Motherboard scratch

Question

I purchased a month ago a motherboard (LGA 1156 - Gigabyte P55A-UD6) at about 328USD. All worked fine until yesterday, when I saw I mounted the CPU fan (Thermaltake Frio - a monster of 1.5kg weight) in the opposite way. I decided to put it in the "normal" position. Problem is, when I had to unscrew one screw from the back of the motherboard, the screwdriver slipped and I made a scratch on it (it doesn't seem very deep to me, BUT it hit most traces near the CPU / Memory).

All that to say: system boots up without any problems (both windows 7 and Gentoo GNU/Linux) (so where's the problem you'd say, right ?). Worried about the damage, I did a memtest86 test and - surprise - Some 40'000+ errors went up to the surface. I already had problems with memory (one defected module I had to change 1 week ago) and tested the memory was fine. So I think I hit the traces from the cpu to the RAM. Tried with only 2 modules instead of 4 but same errors. It's not the memory ... it's the damaged motherboard. Now ... that motherboard costed a lot of bucks to me ... I don't know if I should attempt a repair with some solder I read on superuser.com (another thread) or leave things as they are now. I remember with the damaged RAM the system would hang or give random segmentation faults. Should I try to stress it with prime65 to see the "real" impact of the damage ?

Thank you very much in advance !

Answer 1

OK, in the end I'll just buy another Gigabyte P55A-UD6 motherboard. But (another problem): I have a thermaltake frio CPU cooler AND I lost one of these rubber-things you put between the heatsink's metal and the motherboard. Is that dangerous (electrostatic shock ?) or these things are "just" to absorb FAN's motion so that it does not hit the motherboard ? Should I try to buy some like things in a garden/hobby center ?

Answer 2

If memtest gave you errors you don't need to do any more testing, you have a problem. If you are 100% sure the problem is your motherboard I would attempt repairs, but it would be very risky because you could damage other stuff in the process. Make sure your solder does not bleed between the exposed tracers (this is going to be hard to do). If it does bleed over, depending on what those tracers are, you could junk your processor and/or memory, or some other component that isn't broken.

If you don't attempt repairs and you are still 100% sure your motherboard is the problem I would just get a new motherboard and chalk the incident up to experience, because your motherboard is junk.

Whatever you do don't keep using it like it is.

Answer 3

Well, commiserations. It's the chance we take, and despite care, occasionally accidents happen.

You may as well run Prime65 on it, it won't make anything any worse.

I guess you have to weigh up the pros and cons of your options...

Leave it: No effort, maybe it will work for the stuff you want to do. But who's to say whether it will, or whether it will fail just when you don't want it to.

Attempt to fix it: you may wreck it completely, or you may be able to make it better. If you have the skills, maybe worth a try. I certainly don't so it wouldn't be an option for me.

Suck it up, get a new MB, and chalk it up to experience. Expensive, but without a doubt the most reliable option.

Even a slightly unstable system would drive me crazy, guess how I know that...

Good luck!

Answer 4

Try a single ram stick, or the other one, and make sure memtest86 doesn't give you any more grief. If that doesn't work, throw away the mainboard.

Answer 5

Did you try to use other memory slots? If you're a bit lucky you damaged just some lines to some slots.

I would try memtest with one memory in all slots (at one at a time) and asset which are broken and which are not.

(best to do that with 100% working memory - like tested on other computer)