How could this work?!?

tek538

n00b
Joined
Jan 3, 2006
Messages
55
An officemate of mine was working on a computer today and accidentally broke a pin off the bottom of a p4 cpu. We were both pretty surprised at how easy the pin was to break off and we were a little worried that the little bastard wouldnt work anymore... in fact I was dead sure that this thing would never work again. For fun we threw it into a working machine and low and behold we were able to boot fully into knoppix... am I wrong in assuming that there is a need and purpose for everyone of those pins? Or can procs still run with a few pins missing....
 
Most processors can run without a few pins. In fact you may have overclocked your processor by breaking off the pin. One way to overclock your processor is to short a few specific pin combinations out, thus making them ineffective.
 
some pins don't actually do anything, so you might have gotten lucky and broken off one of the ones that isn't used.
 
Thanks for the info, I'm just glad we didnt have to go hunting for a replacemnt!
 
Back
Top