CPU Socket Pin Replacement: Step-by-Step

A tech enthusiast in China has demonstrated his skill by replacing one of the pins located on a CPU socket. Bilibili user and motherboard repair expert, Mu Ziwen, guides us step-by-step through the intricate process, showcasing the success of his work at the end of this short video. 🚀

The latest generation of Intel and AMD systems have contact pins in the socket. While this makes the processors more durable, we need to be more careful with the sockets of the Motherboards. The 'pins' on modern CPU sockets are not rigid; they have a thin sheet of copper bent at their end, which exerts spring-like pressure to a good contact with the pad corresponding to the CPU.

Damaged pins of a motherboard Sometimes they can be aligned very carefully using precision tools. However, there's a real danger of them breaking if flexed too many times or with too much force, due to metal fatigue. If the pin is too worn to be replaced or breaks, most people would consider the motherboard lost. But Mu Ziwen shows a complete pin replacement process using a fairly basic set of tools, and it seems like he completed it very quickly! ⏱️

The damaged motherboard socket is causing the system to fail to properly recognize the installed memory, with only one pin missing. What a shame! Some pins aren't essential and have duplicate functions on others, for example. The key symptom of the broken pin in this case was that one of the DIMM slots wasn't working. ⚠️

Mu Ziwen takes us through the following process:

Repairing a broken pin affecting the memory bus

Removing the damaged pin – using hot air and tweezers
Load the new pin – heat gun temperature set to just under 300 degrees Celsius
Test pin adhesion – with tweezers
Test the pin function – with a multimeter
Power-on test – with the CPU in place
Success – both memory channels work correctly

motherboard socket pin replacement — (Image credit: Mu Ziwen on Bilibili)

(Image credit: Mu Ziwen on Bilibili)

So, the tech enthusiast used only three accessible tools throughout the repair process: a heat gun, tweezers, and a multimeter. The hot air station's temperature, just under 300 degrees Celsius, was perfect for this delicate removal and replacement job. The Bilibili user warned that anyone using hot air approaching 400 degrees Celsius could melt the plastics on the motherboard socket. ⚠️🔥

At the end of the video, we can see how the Windows Task Manager process monitor confirms that two of the motherboard's DIMM slots are occupied, totaling 8GB of DDR4-2666 RAM, running in dual-channel mode. This is a pretty neat success story, but keep in mind that skilled operators can sometimes make difficult jobs look very easy. 😎💻