Bent pins on pcie x16, mobo works fine

[postmortemIA]

Hi,

Board for my folks somehow had bent pins on pci x16 expansion slot. This board has onboard intel X4500 graphics, so pci express slot is not even used.

I tried to straighten them out, without luck - about 20 pins were bent and most of them touching each other. These pins were on the right side. So I did next best (or worst ) thing - I've cut them out at soldering point as there's no plan to use pci express video card ever.

Computer works fine. I've tested all temperatures and voltage and everything is in normal range. It worked fine even when pins were bent. I am pretty sure that there are no bent pins left, but i might have damaged some pcb underneath them.

question is : is this risky to use - would you replace board? Does BIOS or mobo logic shut off the pci express pins if it detects nothing attached to it?

 

[Modelworks]

The pins will always have voltage on them whether a card is in the slot or not. How risky it is depends on which pins are touching other pins. If the 3.3V or 12V were to contact a ground pin you could have a situation where a trace gets hot enough to melt on the board or failure of the chipset.