Bent pins = RAM issues?

[junfan]

I was installing a new CPU cooler and apparently I was tired and not careful and bent some CPU socket pins on the MB.

The board seems to be in perfect working order with one small exception, it won't accept RAM in the A1/A2 dimms.

Good news is apparently the board works perfectly fine with the ram in B1 + B2.

Asus recommends A2/B2 for ram installs, I'm curious if going against their recommendation will suffer performance loss?

Also I'd love any input on this issue, part of me feels like there is something else going on besides the bent pins, however the board was working 100% perfect before this so I guess the pins are the culprit.

Edit - Forgot to put the model, it's an ASUS Z97-PRO.

 

[mda]

Definitely could be a result of the bent pins.

You can pull up documentation from the Intel site on which pins do what, to confirm if the bent pins directly cause your RAM issues.

 

[Nenu]

Looks like A1 is paired with B1 and A2 with B2.
If you dont follow memory pairing, you will likely halve the memory bandwidth.

 

[Dreamerbydesign]

It will run single channel.