Bent Pin questions

[xIHexIx]

I'm out of town for another few days and there is a Fry's Electronics near me. I went in it, and there are a lot of as-is motherboard tossed in a shopping cart for $5-10 each. Brands like MSI and Asus, mostly 115x boards. Only issues I can really see are bent pins, I'm not sure what to look for about ESD damage. Would it be worth $5-10 to pick up a board or two and try to straighten the pins back out, or are they probably to damaged to even bother?

[Godlygamer23]

Thing is...if you break the pins, it's most likely not returnable. I mean sure it's $5-$10 lost, but it's also $5-$10 that could've been spent on something else.

[L.E.D]

I would probably pick up a few, fix them, test them, and if they work sell them for more money.

[xIHexIx]

I would probably pick up a few, fix them, test them, and if they work sell them for more money.

 

 

I thought about this, but the testing thing brought up another question: What are the dangers to a CPU when testing pins? Is the worst that could happen is not posting, or is it possible to fry the entire CPU because of it?

 

Godly: They aren't returnable anyway, even if you never touched the pins. It's bare boards thrown into a shopping cart. No boxes, no cables, no parts. Sold as-is and without warranty. 

[L.E.D]

I thought about this, but the testing thing brought up another question: What are the dangers to a CPU when testing pins? Is the worst that could happen is not posting, or is it possible to fry the entire CPU because of it?

 

Godly: They aren't returnable anyway, even if you never touched the pins. It's bare boards thrown into a shopping cart. No boxes, no cables, no parts. Sold as-is and without warranty. 

 

Nothing will happen to the CPU if the board is bad, usually, I guess if a pin is bent into the wrong spot then that is bad.

[xIHexIx]

Of course i wouldn't force the cpu into the socket, but i only have my primary 3770k cpu, so I'm not really wanting to take any chances with it. I'll definitely be sure everything is straight and the CPU drops right into place.

[RadSalacan]

Personally, I don't think it'd be worth the time.  Unless you see some totally rad board in there.  5-10 bucks to spend all that time trying to bend pins?  I tried to bend a few pins on an old LGA 775 board and every single one I tried broke.  That's my 2 cents. 

[xIHexIx]

Okay, so I got 2 boards today. The MSI board was $4.90 and the Asus board was $9.90. There was a fairly nice looking AMD board, but it was an FM1 socket, and I wasn't entirely sure what to look for on the board since there are no pins.

 

The first is an MSI Z68MA-G45 (B3). It has some bent pins and a broken PCI-lock.

 

You can see some of the bent pins in the upper right, as well as the upper and lower left corners.

 

Here's another angle of the CPU slot. In the center, there is the one piece that is different than the rest. Is that normal?

 

And here is the broken connector piece. (Should look like the one in the first picture.)

 

The second one is an Asus PBZ77-V LX. More bent pins than the MSI, but that seemed to be about it.

 

Pins:

 

Upper left:

 

Down low:

 

 

I intentionally avoided any boards with already missing pins, which included 2 other MSI, a Gigabyte, and another Asus.