Anyone who has ever assembled a PC knows this one crucial moment: the first attempt to turn on the PC.
If the computer does not boot up normally as expected, there can be many reasons for this, from forgotten cables to incompatible hardware to an unintentionally triggered short circuit. What happened in the case in question here is probably one of the rather rare causes.
Which PC is it? What is meant is a new gaming computer that is equipped, among other things, with a Radeon RX 7800 XT, a Core i7 12700K and 32.0 GB of RAM. An all-in-one water cooling system for the CPU is also part of the hardware – if you install it.
General tips for dealing with a computer that won’t start can be found in the article First aid for the PC: This is what you can do if the computer doesn’t start up
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The owner emphasizes the problem himself without noticing it
As in the picture above from the matching one Reddit post To see, the PC owner lists his components individually in a Facebook group, which is generally a good idea in such a case.
One of his tips quickly catches the eye, because behind the aforementioned AiO cooling for the CPU there is a very crucial addition in brackets: not yet installed
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From the photo of the computer you can immediately see that the processor is housed on the mainboard without any form of cooling. Not only, but especially not a good idea for hotheads like the Intel CPUs of the last generations.
If the PC starts up enough to get a picture, a warning about the lack of the CPU fan usually appears – unless one of the case fans has been connected to the connection on the mainboard that was actually intended for the CPU fan.
Our own experiment on gaming without a CPU cooler also revealed this error message, the same applies to major (heat) problems when operating the PC:
How this can be prevented
You don’t have to be deeply knowledgeable about PCs to know that desktop CPUs need a cooler. It becomes clear when you look at the mainboard manual, because it usually contains illustrated instructions that also describe how to install a CPU cooler.
To be on the safe side, a checklist with the basic steps can be very helpful. The same applies to step-by-step instructions in written or video form.
Essentially, everything in PC building has been the same for a long time. That’s why our own, outdated instructions based on Intel’s Socket 1155 and AMD’s Socket AM3+ can further illustrate the basic procedure – even if all-in-one water cooling was not yet an issue at the time.
Instead of having too few fans, the player in the following article has to contend with far too many of them, as you can read here: Player installs 22 fans in his PC, despairs of cable management
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Anyone who has often assembled a PC knows that it’s easy to forget something – but that’s rarely the case for the CPU cooler. Or has it ever happened to you that you forgot him? And what other errors have you encountered with self-built computers, be it on your own PC or on a computer from a friend or relative? Feel free to write it in the comments!