I Bought A BROKEN Alienware Gaming PC On Ebay...

To be fair if I was a CPU trapped in an Alienware - I would also escape.

Not having a CPU at all in the system is the biggest plot twist of all time because it's quite smart considering people assume there is one due to the cooler.

I legit was in shock when you found out there was no CPU. At least the 3080 was working fine 🤣

As soon as I saw it fail to boot with the 3600, my immediate thought was "I bet the BIOS is 5000 series locked." I rebuilt an old HP Omen that originally shipped with a 3000 series Ryzen, and the only thing that would boot in it, was another 3000 series chip. Anything else would fail to POST. Glad to see you tried a 5000 series and got it up and running!

Dawid just finding out it didn't have a CPU after hours of testing is the equivalent of a surgeon operating on a person without noticing that it came into the operating room headless.

To think there used to be time when Alienware was every aspiring gamer kids dream pre-built to buy... and then Dell entered the equation xD

Fun fact. The SpP and the LPN labels mean this was purchased used from amazon before Dawid got it off eBay. The SpP labels are how Amazon keeps track of shipments within their own warehouses, and the LPN label is used when a product is returned and deemed worthy of reselling as "Used" or "As is."

I'm old enough to remember when an Alienware system was well designed, well specced and was considered beastly, but then Dell happened and that was the end of that.

The most gripping episode of Fix or Flop yet

i laughed so hard when dawid took off the cooler and there was nothing under the thermal paste. I was salty because i was thinking "Why he doesn't test those components in another motherboard?" lmaooo

9:38 “We are potentially sacrificing this CPU to the gods of Alienware” Hahaha there are no gods of Alienware only devils and demons

I remember early Alienware, when they had metallic green, and purple cases. The cases were based on the beautiful Antec/Chieftec chassis' that I still love.

My theory is, the seller was not tech savvy, a """freind""" of theirs stole the CPU knowing they wouldn't know how to check for it and just covered it back up with the water block. So when it wouldn't work, all they would see is a normal system that just didn't work and wouldn't know what to do and instead of getting it fixed they just strait up sold it. Anything else and it's just weird that they sent you a working thiddy80.

I have gone through this exact same emotional experience modifying and fixing things before. When the gpu worked on a new system and you spent a few moments swearing I felt the same relief I feel when success happens to me.

Dawid, congrats on approaching 0,5 million subs! It's awesome to have seen your channel grow so much these years :) Never change, your style sets your channel apart from others like LTT J2C etc. Keep up the great work!

Ive fixed pcs for many many years and this is likely the first time I've ever come across a "broken" pc basically being broken because someone removed the CPU for some reason. As looking at the CPU cooler the thermal paste seems to have made contact with a CPU by the looks of it.

I spit out my coffee laughing when I saw it didnt have a cpu XD

And when you'd thought the CPU would be pulled out of the socket! Damn, nobody was ready for that plot twist!

If the PC came with a Ryzen 5000 series CPU, then you must use a Ryzen 5000 series CPU. Due to AMD keeping the AM4 socket around so long, they ran out of room in the standard 16MB UEFI ROM to store microcode for the entire AM4 range. The fix was to support smaller groups of CPUs, generally in the same range and one prior range. This means that not all AM4 motherboards are compatible with all AM4 CPUs. Some manufacturers did release special stripped down UEFI implementations to make more room to support more CPUs, but it isn't common. If you have a motherboard compatible with Ryzen 5000 series CPUs, then the farthest back you can generally go is Ryzen 3000, excluding the APUs. A Ryzen 2600 definitely won't work.

I'm so glad I bought a Cooler Master HAF-932 case. Giant, low RPM fans (silent), on all sides of the case, no component ever gets hot.