Last resort Z97 motherboard rescue + recommendations for hardstyle music production

Daan._official · November 5, 2021

A while back I accidentally bent a few pins on my Z97 motherboard which basically broke it but after some fiddling I got it to work again. I decided to give it a clean and some fresh paste, kept the cpu in the slot. At first it was fine, but after i took the gpu out for some fresh paste the board doesn't power up anymore. Power button of the motherboard lights up, so the cables to that are fine, reattached the CPU cable as well, but to no avail. My guess is the pins are messed up again because of moving the cooler and maybe the gpu, but if anyone has any suggestions to what it might be, please let me know to give it a last try to fix it. I'll try fixing the pins one more time as well on monday but otherwise I'll get rid of the whole set (i7 4790K), it's kinda old by now anyway and I'll get something fresh. I don't really feel like spending 75 - 100 euro's again on a Z97 board. I'm really into hardstyle music production (FL studio) so if anyone has any relevant experiences with any CPU's that work well it's appreciated. In theory the plugins shouldn't take that much to "run", in reality you need a pretty hefty cpu to get it to work properly with many layers but i'm not sure what the reason is (core speed or threads or something) becausethe I7 was struggling a bit with large projects.

Any help is welcome, thanks in advance.