Transcript for:
Guide to Disassembling a PC

alright so there's a lot going on I don't you guys follow it on Twitter but we showed that we are going to be moving into a new studio here very very soon a much larger space we building it out as people are calling it jeez check tips because the perryland copying line is by making a studio but whatever I did I digress that's besides the point we should all copy the Great's right but no I started taking this system apart because these are not my components see these belong to someone else with the exception of the reservoir I need to get that back because that's gonna be used in the AMD build we're doing with the Radeon 7 build but I thought has anyone ever actually demonstrated how to take a computer apart like how to unbilled one rule the games from the seven kingdoms with your iron claw Mouse from your iron throne it has a scroll wheel that looks like a off-road tyre and buttons on the side and top to do stuff don't lose grip while doing stuff with the textured sides and do it in style with the odd GP and now comes available in wired and wireless learn more at Corsair com I see messages all the time for people telling me hey I inherited a PC I was given one by my friend or whatever and I felt Phil's even though that feels even provided computers to his friends who were like thanks I have a console have no idea what I'm doing with this so rather than pick this up from the perspective of I'm building a new computer from scratch how about we take it from the perspective of you received an old computer you want to upgrade or rebuild or just take the parts out of and you don't know a damn thing about computers we're gonna we're gonna help you now figure out how to take something apart we took that panel off already and you want to take off both side panels your case is probably gonna have some knobs you got to turn take the screws out and this is gonna give you access to all the wiring on the back and obviously on the front now we're gonna at least pretend for the sake of this video that you know what the components are so I'm not gonna go into detail on them but I will point them out this is your heatsink for your CPU if you have a water cooler or a i/o it's gonna be very similar easier to take apart than these usually this is your graphics card everything's plugged into the motherboard these things sticking up is your RAM or your memory and then you have your power connectors which is gonna be a 24-pin usually on the right a CPU power pin usually a four or eight pin at the top you're gonna have your PCI Express hooked up to your graphics card if it uses it otherwise it may not have power connected at all there might be one plug two plugs are even three plugs and then you have on the bottom right here your front panel connectors these are the wires that tell your reset button your switch or in our case our kill switch that we're pushing buttons those plug into the motherboard and then you're gonna also have usually which are over here on the right-hand side your hard drives SATA connectors which are what your hard drives can communicate with your motherboard with and then this thing down here in the bottom that's usually Bagan square is your power supply so what I like to do is kind of unplug the power cables so one of the last things I do when I build a computer is actually plug in all of the power oh and then this big fat flat guy right here this is our USB 3.0 it's usually on the right side of the motherboard or the bottom now if you're gonna be just updating or upgrading your system by changing out the graphics card or the CPU or whatever you wouldn't really need to unplug any of the stuff I'm unplugging here you just want to unplug obviously power from the system but this is from the perspective of we are taking this all apart now you're gonna have at least one maybe two screws that are holding it into the chassis itself unplug the power which we already did and what you're gonna see is in the back this one happens to be white it's a little push tab to push it down to release the lock in the back of the graphics card to keep it from coming out it might also be one that you have to squeeze it might be one you have to kind of move out of the way it might be one that slides there's like three or four different mechanisms for that once you do that just kind of wiggle it back and forth and it comes straight out so what happens is it locks into this little hook right here that keeps it from coming out so the next thing I'm gonna take off here is my RAM I think I'm gonna remove the CPU cooler with the motherboard when we take that out so it's just like the graphics card here a different shaped tab but we've got these two tabs that hold either side your motherboard might only have one little snap release with one side that doesn't move at all it's the same says for both just remove that or push down the tabs that actually move so we're gonna push that one down push that one down and as you do that the RAM kind of gets unseated so you want to make sure that doesn't just fall out when I do the top I like to kind of hold it with these two fingers so it doesn't fall out let me push that down so if you were adding another hard drive you would need to plug in a SATA cable here but since we are unbuilding this computer we are going to unhook these SATA cables and the way to get these out is to see these little metal tabs those are what sort of lock it in place so they don't accidentally fall out not all SATA cables have that these actually do so I'm just kind of grabbing that wire from behind right here pushing that tab down and pulling back now this is actually something that comes in handy as well speaking of use case let's say you're gonna reuse all these components but you got a really old ugly case like here have an example so here's an example let's say the components that we're in here were decent like we have here this is an fx 8320 not a bad system you could still game on it but this case is really ugly so you could do the method we're using here by showing you how to remove everything to move it to another case then you just have to watch our other video on how to build a computer to know how to put it all back together so the next thing I'm gonna do here is since this fan will allow us to do it or this cooler I'm gonna go ahead and just take this fan off because I didn't have this one it's not wired to the cooler itself and I just want the room so we can take the fan out of here get a little bit extra room and now we can easily access our screws we're gonna go ahead and remove our motherboard and to do that I'm gonna lay it flat but you can see right here that there are perimeter screws I'm actually missing winner there but there are usually going to be one two three screws on the bottom potentially one or two right here I didn't put any there we're gonna have one in the middle in this case it's a dimple that just sort of holds on to the motherboard there's no screw in that one screw here and then again just mirrored from the bottom across the top you're gonna have three of them so just unscrew these do it with the case flat that way you don't accidentally drop the motherboard out of there a lot of sensitive materials on the surface of the motherboard capacitors a lot of solder points there's even chips and stuff on there so you don't want to damage it if I having it fall out and land on something sharp so obviously you want to keep a hold of all your screws and stuff you might need them later some of them are still sitting on the motherboard here when we lift it out but come up with it now I like to kind of grab it by the cooling tower because that makes a pretty good handle it's definitely sturdy enough it's easier than grabbing it by the heat sinks you don't want to grab and pull up by the heat sinks now tell you why a lot of these are just mounted with spring-loaded screws and then they have thermal paste or thermal pads that touch the thing they're cooling if you pull them up and it's too heavy you kind of crack that or it breaks that bond then it could also affect the cooling of those parts so I'd much rather grab it by the cooling tower here which I know can handle the weight of the motherboard we're gonna go ahead and just lift this out so what you might have to do depending on your case you might have to sort of lift up kind of at an angle in this particular chassis I've got to go sideways and then come straight up and then there is our motherboard now we're gonna go ahead and set this aside because now we have to remove our power supply and before we undo all of our wiring here you can see we have velcro straps to undo because that's kind of holding things down and out of the way we're gonna go ahead and take out our SSD as you can see here we have a Samsung Drive and this is gonna unplug just like we did on the motherboard the power connector they'll be careful with it it's long and got a lot of leverage if you were to tweak this sideways you could snap the power cable right or connector right off inside the connector from the SSD so you don't want to do that when you take it out hold the SSD firm and then wiggle side to side and then that will come out this easily can snap off inside of that plug then making your SSD not completely useless but much more prone to shorting out those and you don't want to deal with that so set that aside and then undo any zip ties or velcro that's holding down any of your cables if the person who built your computer is even slightly any sort of a pc enthusiast it's probably gonna have cable ties and stuff on there now this case is a little different when it comes to the power supply it's got this plate but the power supply mounts to via these four screws and then the power supply slides out the rear your case may not have that it may just have the screws which means then the power supply has to come out from the side of the case so a perfect example on its old chassis this power supply would not come out the rear it would come out the side because it just mounts directly to the frame itself so as I pull it here you can see we've got wires kind of getting hung up on things all over the place so don't just yank on it you could break things especially if you plan on reusing this case for something else so what I'm doing now is I'm just gonna sort of undo this bit of spaghetti so that I can see what our wires are getting hooked up on like I have a RGB controller here say the cable there so our 24 pin is what was getting caught up now that our cables on the power supply are free we can go ahead and pull it out this way if you're gonna be taking the fans out and using them in your next build then you will remove the four plastic self-tapping screws that screw right into the plastic chassis of the fan of the frame of the fan you would remove all four of these and then your fan will come out so whether you're going to reuse this chassis or not it's always kind of nice to get it sort of prepared and ready for the next build or that maybe this is a perfect enclosure for you to give to a friend or something there's a lot of that going around lately which is kind of cool so I just want to kind of bundle up all the wires here get them sort of I guess so it's some logic to it if that makes sense so that we can put the panel covers back on on the either side of the chassis and not pinched wires because then if we were to cut a wire for let's say the front power or the reset or something like that then you're gonna have to kind of refer to my Killswitch video on how to sort of repair that harness because it would be the exact same logic so basically this chassis is completely back to normal the exception effected as a kill switch and as a 12-volt gauge and it has two fans still in the front of you don't need those fans so what's left now is to talk about removing the cooler and getting the seen CPU out of there which in this case is an AMD FX 8350 M design and am3 and am4 are very similar they're only a few millimeters different whereas Intel is a perfect square so these mounts actually are wider which makes it easier to get to without the heatsink tower itself getting in the way so that's one of the reasons why we removed the fan because if the fan we're still on here then you can see that we wouldn't even have a chance of getting to those particular screws and that's why I wait until it's out of the case hopefully you know if you're upgrading just you're cooler then you could do this in the case but it's a lot harder trust me fortunately we have a little bit of flex on this these are four Phillips head but also they are a nut I think they're a ten millimeter if I'm not mistaken I've already kind of sort of loosen these up with the screwdriver and then I can do it by hand but as you can see I've got this kind of a crazy angle I have to go into but because they're spring-loaded they do have a little bit of flex in them so I can get the right angle to get the screwdriver on there and then we can loosen these up now these are sort of spring-loaded as you can see so that's gonna hold down the tension on the cooler so we got good spread with our thermal paste and stuff but I don't want you to take the cooler straight off yet because I'm gonna show you a common mistake people make with AMD CPUs which really tends to freak them out now those coolers been on here for a long time I'm hoping I can demonstrate this a lot of people just grab it and go yeh I'll get that one didn't do it they'll pull it up and their CPUs attached to it and yanked it right out of the socket now fortunately with AMD that's not really that big of an issue because the way AMD works is they're not LGA which means that the pins are on the CPU and not on the socket so if you undo this little lever here and lift it up it's got kind of a little tab that it clicks in and listen so you can you push it out and go up but as you can see right here it's actually stuck in there really good okay there we go the pins are located on the AMD CPU so if this were an Intel CPU that B flat with a bunch of little like gold pads which would touch pins sticking up on the socket in my opinion this is a much more beginner friendly setup because this is a lot easier these pins are actually fairly strong compared to the LGA pins found on the socket itself and so this is a lot easier to deal with so what I recommend is when you go to take it out is that it pulling straight up twist it a little to break any seal or any sort of bond that could be there and then you can pull it up in the CP you should still be in there so now what you got to do is you've got to clean your CPU and your cooler cuz if you're gonna put this stuff away you don't wanna do a thermal paste everywhere I get to everywhere it's gross I hate thermal paste nothing puts me in a salty mood like thermal paste and Internet comments now I'm gonna be using paper towels for this but a really good material to use is coffee filters because it's a lot less fibrous we're also gonna be using 91% isopropyl alcohol you can get 97 which is probably a little bit better but grab your cpu from the edges and then you want to take where it's wet with the but the alcohol and as you can see it just sort of eats right through the thermal paste so you just want to make sure you get all the thermal paste off you might want to use a q-tip if it's kind of kicked up on there just be careful as you're holding it that you don't squish any of the pins because then if you're watching my video on how to restrain AMD pins so here is an exploded view of all the components inside of a computer this is everything we just removed don't confuse this with a view of an exploded computer that's a whole different video we did back in the day I've blown up plenty of computers on this channel but that's why we do this sort of stuff so that you don't make mistakes and potentially blow up your stuff now taking it apart salaat easier than putting it together because all the components already there there in the place they go all you have to do is take it out and put it back in their boxes if you got it or transfer it to a new chassis like we sort of demonstrated we would be doing but I know I hear you guys like J this is a really weird video we've you've got two million people following you we're all smart we know what we're doing why are you showing us this well if you saw my messages in my inbox from my perspective you'd realize just how many people were watching or our passers-by asking questions because they have no idea where to start they either got me a hand-me-down or a an old computer from a friend or family member and they want to mess around with it but they don't want to ruin it either so that was sort of the perspective we took from this video-content but this piece of content was from the perspective of working backwards so if you guys found this video useful you know someone who could find this video useful once you go ahead and share it and tag them in this video maybe they'll learn something which is the whole point of why I've been doing this now for almost seven years and two million subscribers strong alright guys thanks for watching and as always well even the next one and soon it will be from a whole new studio but I'm thinking about recreating this set one to one in the new studio so it looks like nothing changed then we'd have to actually make fake windows yeah which would be so ironic that's beside the point that perspective we're literally sitting here waiting to shoot our next scene because we're hearing this there's more than one truck going backwards outside there's someone hammering next door the neighbor is like sliding furniture across the floor seen a lot of what are you gonna do studio with all your current one with the exception of space noise pollution