Broken pin on the cpu.

[bennyv]

my brother accidently broke a pin on his new 3.0 cpu..i inserted the cpu to the slot without the pin, and the computer seems to work allright..i ran some benchmarks, and everything really seems to be ok.. do we have to be worried about something? they wont replace the cpu, as the warrany does not apply on broken pins.

 

[thelanx]

Some pins aren't really used for anything important, while others are (i/o etc.). Your brother might have just broken a nonessential pin. Count yourself lucky. Course, maybe the pin isn't so nonessential. I would be careful and test everything out. Best situation is to replace the cpu to be sure.

 

[3chordcharlie]

It could be a power-pin, and not totally necessary. I'd say do a few toroture tests on the system. If it's prime-sable, seti-stable, plays games, encodes videos, etc, it's almost certainly fine.

 

[OMG1Penguin]

Maybe it was the mind control pin.

Do your thoughts seem clearly devoid of fan-boy-esque thoughts?

Do the voltages seem all right?

 

[jjungman]

I also now have a CPU with a broken pin. I haven't tried to boot up with it yet, but assuming it doesn't boot, what are my options? Can the pins somehow be fixed?

 

[FullRoast]

If it is an Intel CPU, you can look at the datasheet from the Intel website to see what the pin is. A lot of them are voltage pins and a broken one would not cause a problem. Here's a link for the 90nm P4's.

 

[Zap]

Some pins are indeed not used. As FullRoast said, check out the datasheet and find out what exactly that pin does. BTW, I've intentionally broken off pins to make CPUs do neat stuff.