Quote:
Originally Posted by NuclearFart
I once was trying to remove the stock cooling fan on my northbridge chip, and it had these one-way plastic pins holding it in that I didnt want to rip out for fear of damaging the brand new motherboard. So I took a long serrated kitchen knife to cut them off, and after cutting through the first pin, my knife blade carried forward through the new motherboard. 500$ gone before I'd even tried the board out 
See y'all on the handi bus! |
Did you at least try firing up the motherboard? Believe it or not, they can sometimes sustain some damage and be OK - a lot of the traces on a typical 4-layer board are ground planes, and you can survive with some of them not intact. In fact, I have an Athlon 64x2 6400 that is missing one pin, and its just a ground pin - chip still works because it has lots of other ground pins.