 This is an Asus Zenith Extreme, a $550 X399 motherboard for AMD's Threadripper CPU. It was returned to me from one of the writers and I was informed that it no longer works. Okay, well, this is gonna be pretty anticlimactic here. I fixed it. HP's new OMEN-X lineup comes equipped with Intel 7th generation Core i7 processors. Check them out at the link below. So what you observed just there was one of the many peculiarities when it comes to bent pins and 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 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 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 into 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 $350. That's what I got quoted when I wanted to repair a socket on an X99EWS motherboard. Even though it was a $400 board, I'm not going to run out and spend $350 so that I can have a B-stock board when it cost me $50 more 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 going to be using these picks that I actually just found here in the workshop. Organization's beautiful, right? Are you going to save us so much time in the future? Yeah! It was super exciting, and we're going to 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 going to 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 going to 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 it's down right there. Wow, 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. This pick might not actually be fine enough for me here. I'm going to 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 to 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 overbend it up a little bit. So you want to come under it this way now and overbend 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. OK, 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 going to fit into any standard cases. So what we're going to do is we're going to simulate what would be a pretty common way to damage a CPU socket. Oops, that was actually accidental. Dropping the CPU as you go to install. Oh, OK. Yeah, we definitely hit one. Let's try again. OK, 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 this second round of repair here is that I'm not even necessarily going to try and get it exactly perfect because what you're going to realize is that the contact pads on the bottom of the CPU are actually reasonably big. I mean, they're not a huge. You still need to get pretty darn close. But if you are pretty close and you remember to 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 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. OK, moment of truth time. OK, 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 FreshBooks. FreshBooks 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 build a 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's tired and you just plain don't feel like it. The best thing about FreshBooks is you can try it out for 30 days for free by going to FreshBooks.com slash tech tips and entering Linus Tech Tips in the How you heard about us section. So thanks for watching, guys. If you disliked 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 that motherboards at the link in the video description. Just in case this doesn't work for you. Also down there, we have a link to our merch store, which has cool shirts like this one, as well as our community forum, which you should totally join.