Bent LGA Pins

Hi all!

Bit of a strange one for me anyway! Having dealt with LGA boards for years I have always been careful. Removed a 771 Xeon today to find what appeared to look like a missing pin on one of the sockets. I new something wasn't right so couple of google images and a root around the board and I found that one of the pins was on top of the other! So surely if this was the case before the board wouldn't have worked? Anyway, managed to pry it back into place, it remained slightly raised but in the right position, clamped the CPU in and out 2/3 times, booted up, and all is running well.

Does this mean it can be forgotten about as it is working!? Looking round the net it appears that MoBos can still operate depending on the pin etc in these situations.

Any guidance/comments are appreciated. Thanks

if its working just forget about it, stress it and see if its stable but apart from that I think you'll be fine.

I've fixed a motherboard or two with bent LGA pins, bent them back and had no problems since.

You can actually get away with breaking some pins but of course it depends on what the pin does.

I'd say you have a working motherboard, forgot about the bent pins.

Hmm, have a look for a pinout or post a pic and I'll check if you like - it might be a power pin and there are lots of them grouped together, it wouldn't really matter if one of them didn't connect or shorted with one next to it.

To be honest, I really doubt I would 'catch' a pin and I think that this is how it came, simply because the pin was almost invisible, it was that creased! Infact I was very lucky to be able to bend it back I think!

Thanks guys real help. Idle temp difference is currently 2c.

On the board it is middle top pin.

So the indented corner was as below and x marks the spot roughly


-------x------\

Is it the exact middle pin? If so then it looks like it's a ground pin so that would explain why it's not caused any problems.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by watercooled

Is it the exact middle pin? If so then it looks like it's a ground pin so that would explain why it's not caused any problems.

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From looking at it it did look like a central one, hence I thought maybe Im seeing wrong.

It is on a Mac Pro you see and as you all know, boards aren't that easy to source/replace!!

So does that mean that pin still isn't working? I imagine it will be and I should just lay my paranoia to rest :D

Losing a single ground pin would be fine; the neighbouring ground pins will take a tiny bit of extra current but can certainly cope.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by DDY

Losing a single ground pin would be fine; the neighbouring ground pins will take a tiny bit of extra current but can certainly cope.

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Don't say that!!! :eek: No one has lost it haha :D

There are about a few hundred ground pins on a CPU, the current of one shared by all the others will make barely any difference - they'd have far more than that passing through them if you overclocked it.

Quote:

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Originally Posted by watercooled

There are about a few hundred ground pins on a CPU, the current of one shared by all the others will make barely any difference - they'd have far more than that passing through them if you overclocked it.

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Thanks you've all been really helpful
Like I said this was new to me and not something I had any knowledge of!
Last time I saw a bent pin was on a Duron and back then the pins were so big you could use a pair of salad tongs to straighten them :D
Machine has run spot on since posting and to be honest I think damage was done in the original 'downgrade' process that Apple provided on this machine as the pin was really creased back to the point that it couldn't be seen.
It was nice to learn something from everyone :)