this is an ASUS zenith extreme
a 550 dollar
x399 motherboard for AMD's threadripper
CPU it was returned to me from one of the writers
and i was informed that it no longer
works uh okay well this is going to be and it's pretty anticlimactic here
i fixed it
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so what you observed just there was one of the many
peculiarities when it comes to bent pins
in a modern lga type CPU socket it can
manifest in any number of ways a failure
to post altogether an inability to detect memory inserted into certain
slots that one's actually very common or
the system can appear to be functioning completely normally all cores detected
all 128 gigs of RAM detected
the reason for this is that every CPU pin
has a slightly different function some of them are wired directly through
traces on the motherboard which you can actually see there's tons of traces
around a CPU socket to a contact point on a memory slot some of
them serve redundant purposes like to
act as a ground pin while others
may have no functionality whatsoever like they might be reserved for a future
CPU that might go into that socket with some
feature that might not ever get implemented so that
is why the symptoms of a bent CPU pin
can be as obvious as the system
not lighting up at all or as subtle as
slightly less stability when you're heavily overclocked
so one way or another
we need to fix this pin so no big deal Linus send it into the
manufacturer for repairs right wrong
first of all physical damage to the product is not
covered by any motherboard manufacturer that i'm aware of and they all consider
socket damage to be physical damage and number two
is an out of warranty repair to a CPU socket can cost as much as
350 dollars that's what i got quoted
when i wanted to repair a socket on an x99 ews motherboard even though it was a
400 board i'm not going to run out and spend 350 dollars so that i can have a b
stock board when it cost me 50 more dollars to just go buy a brand new one
so then with that in mind what do you
need to repair your own bent socket pins
really with a steady hand and a sewing needle you can probably do a pretty good
job but i've used everything from a pocket knife
to a sim removal tool to a thumb tack in
order to bend back pins and i've done it with all of those with success i even
used the pointy tweezers from an ifixit kit once
for today we're going to be using these picks that i actually just found here in
the workshop organization's beautiful right you're gonna save us so much time
in the future yeah it was super exciting and we're gonna be using these helping
hands with a magnifying glass something that i also recently bought just in case
someone bent a socket pin and they did so one of the trickiest parts of any
socket repair operation is figuring out where the bent pins are the best way to
do that is to get down low level with the socket
so that you can see whether it's straight across this way straight across
that way or at a diagonal you can see the gaps between the rows of pins that's
going to make it easier for your eye to pick out any imperfections for our case
we know exactly where it is so we're going to get up above it now we need to
assess the damage so we're just going to prod at it a little bit and this one
seems pretty obvious so you can see there's an even row of pins here and
even row pins here and then here there's a missing one now if this pin was broken
off we'd be in much rougher shape right now but you can actually see that it's
not it's just bent down so we just got to find
where it bent down to looks like uh
looks like it's down right there wow that is
that is dug in pretty deep there now there is always a risk
when you're working on something like this
that you will accidentally bend some other pins in the process
as long as you're careful it shouldn't happen
this pick might not actually be fine enough for me here i'm gonna go back to
my trusty knife i actually use the knife more often than
you'd probably think for this sort of thing so you want something that you can use
to get under the pin to pull it up there so you can
see i've pulled it up off the bottom now but
it's not quite aligned with the other pins so the chances of it
making perfect contact with the pads on the bottom of the CPU is pretty low now
that we've pried it up from the side the easiest way to attack it now is to go at
it from underneath head on that way you
can over bend it up a little bit so you want to come under it this way now
and over bend it up a bit because it's metal so
you can't just bend it to exactly where you want it
and then expect it to stay there okay cool that was exactly the desired result
there is we bent it up a little higher than we wanted and it settled right back
in exactly where it's supposed to be so now we can check the alignment of the
pins and we see a nice little bright dot
exactly where we expected perfectly aligned
let's go test it and we're back the system works
very good Linus you fixed a working motherboard ah
i have another trick for you up my sleeve this
is a sacrificial board from a project we never did because someone
a different member of our writing staff didn't realize that this motherboard
wasn't going to fit into any standard cases
so what we're going to do is we're going to simulate what would be a pretty common way to
damage a CPU socket oops that one was
actually accidental dropping the CPU as you go to install
oh okay yeah we definitely hit one let's try again
okay i'm having a pretty hard time uh mangling the socket here
now that that is a bent socket
let's try and fix it shall we something people might notice about this
second round of repair here is that i'm not even necessarily going
to try and get it exactly perfect because what you're going to realize
is that the contact pads on the bottom of the CPU are actually reasonably big i
mean they're not huge you still need to get pretty darn close
but if you are pretty close
and you remember too that when you put the CPU in it pushes down
into the lga the land grid array then as long as
you're good enough that once it gets pushed down a bit it'll be in pretty much the
right spot then you should be good enough
whoops this guy over here is probably still a
little bit too far out of alignment
now you want to make sure that you don't bend them down and up and down and up
too much because if you do that they lose their
strength and can eventually break off you can recover from that i have done it
by straightening out the shape of the pin
as long as there's enough left to get to the contact point
but it's not a sure thing and i did end up with a board that
i snapped off the top of the pad and uh
was not able to resurrect another key thing to watch out for when you're
looking for bent pins is that there are places where pins are missing
intentionally so it's always good to double check against a socket diagram
like see this corner right here there's no pin there that's fine
or another perfect socket that you have on hand
okay moment of truth time
okay there we go that beep is a good sign
and CPU detected two gigs of memory
yeah that's right repaired motherboard
so that's pretty much it guys how to bring your motherboard back from the
dead assuming that there aren't other issues on it like blown capacitors or
fizzled out resistors and
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