Broken P4 478 Pins - Fatal?

[Von Matrices]

Thanks for reading my plea. I need technical advice. I recently acquired a Pentium 4 Northwood 3.00GHz HT 800FSB Socket 478 processor with two broken pins. Before anyone asks, these are broken pins and not the keyed (intentionally missing) pins. Anyway, I have no motherboard to test this processor currently and thus need advice on determining if this processor is worth testing for functionality or is more suited for as a key chain ornament (I would prefer the former).

According to the this pin diagram on Intel's website, the broken pins are A26 and B26. Both are labeled as VSS "power/other" pins. As far as I know, these power/ground pins usually are redundant. Does the lack of both of these pins incapacitate the processor or could the processor still work stably without them? I do not want to bother acquiring a motherboard for a lost cause but would test if there is even a slight possibility of the processor working.

Thanks for your help and advice in advance.

 

[dmens]

should be fine... vss is just ground.

 

[Von Matrices]

UPDATE: I checked my processor again and noticed that I had the processor oriented the wrong way when finding the pin numbers. The correct broken pins are AF1 and AF2. AF1 is VSS and AF2 is VCC, so as I said before the pins still seem redundant to others on the processor. Thanks for the advice in advance!

 

[myocardia]

Quite a few people out there will replace processor pins, for not much money:link, although most people just do it themselves, with a piece of wire.

 

[dmens]

still ok, vcc/vss are the supplies.

well, worst case, the cpu boots slower than rated because of power droop in a local area. if that happens, jam a piece of wire into the hole where the missing pin is before locking the cpu so the bump conducts.