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I'm basically building a replacement computer for my living room. Bought all the pieces yesterday, brought them home and assembled half of it before my girlfriend came over.
Finished it up tonight, powered it up, five seconds later it powered off and cycled. I'm like, hm, okay. I pull a ram stick out, boots up into bios fine. I switch ram sticks, boots up fine. I try the other side of the dual channel, power cycles. I go with one ram, update motherboard bios, still not fixed. I check to make sure it's not a short, works fine with one stick, not with two. I try boosting voltage a little bit, still the same result.
I'm like... wtf else could it be? I pull the CPU and bam, bent pin on the motherboard. :/ It must be on the part of the memory controller dealing with the dual channel.
Protip: always check before buying and/or leaving the store, haha. Hopefully they don't argue with me about a replacement as clearly, it wasn't my fault. How is a flat cpu going to bend a single pin straight down and not do anything to the adjacent pins? I'm very meticulous when installing CPUs too.
Those pins are actually carefully bent "springs" that are closer than a needle width to each other, and even grazing your fingernail over that socket will bend dozens of them, possibly breaking them off.
Those pins are actually carefully bent "springs" that are closer than a needle width to each other, and even grazing your fingernail over that socket will bend dozens of them, possibly breaking them off.
That is accurate. They actually are already somewhat bent. You would need a ridiculously steady hand and fantastic vision to be able to reliably fix a single pin.
Besides that, there's now way I'm going to try to fix something that I didn't do.
I exchanged it successfully. From the horror stories about cpu pins, I was expecting the worst. Microcenter was helpful.
Rig is up and running well now. Those i3-3225 chips are burly for a dual core, very impressive.
That is accurate. They actually are already somewhat bent. You would need a ridiculously steady hand and fantastic vision to be able to reliably fix a single pin.
As someone with better than average vision, I also needed a large magnifying glass
That is accurate. They actually are already somewhat bent. You would need a ridiculously steady hand and fantastic vision to be able to reliably fix a single pin.
Besides that, there's now way I'm going to try to fix something that I didn't do.
I exchanged it successfully. From the horror stories about cpu pins, I was expecting the worst. Microcenter was helpful.
Rig is up and running well now. Those i3-3225 chips are burly for a dual core, very impressive.
Microcenter is awesome. The first thing I thought when I read this title was "yeah, but most people order them from online!"
Microcenter is awesome. The first thing I thought when I read this title was "yeah, but most people order them from online!"
I used to order everything from Newegg back in the day, but Microcenter really came around the last few years and there's one close to my place of work. It's much better to take the extra ten minutes to go there than have to deal with RMAs.
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