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I need to find a replacement AMD CPU - Interesting issue - CPU + HS came out together

The Stigenator

The Stigenator

Lifer
Last night my friend Mike called me to give him a hand with his box. We assembled it sometime last year (Feb 2011). A few months ago, it was randomly shutting off, so we determined it as a heat issue and blew the dust out of the CPU heatsink and it ran pretty well.

Last night he called saying it wasnt starting up at times, and when it did it was running hot at idle (50c), so we looked at the CPU heatsink again, bit of dust, blew it off.

Then we decided to remove the heatsink and put some fresh thermal compound. I unhooked the heat sink, pulled.. nope nothing.. would not come off. We tried loosing up the '4 screws' on the base of the motherboard, still no budge. Finally we pulled at it and it came out.

HEATSINK + CPU. The cpu was stuck to the heatsink, the 'CPU' insertion lever was 'down', meaning it just got pulled out of the socket.. OUCH!

We checked the CPU for damage, it didnt look like there was an issue, but we carefully with an exacto started scraping the goop off the edges of the CPU. Still the CPU wont come off the heat sink. Finally we used a screw driver to pry it off.

Thats when I noticed that 3 pins were bent. Now I got to get him a new CPU / MB combo. He cant have much downtime due to the nature of his work.

His previous config was an AMD X6 1100T with an ASUS A4MBB motherboard. I would probably have to replace both. The AMD X6 1100T is not available. So what comparable MB can I get while he deals with ASUS/AMD/Heatsink mfg on the warranty.

In all my years of working with computers this is the first time I've seen a CPU stuck so badly to a heatsink that it would not come off.

Cliffs:

CPU stuck to Heatsink - came out of socket when pulling heatsink off.
Need new AMD X6 1100T and motherboard or something comparable. Hopefully no reinstall required!
Suggestions on how to get RMA

Is the FX series processors comparable to the X6 line?
 
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Tip for next time: if the heatsink doesn't want to give, twist it a bit. Dried-up thermal grease doesn't cope well with shear forces, and it should give pretty easily.

As for the rest of the question, what is the budget and does it have to be AMD?
 
Ouch man, that sucks. Always twist as mfenn said.

And yea, why AMD? Could go with an i5-2500 which performs a bit better than an X6 1100T. Unless of course you do something that uses the extra 2 cores to the max.
 
I did the exact same thing recently, bent pins and all. First time ever. In the future i'm gonna stress my cpu for a few minutes first.

My solution to the problem... unbend the pins... worked a treat :whiste:
 
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I've accidentally bent one pin on the motherboard I'm currently using. Fixed that issue by bending it back with a screwdriver 😀. I get random lockups once a few months though, just a BSOD. Might not even be related to the bent pin, but a RAM issue
 
I did twist it, it wouldnt twist out. Trust me this is the first time I've run into that issue. I twisted it and twist and pulled it. Infact when I was doing the twist and pull the last time the whole thing came out.

I may be able to restraighten the pins, but i'll need a magnifying glass and some fine tools to do so.

The reason for AMD, it is his editing machine, he edits HD footage. We cant have downtime, it has been unstable this week he hasnt been able to edit footage. So we have to stick with AMD or we would have to reinstall that will take days perhaps to get everythign back to normal.

Thats why I was thinking, quick and dirty, find a new mobo and chip. If I cant find the X6 1100T I may have to do the slower X6 processors.
 
The Stigenator said:
I did twist it, it wouldnt twist out. Trust me this is the first time I've run into that issue. I twisted it and twist and pulled it. Infact when I was doing the twist and pull the last time the whole thing came out.

I may be able to restraighten the pins, but i'll need a magnifying glass and some fine tools to do so.

The reason for AMD, it is his editing machine, he edits HD footage. We cant have downtime, it has been unstable this week he hasnt been able to edit footage. So we have to stick with AMD or we would have to reinstall that will take days perhaps to get everythign back to normal.

Thats why I was thinking, quick and dirty, find a new mobo and chip. If I cant find the X6 1100T I may have to do the slower X6 processors.
Click to expand...

Use a mechanical pencil with a metal tip to straighten the pins (take the lead out and put the tip over the pin). That makes it easy to bend only one at a time.

If only a few pins are bent, it shouldn't be too hard.
 
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I'll try the mechanical pencil trick later tonight. I am picking up an sempron from frys to test out the mobo tonight.

I ended up getting a FX 8 core processor, new mobo, new memory, Case & PSU (his old psu was not up to snuff, which could have caused the issue with the computer not coming up correctly and the mobo is too big for his old case).

Yeah its an expensive lesson to learn but I am writing it off on my company cc. I told him I am taking his old mobo (if it works) and memory & case stuff so I can build another computer out of his old thing. It is going to be an interesting swap.

I am going to use ceramique thermal paste this time, hopefully that will not give the same problem as the paste we used before (i think it was teh stock stuff we used before)
 
This is actually a common problem with AMD CPUs, especially when using the factory AMD paste on the four-heatpipe heatsinks. Once that paste heats up, and flows, it becomes like a "glue" almost.

I don't know about the more recent AMD sinks, the ones for 95W CPUs, the TIM seems different now, more like the Intel TIM.

This problem is so significant, I've started, on many AMD rigs that I build, to remove the factory AMD TIM off of the heatsink, and apply my own AS5, which generally does not do that, and comes off easy.
 
I rarely use the stock HSF on an AMD build, so I seldomly encounter this. As mentioned already, always let the PC run for at least 20 minutes to heat up the paste, then power it off and it should come loose a lot easier.
 
Well the good news is the motherboard is not toast, the CPU though is. The computer was starting erratically before we tried pulling the CPU out, so the CPU was on its way out.

We used the mechanical pencil trick to straighten the slightly bent pin, put it in the mobo, computer would not come on (system will turn on, no display nothing).

I bought an AMD Sempron processor, dropped that in, computer came on no problems. SO the CPU had an issue. We're RMAing it to AMD. In the meantime we decided to go get an AMD X6 2.7ghz from Microcenter and drop it in.

Now to cancel the will call pickup from Newegg (I do not need all that new hardware). We'll switch out the 2.7ghz with the replacement x6-1100t when it arrives from AMD.
 
The Stigenator said:
Now to cancel the will call pickup from Newegg (I do not need all that new hardware). We'll switch out the 2.7ghz with the replacement x6-1100t when it arrives from AMD.
Click to expand...

Since they stopped making 1100T chips a while ago, I wonder if they will be able to give you an exact replacement, or if they will offer you a 1045T (Which seems to be the only X6 available left in the channel.)

Edit: The 1045T are no slouch. I don't know if you had the 1100T OCed all the way to 4Ghz or not, but I have my 1045T OC to 3.51, at basically stock vcore (1.325v). Temps still get kind of high though, seen them as high as 56C in CoreTemp, on warm days.
 
ugh. Looks like the mobo has issues. Ugh. Its booting up to bios and hangs. Ugh. This is with a sempron and a 1045t.

last night it was going into the bios
 
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