PICTURE THE SCENE. We were almost complete, every component attached, cables connected, and the day was going so well. We walk over to the outlet, connect up the PSU power cable, flick the switch on the wall, and then turn on the power supply itself. The motherboard lights come on and our hearts are filled with joy. We reach over to press the power button on the case, fans spin, lights come on, the pump header LCD panel shows a glimmer of hope, and then bam! The PC chokes and fails to boot up.
Our once joyous faces fall, the classic head scratching begins. We tried another PSU, reseated every single cable and component, and even shorted the connection on the power switch front panel pins to boot the system, but kept on getting the same result. We then dreaded the thought of the GPU or CPU being faulty and knew we didn’t have any time to get alternatives, especially not another GPU. We had a backup build in mind, so we took all the components necessary to complete that build to our photo studio, as well as this build. After finishing another machine, that system also crashed and burned (not literally, thankfully) and was having motherboard issues, so we turned to the original system and tried something we hadn’t yet tried, namely swapping out the cooler.