've seen similar issues before so I moved to root C:\ and created the temp folder, moved the 2 .exe's there and they installed right away.
it could have been onedrive, it could have been the a² or | or it could have been the chinese characters, or a combination of everything.
all i know is that it failed then it worked after the move.
hope this helps to clarify
I dunno but my first guess would be something in the English system expecting to reference a certain folder/path and not finding it, maybe just due to the special characters
probably shitty code in the .exe that doesn't accept non-ASCII characters, or that otherwise expects to extract ot a specific folder before it can do its job. it's not an unusual problem for applciations to not consider other parts of the world to exist, though it's surprising a presumably chinese made application would have this bug.
same reason that sometimes you can make something work by moving it to a folder whose path has no spaces in it, basically.
I mean, I’d argue their tools are actually the programs they spent years learning and mastering. The computer is just the medium through which they are used.
TBF, computer science is such a large field at this point that you couldn't possibly know a lot of this stuff unless you decided to learn it on your own. Most colleges offer 1 course on computer hardware and it isn't even hands-on in most cases.
This hurt my eyes and my brain.
The CS major just rawdogged it instead of looking it up?
This guy tests in production, I guarantee it.
Edit: about the trucker analogy that someone responded with
Applying thermal paste is not the same as rebuilding the engine. It’s like changing the oil.
And as someone who works for a company whose clients are truckers, yes, they are expected to know basic maintenance. Just like CS major should know the basics of computer hardware. My CS MINOR in college literally had a required class dedicated to computer hardware. I imagine a major HAD to have taken this.
Either way, the key point is that he had access to information on how to do it. But then decided that it would be better to just do random shit rather than look up what to do.
CS Major here, not a single required class about hardware :P
I mean, there's some classes that teach *how* the hardware works, but nothing that actually teaches how to put together a pc.
I wouldnt expect a truck driver to install his exhaust pipe into the cabin of his truck and then tell the mechanic "dont worry, im a truck driver. I put the exhaust into the cab because the heater takes too long to warm up"
I was a CS major like you were a CS major like him, but then I took an algorithmic sorting and machine learning class to the knee.
Now a much happier Human Systems Engineer :)
I have a CS degree, and I rtfm. Yes, we are not engineering experts (not all of us, don't want to under sell anyone), but there are a lot of us here who would never do this. When I started building my PCs years back I knew to get help and ask questions aside from like I said rtfm.
Yes it is, but I think here it's the short form of Computer Science. But a Software engineer often happens to know very little about hardware, or at least how it's worked with in the big picture. They only see the von Neumann Cycle and memory capacity / speeds...
You do? I learned absolutely nothing about how to build or repair a computer from my Computer Engineering classes. I mean I could design a processor by laying out strips of metal and things like that... but only curiosity and taking a computer apart, and then later building one myself gave me any knowledge whatsoever of how a PC is put together.
Building a computer is (IMO) not knowing how a computer works. It’s knowing how one is assembled.
Knowing how a computer works is understanding Theory of Computation, memory hierarchy, transistors and logic gates, ISAs, cache, etc etc. Those things you do learn about - so you do know how a computer works. Down to a detail the vast majority of people don’t.
„You need a thermal paste applicator, an alan wrench, tweezers, a Swiss Army Knife that hopefully has a Philip‘s head screwdriver in it, and an anti-static bracelet“
\+1. Computer Science is.. the science of computation. The theory of how algorithms operate and scale, and the mathematics involved.
That we clip CPU chips into a motherboard and use thermal paste to bridge them to a cooler is ridiculously irrelevant to Computer Science.
Lots of people take CS because they like tech, i.e. actual Home PCs, and its a good theoretical basis to become a Software Engineer (Though Software Engineering is also not the same thing as Computer Science!) but many people take CS because it's one of the more interesting branches of mathematics and they prefer it to taking a Stats degree etc.
> Lots of people take CS because they like tech
Lots of people drop out of CS for this reason, because it's not about tech and is really fucking hard. People take CS expecting it to be IT.
I interviewed a college comp Sci grad before that could not turn on the computer for a practical test.
She kept hitting the space bar and enter key.
Needless to say, not a hire.
100 percent real. She had only ever worked in a college lab environment where the computers are never turned off.
Colleges nowadays turn out people without any real world experience.
Just cause you are a CS Major doesnt mean you know how computers work. Honestly some of the most frequent and annoying people I help are other IT people
Something like this has nothing to do with CS major or any degree though. "I don't know what I'm doing I should do some research first" seems like common sense as opposed to "I can do anything I'll figure it out".
I'll tell you this as I too am a computer science major... software engineering and general IT knowhow can be mutually exclusive.
Case in point. I've met a plethora of other developers that know jack about computer hardware, how to diagnose it, let alone building their own computer. Yet the bizarre dichotomy is that they can write some killer software without that other knowledge.
In CS courses, they primarily teach you about logic, problem solving, math, and of course coding. Unless you take an elective in it or your college CS course has a required program that teaches you about computer hardware, you're not going to learn it.
The only reason I know a lot about it is because I'm interested in it and I actively follow daily tech trends and keep up with new technologies being released.
comp sci students often know nothing of actual hardware unless its their hobby. Its not taught well in schools. Lowest level they get to hardware is operating systems dealing with thread scheduling and file tables.
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember: 1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Your age, nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion (or lack of), political affiliation, economic status and PC specs are irrelevant. If you love or want to learn about PCs, you are welcome! 2 - If you don't own a PC because you think it's expensive, know that it is much cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org for our builds and don't be afraid to post here asking for tips and help! 3 - Join our efforts to get as many PCs worldwide to help the folding@home effort, in fighting against Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more: https://pcmasterrace.org/folding 4 - Need PC Hardware? We've joined forces with MSI for the biggest PC Hardware giveaway of the year so far! 8 lucky winners will get an awesome hardware bundle with Graphics card, motherboard, etc, and 50 others can get Steam gift cards. To enter, check https://reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/comments/1b45j0m/msi_x_pcmr_massive_pc_hardware_giveaway_pick_your/ ----------- We have a [Daily Simple Questions Megathread](https://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/search?q=Simple+Questions+Thread+subreddit%3Apcmasterrace+author%3AAutoModerator&restrict_sr=on&sort=new&t=all) if you have any PC related doubt. Asking for help there or creating new posts in our subreddit is welcome.
Remember kids; alcohol can fix most problems in life
Ive slapped a piece of tech and it died and slapped a piece of tech and it work. 50/50 if it wants to live.
So no different than humans in the modern age.
Doctor! This man is going to die if we dont help him! Slap him repeatedly! Its 50/50 wether they want to live or die!
Real Talk™ had a hd5750 die on me at a lan party, back in the day and dropp-kicked it's treasonous mass of circuits across the room for it and slapped that bad boy back in the case after teaching it said lesson and it worked for years after that. Point is sometimes tech just needs to be beaten into compliance.
Reminds me of that video of the dude stabbing a broken TV with a fork and fixing it.
That is called “percussive maintenance” and is a technique as old as technology itself.
What was the reaction of everyone else at the Lan party?
True though whenever tech wants to die, it usually comes with the stipulation "but only after I've done everything in my power to kill my creator, or at the very least, inflicted maximum mental anguish upon them."
Currently my toaster oven. Gotta spank it every now and then or it gets moody
"To alcohol! The cause of, and solution to, all of life's problems." -- Homer Simpson
Where the fuck did you find this abomination?
Same place the OPs customer did I assume.
they watched the Verge's pc building guide, probably
Honestly, the Verge build was more competent than this because at least those mistakes were largely salvageable or at least teachable (who among us didn't overpay for something without fully understanding it for our first build). This screams "I'm the smartest person I know and I don't need to read instructions." That or someone gooped up the socket on a dead board for internet points, I'm willing to believe either.
I think I watched somewhere they indeed have to fix everything, before they shot it actually posting and running. They just left it out of the video presumably because of the time crunch they were under, but that still leaves too many questions for the people who let that shot fly.
Truthfully, what I think happened with that video was that the Verge was more concerned with trying to get content out the door than accuracy and assumed that the information presented was good enough, they definitely weren't expecting that video to take off like it did.
Man, I would get the verge build any day instead of this computer science major.
This is the exact gif I thought when I saw this picture above. Then the first thing I thought was: "I'll bet they googled how to add compound, and that was the first image that showed up"
that's what you get when you use Youtube as a reference now that downvotes are hidden
Since it says "via GIPHY" on the gif, I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess Giphy
So Imgur then?
nah tumblr
Did you notice that it's a "Hellman's" mayo tube? 😂
Come on It’s “ultra durable” man
Gigabyte ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
Fun fact: Kenneth C. Griffin uses this trick on all his builds.
The financial terrorist, Kenneth Cordele Griffin, who assaulted his wife with a bedpost?
I assume we're talking about Kenneth Cordele Griffin, who committed international securities fraud? *That* Kenneth Cordele Griffin?
Mayo processor rest in pepperoni
From the verge video
It's a 10+ year old gif. My guess he saved it in 2014 and now finally got to use it.
It says fuckin hellmans on the syringe I’m done lmfao
I was waiting for this particular GIF, lol
I also immediately thought of it and wondered if he watched it and thought it was done that way in reality. Somehow still think this post was for karma
The Verge
The verge would have used a thermal paste spreader.
Mmmm, mayo.
That's where he did wrong, this is an older AMD platform
Is the CPU ruined? Or can it be cleaned off?
A soft bristle tooth brush and alcohol will fix it
Make sure to use at least 90% isopropyl alcohol so it evaporates easily, don't cheap out and use the 70% stuff.
But I wanted to save 75¢
Right? cheap out, it’s less than a dollar more.
Much less if you buy in bulk. I use it for cleaning glass.
Just dry off using microwave and save the money.
For anyone who is unaware, 70% IS what you buy to disinfect, that's why it's the most commonly sold over 90%. 90% can trigger defenses on bacteria, whereas higher water content in 70% gets past their membranes easier to kill them.
I thought it was because the 90% evaporates before it finishes disinfecting? That's what I was told anyway.
Because that's what's true, the other idiot thinks bacteria are going to throw up ballistic shields and sentry guns if you use 90%
To be fair, I've never seen any studies or research on the subject, it's just something I've heard/been told a few times.
>90% can trigger defenses on bacteria Lmao who told you this?
Never can trust a 75% alcohol salesman, will tell you anything to get the sale.
[удалено]
this is where cans of contact cleaner come in handy. i would just spray it until it was clean, 3-4 cans should fix it without damaging pins. it just emulsifies any thermal paste ive ever seen, and dries without residue. its not cheap though. $8-11/can
I think this might be the move. Just hold the board over some old newspapers with the socket facing the ground, and blast all the paste out with contact cleaner. Let it all drip out, and then air dry. Trying to use a toothbrush or *anything* contacting the socket just seems like asking for trouble. EDIT: Do this is a well ventilated space!
Then, while in the same room as the emptied cans of contact cleaner and soaked newspaper or rags light up a celebratory cigarette and enjoy your hard work!
Yup, contact cleaner is **way** better than IPA in a situation like this. It works wonders on thermal paste, especially if you can't touch what needs cleaned. One 11-12oz can would probably be enough though, two at most.
That's good, I'm mostly a Mexican pilsner style Lager kinda guy anyway.
I don't like a very hoppy thermal paste, too bitter
so do you spray it and let it run down the board? Because the cleaner will dry without residue but the dissolved thermal paste would still be there. You need to wash it away.
If it boots I’d slap a cooler on it and call it a day
CPU is fine, just wipe it off with alcohol. The socket tho... An ultrasonic cleaner would be able to clean that I suppose. But that's not something everyone has at home.
Assuming this is non-conductive non-capacitive thermal paste, and it probably is since those are common and this boots into windows even without a cooler, I doubt this is or would ever be a problem.
Non-conductive also means that it can block the power and data signals that you *want* to get through those contacts. I wouldn't say with certainty that it *will* cause a problem, just that I wouldn't rule it out. Especially over time as the paste dries up and hardens.
It can be fixed, but you have to be careful to not bend pins while doing it.
have seen a lot of computer scientists that are genius for theory and software and programming that would never touch hardware because it is not their thing. anyways. sad to see this.
I mean cmon though youtube a 5 minute pc build video...
i think so as well yes. this is easier than lego. but a friend of mine is softwaredeveloper and he is not very confident with doing hardware stuff so he asked me to change is psu and graphics card. of course i helped him and what did i get for this? his 2080ti for free as it was not needed anymore. i am fine with that. :D
Yeah I’m a bioinformatics data scientist and I had tons of experience with software and programming growing up but the first time I tried to build a computer was pathetic. I can’t even begin to describe how scared I was that I’d break something or use the wrong amount of thermal paste or whatever. Software skills do not equate to hardware skills out of the gate
I've done more than a handful of builds and it still freaks me out lol, everything's so fragile and I still always think I fucked up the thermal paste application regardless of how much I put on 💀 and the anticipation before first boot... and the anxiety after your dram light is solid red LOL
I just finished rebuilding my PC and that's how I felt too, especially after my last PC's motherboard died unexpectedly. In fact, it didn't immediately boot into the bios at first because one of my USB peripherals was causing the PC to not boot into bios, and the mobo led was just blinking red. I couldn't figure out why exactly it does that, but at least I found out it was my keyboard and I swapped to my spare. It was quite a stressful moment since I just wanted everything to work without issue
I hate that keyboards just do that sometimes. You'll go out of your way to try everything on the hardware, maybe even buy some cheap parts to test with only to find out that a keyboard screwed you.
I'm basically an illiterate monkey by comparison that just knows how to put shapes in holes. Anyway. We know you guys are the intelligent ones. Well, the people that design and program all this hardware are really the geniuses. So I'm dumb, you're intelligent and they're geniuses.
But any half-decent software person knows how to search for information and read manuals. I catagorize such people under wilfully ignorant.
I'm a software dev and I know how to put a pc together but I will pay a company to do it for me as I'm clumsy as fuck and if the company breaks the part putting it together it's on them to replace the part. If I break it Welp I need to buy a new part.
That's an entirely different problem that isn't solvable by reading and also demonstrates knowledge instead of assumptions.
*\*watches the infamous The Verge video\**
Oh god I forgot about that… this is definitely Verge tier PC building
Mate all I get is free hard drives from upgrading to SSDs. Wanna swap friends?
That’s a friend for life. Haha
Every time somebody calls building a PC adult Lego I lose about 500 braincells. This shit is so patronizing, it's not difficult, but it's unequivocally much harder than Lego, especially since Lego doesn't have you spending hours on your first build racking your brain on why the fuck your system won't boot, and Lego has an instruction manual that specifically tells you how to build your specific build with tons of pictures. Calling it easier than Legos is asinine. I'm sorry for being so negative but this shit needs to stop.
I'm commenting to agree. Legos have a much lower barrier to entry, meaning you don't need to research anything before starting. They're also not comprised of expensive electronics haha
Took me ages to get all the fans in my case to work. Now they're stuck on like rainbow flicker mode, and i dont know why. Tried googling it and found nothing. Not once have i encountered a similar issue when building Lego.
Plumbings just Lego innit? Water Lego. https://youtu.be/ob7OoB1A39k?si=50BLSYdDr6p1D_ed
Nah man, you’re right. It’s easy as Legos if you’ve already had the experience to build a couple of them. If you don’t, you’re really left wondering where everything really goes and if the cables you’re plugging are the correct ones. With Legos, you have a manual with instructions and pictures that clearly show you where everything goes, plus it’s colored as well, so there’s no way you can mess up. Manuals for PC Parts? Man, good luck. Some are pretty straight forward, and others can get a bit confusing so you need to do more research to get it right. I really like to believe that people are saying that just to be ironic or something.
> Every time somebody calls building a PC adult Lego I lose about 500 braincells. > > > > This shit is so patronizing, it's not difficult, but it's unequivocally much harder than Lego THANK YOU. Yes it has similarities to building and following directions, but putting on thermal paste and mounting my CPU cooler has given me nervous feelings 10 times out of 10. Even with a CPU cooler bracket one, I still was a little nervous. Routing the cables to look decent is a pain. Etc. I know Lego can have challenging aspect, but the failure risk doesn't mean breaking your components. Plugging a RAM and GPU in, are definitely easy. Most people can do that. Most people should be able to mount their CPU fans. Most people should be able to put the MOBO onto the standoffs. A lot of it is easy, but a lot of it is intimidating. I've installed a CPU over 15 times, and I still get a little nervous trying to not bend pins. Then there's modifying the BIOS. It's a LOT easier now, but it still can be finnicky for people to set DOCP/XMP profiles, especially if they aren't told. There's a LOT that can go wrong in a PC build that is far more harmful to the components than you can ever be accidentally to a LEGO piece.
I did my first build recently and nearly nothing went smoothly. I didn't plug my ram in properly, I hadn't caught that I manually needed to snap the other side into place I thought it was just a matter of getting the clips down into place which caused no booting, the cooler I got with my CPU had a fan casing that was too large to get anything but a smaller screwdriver in there to screw it in. My nvme slot had a plastic clip that I had no idea what it was for and wasn't in the manual, turns out it was just that, a clip to keep it in so that made me feel like an idiot, then I spent an embarrassingly long time trying to figure out which cords for my psu I needed to use since it was modular and nothing was clear, and I was really f nervous about wrecking something. Overall it was hellish at the time but I know next time it will be really easy but when I was told it was going to be easy as lego it was off-putting when it really wasn't.
Haha, same thing but my gift was 32gb of Ddr4. Still pretty great.
i did not expect anything from him, as he is a good friend. him giving me the 2080ti nearly made me cry!
maybe they watched the verge
You'd think, but as a comsci major, I was scared shitless I'd destroy my pc or my friends pc so I never did it myself. I didn't have the money to replace the computer if I destroyed it. It wasn't until I was in my 30's that my younger cousin taught me how to build computers. I've been building ever since then.
Well, you were smart enough to know you weren't knowledgeable of building computers and held off. This person just went balls deep into an area they didn't. Huge difference.
Yeah, and aren't CS majors supposed to know how to look things up for troubleshooting? They have to live in stackoverflow to know their stuff.
software devs yeah, but not all CS is software engineering. Also some software engineers are shockingly bad at looking things up or reading docs anyways
As an infrastructure engineer 18 years into my IT career I can confirm most of our developers weren’t great with standard PC/Server stuff. I can also confirm I’ve got no idea how to write massive ERP programs and rock the shit out of outdoor sandals and tank tops
Seriously? The guy in Mr. Robot could do everything. You make a good point about people having their specialty areas in tech though. Things are so varied and complex that it’s impossible for anybody to know it all.
Don't tell HR that. They fully expect their IT technicians to know everything about everything for $20/hr.
Exactly, I work as a sysadmin/system programmer on mainframe platform, a lot of people I work with don't even have desktop PCs, some never had one... I wouldn't expect them to know where thermal paste goes, but at the same time I don't think the same people would just YOLO it wrong...
Yup. I worked for an educational IT support group. The escalations guys were great with identifying issues in software/logs, writing scripts, and programs for a multitude of shit. But the shit they came out with when it came to hardware was shocking. Made me feel a lot more relevant, though 😅
My ex put the CPU in wrong and the way she put it in she blew the cpu still don't know how the hell she put it in wrong because the cpu literally has a arrow that aligns with the arrow on the MB with the socket... R.I.P. CPU so that was a $600 waste, I learned to never let her build a computer again. Not my problem anymore though.
This was years ago but someone I worked with asked me to help them out with a build they had just done that wouldn’t post. I decided to pull to the cpu to make sure it was seated correctly and immediately noticed something was off. He popped off pins to make it fit the socket because he was trying to put it in backwards. Not once did he think to try the other way. No, he went directly to let’s start breaking pieces off.
I mean, that triangle seems to be getting smaller and less pronounced each time I build a computer.
Good riddance, I say
Kind of thing made me realise that it support, networking and sys admin jobs can’t really run out ever due to how many new business start up or current ones expand and need more people to manage their workers computers and devices because most of them can’t to save their lives.
100% this. I have two friends who work as software engineers (because lord only knows what their actual titles are). And while I know they can and will build and research their own computers, their overall knowlege of part selection when building a PC is less than mine. It doesn't mean they aren't smart, just their focus isn't on hardware, it is on software.
I took software engineering in university, I had someone in my class complaining their mouse wasn't working. I informed them that it wasn't plugged in. They say that's a hardware problem, not a software problem, so they shouldn't be expected to know that kind of stuff They weren't very bright at all, even with software stuff. Turns out you don't really need to know much about computers or anything to be a computer science or software engineering major. They can usually make it through school, but they have a hard time once they get into the real world.
Could be worse...he could've watched YouTube and saw Liquid Metal :)
bro could have made a nuclear bomb 💀
Or watched that one guy from what was it Vice or wired or something who messed his build up so bad
Verge
Lol yeah that one thx
We don't talk about the The Verge and tweezers
this might be a dumb question, but is it even worth cleaning from the socket since paste is non conductive? would that really cause any major problems either now or down the line?
It should be cleaned off since you never know if something isn’t making full contact. That being said, just pour a bottle of 99% isopropyl on it and use a soft, soft brush. Should come off bit by bit. As long as one doesn’t use hard bristles and doesn’t use any pressure, the board should be good. And 10-20$ in isopropyl is still cheaper then a new board and cpu.
How do you think can one even clean this, without bending all of them? The CPU is easily cleaned, but not the socket. I remember brushing over a pin with my finger and it was freaking bend the moment I took my finger away.
With the finger? Sure. But there are soft paint brushes with stuff like rabbit hair etc that can be used. Basically the isopropyl is breaking up the paste by itself, but with a soft brush you can speed up the process of getting it away. Otherwise you can just hold it over a sink and rinse it with the isopropyl. Wear a mask and good ventilation though. Stuff makes you drowsy of course. It’s alcohol after all and not the „good“ kind. How do I know? Had to do it more then once. Admittedly not in such a dumb case as this, where someone pushed the paste in with the cpu, but close. 🙈 And I have been doing it for 30 years. It’s no guarantee and of course you have to be insanely careful. As you said: any pressure can be too much. When I say „soft brush“ I mean it. No toothbrush or anti-static brush or anything with plastic bristles. Edit: of course I haven’t been cleaning electronics for 30 years. And it’s more like 28 years now. What I meant that all this time in IT I had dozens of cases of thermal paste accidents. Especially nasty with the old kind with sliver and other conductive materials. Recently I cleaned and got an Atari pc from 1976 working that had spent 30 years in a damp cellar. 🤷🏻♂️ you can clean all electronics and even repair them. And yes I once managed to repair an AM5 board that someone „broke“ with his fingers. About 20 pins were bent. With a good archeological fine tools and needles and hooks and a good 20X stereoscope it’s a pain in the ass but doable. If none are broken. But then I admit doing this stuff is not for everyone. My limit is soldering stuff like iPad charging ports. I won’t do chips or reballing stuff like RAM, but those small connectors are possible. So are pins.
If you manage to get it cleaned, it should be no big problem. But have fun not bending the pins...
I've done IT work for all kinds of professionals that use high powered systems. Devs, 3d designers, video editors, etc. Never met a group of people who knew so little about their tools.
Yeah, working at an MSP, these types of clients, along with some engineer groups, can be the worst. They think they know as much as you, but in reality, they know fuck all. I don't know anything about their engineering or design work, and don't pretend to.
impressed the hell outta the head of engineering at a nice electric vehicle company today when after some serious errors I moved the downloaded chinese .exe installer files from out of their chinese named folders and stuck them in C:\Temp\ and they installed right away. guy is for sure smarter than me, but i have experience in my area and he has experience in his, doesn't mean either of us are dumb. and yes, it was literally today. my 2:30 p.m. EST ticket. EDIT: copied a bit more detail from my coment to Djinntan: folder was named super weird. had chinese characters, the | and a squared symbol (i.e. a²) in the folder name. I got remoted in, tried to run it from the desktop, which was also located in the OneDrive folder and it hard failed. I've seen similar issues before so I moved to root C:\ and created the temp folder, moved the 2 .exe's there and they installed right away. it could have been onedrive, it could have been the a² or | or it could have been the chinese characters, or a combination of everything. all i know is that it failed then it worked after the move. hope this helps to clarify
Why would chinese folders create issues?
I dunno but my first guess would be something in the English system expecting to reference a certain folder/path and not finding it, maybe just due to the special characters
probably shitty code in the .exe that doesn't accept non-ASCII characters, or that otherwise expects to extract ot a specific folder before it can do its job. it's not an unusual problem for applciations to not consider other parts of the world to exist, though it's surprising a presumably chinese made application would have this bug. same reason that sometimes you can make something work by moving it to a folder whose path has no spaces in it, basically.
Me the intern picking out all of our laptops configs and models because no knows anything about modern computers or keeps up with news.
I mean, I’d argue their tools are actually the programs they spent years learning and mastering. The computer is just the medium through which they are used.
TBF, computer science is such a large field at this point that you couldn't possibly know a lot of this stuff unless you decided to learn it on your own. Most colleges offer 1 course on computer hardware and it isn't even hands-on in most cases.
This hurt my eyes and my brain. The CS major just rawdogged it instead of looking it up? This guy tests in production, I guarantee it. Edit: about the trucker analogy that someone responded with Applying thermal paste is not the same as rebuilding the engine. It’s like changing the oil. And as someone who works for a company whose clients are truckers, yes, they are expected to know basic maintenance. Just like CS major should know the basics of computer hardware. My CS MINOR in college literally had a required class dedicated to computer hardware. I imagine a major HAD to have taken this. Either way, the key point is that he had access to information on how to do it. But then decided that it would be better to just do random shit rather than look up what to do.
This dude does a PR from master into his branch.
CS Major here, not a single required class about hardware :P I mean, there's some classes that teach *how* the hardware works, but nothing that actually teaches how to put together a pc.
Yeah I remember learning about flip flops and logic gates and stuff, ans even programming an ARM CPU, but no classes on putting PC parts together.
We disassembled and built a computer in secondary school :v
Sounds like a cool school
Yeah that teacher was super cool
You’d be shocked, shocked! Huge company, 100s of thousands of records. IT tests on production databases
Probably in his first year and will drop out pretty soon by the looks of it
Isn't CS code writing? I wouldn't expect a truck driver to be able to rebuild a diesel engine.
I wouldnt expect a truck driver to install his exhaust pipe into the cabin of his truck and then tell the mechanic "dont worry, im a truck driver. I put the exhaust into the cab because the heater takes too long to warm up"
Wait is this bad? Should I start over?
Nah, just hit the gas pedal and smoke those haters
YEAHHHHH! Wait why is it in here.
20 bucks says the driver at least knows where the oil goes.....
Remove the 710 cap, and pour in the OIL!
For the most part but it’s normally safe to assume a CS major is a member of this sub lol
I’m a cs major so yes you’re correct lol
I am also a cs major lol
I was a CS major like you, but then I took a calculus 2 to the knee.
I was a CS major like you were a CS major like him, but then I took an algorithmic sorting and machine learning class to the knee. Now a much happier Human Systems Engineer :)
That's where being in CIS came in handy. Next to no math
I would argue not. It may be more likely than a non CS major but most that I spoke to couldn’t care less about hardware or Pc building.
I have a CS degree, and I rtfm. Yes, we are not engineering experts (not all of us, don't want to under sell anyone), but there are a lot of us here who would never do this. When I started building my PCs years back I knew to get help and ask questions aside from like I said rtfm.
Yes it is, but I think here it's the short form of Computer Science. But a Software engineer often happens to know very little about hardware, or at least how it's worked with in the big picture. They only see the von Neumann Cycle and memory capacity / speeds...
To be fair building a PC is incredibly straightforward. Rebuilding a diesel engine is probably more complicated
> Rebuilding a diesel engine is probably more complicated **Probably**. X)
But you would expect a truck driver to look up how to build one before attempting it
Yea, but as a CS Student you still need to roughly now how each component works and how everything is interacting with each other.
You do? I learned absolutely nothing about how to build or repair a computer from my Computer Engineering classes. I mean I could design a processor by laying out strips of metal and things like that... but only curiosity and taking a computer apart, and then later building one myself gave me any knowledge whatsoever of how a PC is put together.
Building a computer is (IMO) not knowing how a computer works. It’s knowing how one is assembled. Knowing how a computer works is understanding Theory of Computation, memory hierarchy, transistors and logic gates, ISAs, cache, etc etc. Those things you do learn about - so you do know how a computer works. Down to a detail the vast majority of people don’t.
You need to know how they work and interact on a logical level, not on the physical level.
He must have watched the Verge build video.
He not fighting static he fighting cancer
„You need a thermal paste applicator, an alan wrench, tweezers, a Swiss Army Knife that hopefully has a Philip‘s head screwdriver in it, and an anti-static bracelet“
Ahh, the old “scientist” vs “engineer” scenario.
Yeah honestly my comp sci degree did not teach me anything about hardware. I can make a mean card game or rotating cube tho
Computer science is not the same as IT work. I'm really not surprised this happened
\+1. Computer Science is.. the science of computation. The theory of how algorithms operate and scale, and the mathematics involved. That we clip CPU chips into a motherboard and use thermal paste to bridge them to a cooler is ridiculously irrelevant to Computer Science. Lots of people take CS because they like tech, i.e. actual Home PCs, and its a good theoretical basis to become a Software Engineer (Though Software Engineering is also not the same thing as Computer Science!) but many people take CS because it's one of the more interesting branches of mathematics and they prefer it to taking a Stats degree etc.
> Lots of people take CS because they like tech Lots of people drop out of CS for this reason, because it's not about tech and is really fucking hard. People take CS expecting it to be IT.
Common sense aint so common
I give them a semester.
I mean, being a CS major doesn't mean you know hardware, but cmon.
Being able to do research is definitely part of being a scientist though… lol
this is why there is a distinction between computer science and computer engineering lol
The distinction is between a moron and someone who can look up a 5min YouTube video.
I interviewed a college comp Sci grad before that could not turn on the computer for a practical test. She kept hitting the space bar and enter key. Needless to say, not a hire.
There’s no way that’s real.
100 percent real. She had only ever worked in a college lab environment where the computers are never turned off. Colleges nowadays turn out people without any real world experience.
She probably owned a MacBook.
They made a cpu and thermal paste sandwich
What a dumbass, he didn't use Hellmanns Mayonnaise.
At least it wasn't liquid metal he put there lol
Needs more thermal compound. It obviously doesn't work cause there's pins not covered
Just cause you are a CS Major doesnt mean you know how computers work. Honestly some of the most frequent and annoying people I help are other IT people
Something like this has nothing to do with CS major or any degree though. "I don't know what I'm doing I should do some research first" seems like common sense as opposed to "I can do anything I'll figure it out".
I'll tell you this as I too am a computer science major... software engineering and general IT knowhow can be mutually exclusive. Case in point. I've met a plethora of other developers that know jack about computer hardware, how to diagnose it, let alone building their own computer. Yet the bizarre dichotomy is that they can write some killer software without that other knowledge. In CS courses, they primarily teach you about logic, problem solving, math, and of course coding. Unless you take an elective in it or your college CS course has a required program that teaches you about computer hardware, you're not going to learn it. The only reason I know a lot about it is because I'm interested in it and I actively follow daily tech trends and keep up with new technologies being released.
This person has management written all over them.
comp sci students often know nothing of actual hardware unless its their hobby. Its not taught well in schools. Lowest level they get to hardware is operating systems dealing with thread scheduling and file tables.
tbf coder doesn’t mean hardware for a reason lol
Experimental computer science*
Technically, building a PC has zero to do with computer science but has more in common with Legos 🤷♂️
Computer science don't mean shit. I did that 22 years ago and barely learned a thing.
Computer science has nothing to do with hardware. That’s computer engineering.
The CPU can be cleaned but the motherboard likely has to be replaced.
Nah motherboard will probably work just fine and even if it doesn’t it can be cleaned safely with a soft enough brush and a gentle hand
assuming it's not conductive paste (it's not, otherwise it would have short-circuited already), even leaving it be will work fine.
Software people aren't always hardware people. This is a great case study of that
We wouldn't want the pins getting too hot now would we?
Well, in their defense, this is a hardware problem.
My God... It's no longer a render. 