I had a brief summer job as a 17 year old, assembling computers. Even after over 100, I still had that feeling of imminent destruction of expensive electronics.
I took the CPU out, and sure enough, I'd bent a few of the pins in one corner. Fuck. I then spent the next couple of hours with a tiny magnifying glass and tweezers, painstakingly trying to bend the pins to where it would boot again. 20 min of bending, stick the CPU back in, try to boot... nothing. Several times.
Finally it booted, miraculously. I'm never taking that CPU out again.
These are antiquated connectors!
Then again, I hear the sockets we use for the BGA chips I work with cost in the thousands of dollars (because custom-desiged), so I can kind of understand that the razor-thin margins the custom PC industry works with stays with cheap old connectors.
The TR4[2] (for enthusiast Threadripper processors) and the SP3[3] (for server Epyc processors) sockets, however, are LGA.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_AM4 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_TR4 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_SP3
BGA means 'ball-grid array' - meaning it's an array of solder balls, meaning that ouside of testing, it will be soldered to the board... no socket required.
Your sockets for testing are super expensive because they are taking a chip that was never meant to be socketed... and socketing it, which is pretty useful when you are testing the things.
You still have to clamp it down worryingly hard, but it doesn't go crunch anymore, and I think it's probably quite hard to damage the contacts.
Double check your hand will fit in the thing first!
Actually, your credit-card suggestion is useful. My last bent-pin disater was fortunately a mostly-obsolete PGA Pentium 4 CPU, tweezers and careful, repeated re-insertions into the socket sorted it out. Given that the CPU could be had for about $5, it wasn't worth the effort, but I was trying to help a friend and I felt stupid for dropping the CPU.
I also bent a pin. Now, the pins in my case were on the motherboard (my understanding is that this used to be reversed, and they used to be on the CPU. Frankly, I am quite happy that they're on the mobo, since that's the cheaper part) and IIRC they don't point straight up (they're slanted, and just kinda graze these contact points on the bottom of the CPU).
It turns out that, for my particular motherboard, ASRock's manual's instructions and images describe a different piece of hardware than the one I actually had. Same model number though, IIRC. As best I can tell, at some point, there was some sort of hardware change, but like so much tech, the docs were never updated. It was only after scrutinizing the manual very closely that I discovered the error, but it was already too late and the damage was done.
I contacted ASRock about it, sent them images detailing the differences and obviously laying out the problem. The representative essentially just sent me the same bad instructions back. Finally caved and had it repaired, which they did not cover under warranty (which I consider a violation of the warranty). (I also finally figured out the correct procedure, which I had to figure out in order to send the motherboard back to them for repairs, as they claimed they would refuse it if I shipped it with the pins exposed, which is extremely frustrating when they also can't tell you how to actually accomplish that.)
The next motherboard I buy will not be from them.
Finally got it all back, and now, equipped with the knowledge of how not to screw it up, got it all assembled. Still didn't boot. Got a friend with a working machine to swap parts with until we could isolate the failure; turned out to be our first guess, the PSU. But it was somewhat surprising at the time, as we thought the PSU was good. You can short two of the leads on the main plug from a PSU with a paper clip, and that is essentially the signal to "turn on" and start supplying power. We did this, and it would start right up, but it never started when hooked up to the motherboard itself. Beyond that, IDK. (and since you have to short the two contacts w/ a paper clip, the plug isn't attached to the mobo at that time, so you only really power things like the DVD drive, the fans, and the HDD, which mostly then go into loops b/c they can't find the motherboard.)
Finally, it booted. I'm never taking that CPU out again, either.
Nothing makes you sicker than the sound of a corner of your CPU die crunching.
I used the same motherboard and bought an adapter which allowed an upgrade to a 1,3GHz PIII Tualatin. It had a proper headspreader so the installation was a breeze in comparison.
The horror ensued on my next upgrade to an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ which again had the die exposed, but thankfully I never managed to destroy it.
Took the case off, and behold! The Intel fan had seized, melted, and caught fire. It wasn't a particularly old system so I'm not sure how the thermal protection didn't kick in, but that had happened on two near-identical systems. No saving those boards.
I had a solid copper heatsink that was easily 5lbs for my Athlon XP system. I held onto it for the longest time after I got rid of the system because I knew the metal was easily worth $20.
Especially my latest, when I updated my main rig to a Ryzen 7/32 GB ECC/250 GB NVMe setup. About $1000 worth of new hardware, and the POST delay nearly gave me a heart attack. I shouldn't have worried, though, it worked on the first boot. wipes sweat from brow
CPU cooler installation always seems to be the worst part of it, and there just doesn't seem to be a way around that, since lots of force is needed to squash the cooler down and insure good contact. Still, I like the screw-down setup on the Ryzen far better than the older spring-clip designs, or the spring-loaded pegs on Intel coolers.
Takes a while for my monitor to wake up and was sure I had killed it on first boot with the stream of cryptic messages from the motherboard, but it was fine.
The best way to apply thermal paste AKA TIM:
the thinnest possible layer ALL over the processor's surface.
The pea method IMNSHO is stupid!
Could it be that there is some merit to the "thin layer all over" message? But yes, easy to mis-communicate. I had not considered the problem of bubbles.
Funnily, those screws also sort of fit into the grid on the back of my computer case, so I mounted the old cooler externally, and it helps draw the hot air out. No reason to throw away a good PWM-controlled fan if you have a free connector on the motherboard, after all.
If you're doing it for the first time, try a few times without the thermal paste so you get the feeling of it. Then the pins will also go down easier when you do it for real.
The first thing they were having me do was to de-solder bad memory chips on the mainboards. So, yeah talk about stress.
CPU definitely... The modern video cards that weigh like ten pounds also give me pause. Not because slotting them is hard but because they sag.