Just had the scare of my life

Zaruz

Zaruz

Zaruz

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Joined
20 May 2012
Posts
100
After spending the past 10 years being really naive about how "easy" it is to bend the pins on a Mobo/CPU, it finally happened to me.

I just moved yesterday and when connecting all the cables to my pc, i managed to knock my tower sideways and it hit the side of my desk. I figured nothing would have broken, as I have a Zalman Z9 case which is built like a tank, and I only had a small scratch on the case (whilst a big chunk of my desk is now missing). Then a couple of hours ago I went to boot it up, and windows recovery launched. Figuring I didn't shut down properly last time or something, I wasn't worried and let it run, then it shut itself down. After that the thing wouldn't boot, just powered up for ~4 seconds, beeped twice and restarted itself.

After checking PSU/GPU/RAM/SSD I checked my CPU, and noticed 4 of the pins on my Mobo were bent. Luckily my years of gaming paid off, as I now have a steady hand and good hand-eye co-ordination, and I managed to repair it with a pair of tweezers. After I got them in place, fired it up and it seems to be working fine, thankfully no fried CPU. Been on BF3 since and no problems yet.

Is there likely to be any repercussions down the line due to having the pins maybe slightly out? If so, any precautions I can take to prevent damage to my hardware? (obviously I'll be making sure my tower is always laid flat from now on!)

TL;DR
Knocked PC over when fiddling with cables. Wouldn't boot and crapped myself. Managed to fix problem (bent CPU pins) - wondering if there's any side effects of the home repair?
 
it will be fine,it just wouldn't boot or would be missing available memory in windows if there was an issue
 
You'll be okay :) the pins are pretty hardy... unless they were so bent they were about to snap (which I doubt)?
 
So you're saying you bent the pins whilst it was mounted in the socket with a cooler attached inside your case?

And you also say the machine booted up (into windows recovery) with bent pins?
 
That's not possible. You had to have bent the pins when you installed the cpu. Knocking the case over would not bend the pins. Once the cpu is installed it's secure and can't move about.
 
Ben Cole said:
So you're saying you bent the pins whilst it was mounted in the socket with a cooler attached inside your case?

And you also say the machine booted up (into windows recovery) with bent pins?
Click to expand...

Yeah that's the weird thing. Not too surprised on the pins bending as I have the stock intel cooler that comes with the i5, which I find is absolutely terrible and has never seemed to sit tight enough for my comfort (replacing this next month when I qualify for free delivery).

I can't seem to figure out how it managed to boot up and run windows recovery the first time though? Surely it should have done that every time, or not at all?

Ryder, the pins were bent pretty far - one was flat onto my board, but it didn't feel that it was abouts to snap when I moved it back.
 
pastymuncher said:
That's not possible. You had to have bent the pins when you installed the cpu. Knocking the case over would not bend the pins. Once the cpu is installed it's secure and can't move about.
Click to expand...

The CPU hadn't been taken out since I installed it about 8 months ago, and I've never had a problem with anything since then. I also took out and cleaned all my other hardware before checking the CPU, so I'm 99% sure this was the problem from the start.
 
Like i said, it's not possible. Once the cpu is installed in the socket it can't move. It would be impossible to knock a case over and bend some pins.
 
ryder said:
Unless you mean FINS? :)?
Click to expand...

Haha :D

I suppose it's possible that I bent them removing the CPU? Although then I have no idea what the issue was, as putting them back resolved the issue completely.

Any ideas? Can't think of anything else that I changed when I fixed the mobo, as I had already checked all the screws/cables/gpu
 
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