Resurrecting a Broken Motherboard – Bent Socket Pins

This is an ASUS Zenith Extreme A $550 X399 motherboard for AMD's thread Ripper CPU it was returned to me from one of the writers And I was informed that it no longer works. Okay, well this is going to be on it's a pretty anticlimactic here I fixed it! HP's new OMEN X lineup comes equipped with Intel's seventh generation core i7 processors check them out at the link below So what you observe 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 it 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 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 in to 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 Three hundred and fifty 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 gonna run out and spend three hundred and fifty dollars So that I can have a B stock board when it cost me fifty 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 thumbtack 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 gonna be using these picks that I actually just found here in the workshop Organization's beautiful right? Offscreen: This is going to 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 gonna 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 gonna prod at it a little bit And this one seems pretty obvious so you can see There's an even row of pins here an even row of 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 Looks like it's done 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 Hmm 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 and 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 gonna fit into any standard cases So what we're gonna do is we're gonna simulate What would be a pretty common way to damage a CPU socket, whoops 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 mangling the socket here. Oh now that? That is a bent socket let's try and fix it shall we Something people might notice about the second round of repair here is that I'm not even necessarily gonna try and get it exactly Perfect because what you're gonna 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 uhh 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 Thanks for watching Now let's say for a minute You make your money doing like small-time computer repair like this for others well Then you want to check out fresh books fresh books is the cloud-based accounting Solution that lets you get paid faster be more organized and be more productive Spend your time doing work So you can get paid like you can track your hours on a job you can bill the client through the platform You can even see when the client has seen the invoice Instead of spending your time fighting with a complicated Accounting solution at the end of the day when your brain is tired And you just plain don't feel like it the best thing about fresh books is you can try it out for 30 days for free By going to freshbooks.com/techtips and entering Linus tech tips into how you heard about us section So thanks for watching guys if you dislike this video you can hit that button But if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy Motherboards at the link in the video description just in case this doesn't work for you Also down there. 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Channel: Linus Tech Tips

Views: 1,960,725

Keywords: motherboard, socket, repair, lga, amd, pin, electronics, cpu, bent, damage, damaged

Id: O1H5_FVX9lU

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Tue Sep 19 2017