Bent Pins On CPU

[Debbie]

I bought a used P4 478/3GHz/512/800 CPU from e-bay. I'm not sure if the pins have been bent while I was unpacking the chip or if it has been in that condition before.

It had 3 pins on the outer row that were bent to about 30 degrees. I manage to straighten them and put the chip into the zif socket in and out 2 times. No particular
fource has been required but the affected side required very slight pressure to get
the chip seating squarely on top the zif socket, with no problems to close the lever.

I have not tested the cpu yet since I'm waiting to borrow a psu rarther than using
one that is allready on a machine which otherise I would have to dismantle.

My question is; shall I try to get the pins perfectly (straight) enligned to zero insertion
force or leave it as it is without risking the brakeage of any pins ?

[Fat Tone]

Leave well alone. If they've gone in and the CPU is sitting flat, you are done. Don't interfere with the pins any more than you absolutely have to.

This is a thing of the past now with the Core2's etc as the 'pins' are a part of the socket. The underside of the cpu just has a grid of contacts.

[Dr Mordrid]

Same with the AMD socket F's which also use a ball grid arrray.

[Claymonkey]

I've been bending pins back since the socket 7 days. As long as they don't break off (thankfully has never happened) and they all fit in the socket you are FINE.

As the hardware guru at whatever job I'm at (gurm being my first real competition, but then I haven't worked with the people from here before him) I play with a lot of old hardware or fix stuff others give up on. Bent chips are fairly common from what I see. I find the best tool for the job is one of those double ended pen screw drivers (often found in Belkin tool kits) are the best unless the pin is pushed ALL the way down to the chip. Then use the smallest flat head screw driver you can find (eye glass repair kits are good for this).

[Debbie]

Thank you guys. Advice taken !!

So now with the Core2's the problem of bent pins is diverted to the MOBO and Intel have
cleared the problem of 20% (so they say) of chips with bent pins. !!

[Claymonkey]

yeah I haven't tried bending pins on the motherboard.. they seem to be a smidge different and might actually be HARDER to fix. Thankfully you don't have to deal with that.

[Jon P. Inghram]

They'd solve this problem if they went back to DIP...

[Fat Tone]

LOL, that would be one VERY long chip, especially at 0.1" pitch

And I recall installing a math co-processor in an early Vectra that was DIP format... I forget how many times I had to straighten an entire row of pins, but it was more than once

[The PIT]

Leave well alone. If they've gone in and the CPU is sitting flat, you are done. Don't interfere with the pins any more than you absolutely have to.

This is a thing of the past now with the Core2's etc as the 'pins' are a part of the socket. The underside of the cpu just has a grid of contacts.

Mmm not so sure about that. My present Motherboard is slightly warped so when you try to put the Heatsink on much fun entails. After struggling with this and ending up with a none booting board the only conclusion I came up with that the pins were bent away from the CPU during fitting the heatsink.

Reseating the CPU fixed it but I wonder what state the pins are in on the Motherboard.

[Admiral]

What about the slot format ?
Latency hit and cooling issues ?

[Claymonkey]

What about the slot format ?
Latency hit and cooling issues ?

The main problem with the slot format is your adding an extra heat spreader into the mix. you have a chip on a board, in a housing and by the time the real heatsink can take the heat away you have at least one extra layer in there with possible bad contact. In this current era of excessive heat it's not a good method. That and you've basically put the cpu on a riser card take it that much farther away from the northbridge and memory. That and slot cpu's were always a pain to install without problems.


.... so basically YES what you said.

[Technoid]

Same with the AMD socket F's which also use a ball grid arrray.

so the socket F is a real BGA zif sockel? (the intel 755 is not) :?:

[knirfie]

Leave well alone. If they've gone in and the CPU is sitting flat, you are done. Don't interfere with the pins any more than you absolutely have to.

This is a thing of the past now with the Core2's etc as the 'pins' are a part of the socket. The underside of the cpu just has a grid of contacts.

Yes, now you can bent the pins on the mobo rather than those on the socket :')
And unfortunatly, those are near impossible to repair...