A customer of many years called to report that their important desktop was intermittantly restarting. An intermittant fault is always the hardest to try and diagnose and pin down the cause or faulty components or components. Sometimes the best way is to request that it is monitored until it becomes more consistent. They big danger to this is that in waiting for the condition to worsen could be catastrophic. This is why this desktop was booked into the EHCR workshop.
On performing a visual check over first, I could see that the front air intake was nearly 100% blocked by debris. So no cool / fresh air coming into the desktop. This machine is kept in an enclosed area and in the hot temperatures this year is potentially a key fault indicator. The whole area was blown and cleaned free of the debris
I found the old Graphics card was placing a huge drain on the system, this card was also causing the monitors to switch on at random intervals when turning the desktop on. This was replaced with a lower profule card and able to supply upto to three monitors.
I benchmarked the machine pre and post repair, this isn’t a true representation of the performance of the machine. You can see how the different components change when the system is altered. The New graphices card vastly improved the system, and will be useful when working with graphics as this customer likes to do.
PRE-CHANGE
UserBenchmarks: Game 25%, Desk 81%, Work 24%
CPU: Intel Core i7-11700 – 78.3%
GPU: AMD R9 270X – 27.7%
SSD: WDC WDS500G2B0A-00SM50 500GB – 88.1%
HDD: WD Blue 1TB (2012) – 62.3%
RAM: Crucial CT16G4DFS8266.C8FE 1x16GB – 46.9%
MBD: MSI MAG B560M MORTAR (MS-7D17)
POST-CHANGE
UserBenchmarks: Game 33%, Desk 73%, Work 31%
CPU: Intel Core i7-11700 – 70.3%
GPU: Nvidia GTX 1650 – 43.1%
SSD: WDC WDS500G2B0A-00SM50 500GB – 72%
HDD: WD Blue 1TB (2012) – 56.7%
RAM: Crucial CT16G4DFS8266.C8FE 1x16GB – 45%
MBD: MSI MAG B560M MORTAR (MS-7D17)
The top image shows the rating pre changes and the lower post changes
