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How to fix bent CPU pins

2017-11-08
so I got an email asking me if I'd be willing to fix a subscribers broken rise in CPU where some pins got smashed and I thought to myself rather than do it for them I figured why not actually show them how to do it themselves with what the rise the rise of rise in CPUs this year and how many of them were sold and the fact that this applies to all the backwards compatible AMD CPUs that have pins on them like the FX CPUs and the Athlon CPUs I figured this is a topic that's probably worth covering or limited time by a select EVGA GeForce GTX 1080 Ti or GT X 1080 graphics card or a laptop and get a free copy of Destiny 2 for PC help save humanity's last safe city by following the link in the description below so what I have right here is my running and working risin 1700 X CPU it's one we've been using when we do our rise in benchmarks and you know what I figured I'm so confident in this what I'm gonna do is I'm going to damage this CPU I'm going to intentionally hurt it so I'm gonna drop it on the pins kind of reminiscent of what might be a typical issue up there someone's holding they drop it and these pins are fairly fragile they'll kind of smash over and showing you that it's working right now I'm going to hit restart oops and now it's probably a triggering update but I'm going to show you guys the way that I do this now there's a lot of different ways that you can do this or even some specialized tools out there that people come up with to fix this but I'm gonna show you the way I do it with minimal to no budget whatsoever now this isn't the first time anyone's done something like this so I don't claim to be first or original at repairing a CPU in fact Linus did a video showing how you can repair the motherboard pins on an Intel socket which is much more delicate and much more difficult but we're gonna do it today with AMD because I think it says is the easiest thing out there and some people really freaked out when this happens and it you really don't have to but we need to talk about what tools you need now the only three things you need to get this done at least using my method is the CPU and the motherboard admittedly you should have both already if you have a damaged CPU and a razorblade now I've heard people using like tiny the needle nose pliers and microphone but you know magnifying glasses and stuff it's not the way I do it I'm of the mindset that I like to do things as simple as possible with the least amount of trouble as poss and this one's designed to be fixed in a matter of which is readily available and if you don't have a razor blade you can run down to you know the corner store get one pack of razor blades from Home Depot or whatever are going to be very very cheap but you know we have to do first we have to hurt this guy this is a $300 CPU this is not like this is not some cheap like I could go grab the FX CPU and I could totally show you how to do it on an old FX CPU that would like it if it went re and if it didn't work I wouldn't be out you know a $300 CPU but this is how what does it say about a guy if he's not willing to put his own stuff on the line to stand by his methods right so here we are right here with a perfectly good rise in 1700 X CPU the way I see this typically happening is guys are like holding their CPU and they're like yeah and then they drop it and it doesn't take much to bend these pins I mean look these these pins are they're not even a millimeter thick I mean what are these probably half mil at best and there's a lot of them obviously so you know what we got to do so apparently I'm a better dropper than I thought because after like the first three drops I couldn't get anything to happen like it cause it kept hitting the corner which is fairly protective right the pins are somewhat recessed but then on the fourth drop they bent a little bit then finally I decide to just take a pen and take measures into my own hands one of the ways I've seen these get bent though is if people put them in the plastic sleeve like to ship used or something to someone who bought it online and then they don't put it in the right way believe it not there's an orientation a top and a bottom then when they snap it closed it bends in all the corners of the pins so what I did what the pen was I just sort of smashed into one of the corners and I think it did a pretty good job of making it look like the picture that was sent to me for asking whether or not I could actually you know fix this for them now this is pretty repairable in my opinion means some of them are pretty smashed the hard part here is going to be straightening them back out without breaking if a pin breaks off you can technically fix it if you have the right equipment it's a tiny tiny little solder it's just a lot more work I mean at this point I wouldn't even attempt it because I don't have the right equipment to do it so let's go ahead and see if we can't fix this because obviously this ain't going to work like this what I typically will do with the razor blade is I'll just sort of take it and I'll kind of put it in between each row here to make sure that everything is kind of straight so I'll take it here I'll start in the end and then I'll just sort of like weave it in between and then just kind of rock a little bit alright so I'm making sure that the other parts of the chip right now are good and this parts with me a little bit tedious you're gonna have to have some patience I mean at this point you're trying to save yourself hundreds of dollars so you don't want to rush this technically you can't make it worse unless you break the pins but if it's not working now and then it doesn't work later you're kind of in the same boat right so this side of the CPU is pretty good it seems like through all those drops nothing really happened on this end the very first row though has a little bit of resistance that's why I just kind of wiggled it like that and I'm sorry of using this as a spreader if you will I'm using the razor blade to just go through the pins and make it straight so it keeps everything nice and straight this is where the hard part's going to be though the first thing we're going to want to do though is kind of start on the end and just sort of Ryback these pins and this is actually very difficult with the lighting I have in here a my goodness because it's reflections everywhere we just want to bring the pins back to straight we don't want to force them too hard we just want to sort of work it slowly and that's what I'm gonna be doing at this point so what I'm gonna do now is we're just gonna sort of time-lapse this because I really need to take my time like right here this summit's bent on this corner so I'm gonna rotate it 180 we're just gonna go this way and make sure that everything is straight on this end otherwise if they're not straight this way I can't go that way if that makes sense so we're sort of just like hashtagging this left and right as we go a terrible analogy but you know I think you get what I meant so what I'm doing right here now is I've gotten these basically upright I've got to make sure they're all straight so they're all kind of smashed a little bit different direction like when it got smashing on the corner so I went right somewhat left's and went back so I'm just slowly trying to get them facing generally in the upward direction so that I can then start to deal with getting them facing straight and the rocking back and forth motion of the razor blade like this when I switch angles is just making sure that everything stays in its own row because I don't want one to accidentally make you know get flattened out and be interfering with the road next to it because that's gonna be a problem so I basically got it now so that when I look down long ways on this axis we're actually looking pretty good like I don't see any pins leaning over into the row they're not supposed to but when I look down this axis I know if you're gonna be able to even see that there's still quite a few facing that way the other thing had to be careful of too is while you're doing this make sure you know while you're holding it down you're not smashing pins elsewhere like I started to smash down this corner with my thumb I mean ideally doing this maybe and some kind of a vise would help but then you can't run the razor blade along it nearly as easy see this pin on the end right here is like curved that's the problems I think we might've broken off we'll see what happens so you can see right here and if we can see that we technically lost a pin because that one got smashed really good now I'm still gonna test this CPU though because believe it or not there have been instances where pins have broken off and there was no adverse effects whatsoever I personally don't have the tools to do it but I'm sudden I see if the CPU works because I have heard of plenty of instances where there are pins on here that don't do squat now we've got them all per inch lined up but we're not done yet because if they're not perfectly straight then they might have a problem going into the socket so what I'm gonna do next is I'm gonna take the motherboard and I'm gonna try and put it in the motherboard what happens with the motherboard here is when you turn this like that you can see the whole top part slides and if you get the CPU in like if you get these straightened up enough to we get the CPU in you can work this back and forth that will also help you to straighten out your pins yeah she got in there so that went in there at first try there's been times where I'm Way off now I'm just kind of working this back and forth and I can actually feel a little bit more pressure when I do that but now that it's in there I'm just gonna kind of wiggle it do the same thing here just sort of wiggle it around so you not went down a little farther it wasn't quite in all the way yes yes just going in there without without any effort now all right so we gotta test it now and I've seen instances where one pin like that no post because it's an important pin I've seen where I busted pin like that can cause kind of a lot of thermal paste I've seen an instance where a pin like that can cause a memory channel to go bad or no problems whatsoever so I kind of guess kind of take the chance here and see what happens because at this point it's from the perspective of I've got a CPU that doesn't work anyway now we're trying to salvage it and see what happens it's unfortunate though I mean the very first pin is usually the one that will break is it got smashed the most guess we'll see I might have just cost myself 300 bucks but it's worth it to do these videos quite honestly all right moment of truth so we're going through our postcode so it's like we've made it past all the CPU codes if we're in GPU we got posts if we go into BIOS so you can see our frequency right there running at 3.4 that's factory oh come back we've got our 16 gigabytes of memory showing right there voltage is good and all of that so that's a good sign let's go ahead and let's give Windows boots you know the thing with the pins is this AMD likes to remain as forward compatible as possible so all those pins may not even be in use that may be a dummy pin that may not go to anything it doesn't mean it won't go to something in the future who knows I mean FX was kind of sort of the same way this is why you can hear about pins breaking off and there was no adverse effect I mean the pin is still sitting well the pin has gone off to a better place so but anyway all 16 gigabytes are showing right there we've got our reserved memory for our Hardware brain at 21 33 because it was all stock speed and if we look at our whoops foot our CPU all our cores are present everything is running normally as it should all our cache is showing so yeah there you go guys as long as you take your time and have some patience you can actually fix it and I did all I did all I used to do it was a razor blade and the motherboard but hey it's working we fixed it and I don't have to spend another 300 bucks to replace it it's the only 1700 X I have the other one was given away so with that said guys thanks for watching if you have any other suggestions on how to repair or how to fix videos send them to my inbox or sending to Twitter wherever it's obvious that I listen to these so for you that sent me that email I'm not gonna put your name out there know if you want me to but here you go here's what I would have done and as you can see it's working and it looked an awful lot like yours and the pictures that you sent me so give it a shot and let me know how it works out thanks for watching guys and as always I'll see you in the next one
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