Should I even try putting my CPU in this motherboard?

StoleMyOwnCar

2[H]4U
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https://imgur.com/a/3nqkm

Bought a motherboard off Ebay. At first glance things looked good. The IO plate wasn't even out of the wrapper (which only rips open, you can't reseal it). Then obviously the first concern was pins. I went and took some good overhead shots of the board.

To be honest the amount of deviation of the pins in general did not seem to be large, but I don't think these have any room for manufacturing defects, do they? These look like someone had corrected them at some point. For something that they charged 130$ for, I don't think I should be getting a product with bent pins. How do these look to you folks? I plan to open a case shortly to make sure they can't claim that I did it.
 
It's hard to tell from just one pic.

Some of them will look different just because of the angle you are looking at them, but they are fine.
Try looking at the suspect pins from different angles.

You may see a very slight variance on a few pins, but nothing should look bent.

.
 
Well there are two pics, from different angles. If you pay attention to the grid pattern, the circled pins do fall well out of line, although whether it would still work or not was questionable. It very well might have. I just didn't want to take chances. And it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. It doesn't really matter at this point anyway. I returned it. Seller accepted return with no issues and it has been dropped off at USPS.

Then I also full on retard (because this left a bad taste in my mouth and I'm not gonna overpay for old motherboards) and decided to just make a z370 micro build instead. Spent 320 bucks on an open box 8700k from Microcenter (very random find, tbh, was still eligible for the 30$ combo discount; still had thermal paste all over it, looked very sketch. Probably a bad overclocker?), some open box RAM (16G@3200 for 160 or something), a samsung EVO 256GB NVME drive, and this motherboard. Which I have read has terrible coil whine on Amazon, will have to see tomorrow. Initially I wanted to just make sure everything tested right, so the PSU wasn't even inside of the case. I had the AIO CPU radiator dangling out to the side. I took some pictures, it's a hilariously messy setup. But everything booted up just fine, and the NVME drive is freaking fast as hell. Installed Windows 10 Education edition on it (which I need to give the powershell bloat shredding treatment). Hopefully games will just use it as a cache and I can take advantage of it even with my slower SSD's or HDD's.. I can't say this was 800$ worth it, but I guess I finally have my smaller form factor build done, and it's gonna be futureproof for a while yet with the 6 cores.
 
Well there are two pics, from different angles. If you pay attention to the grid pattern, the circled pins do fall well out of line, although whether it would still work or not was questionable. It very well might have. I just didn't want to take chances. And it left a pretty bad taste in my mouth. It doesn't really matter at this point anyway. I returned it. Seller accepted return with no issues and it has been dropped off at USPS.

Then I also full on retard (because this left a bad taste in my mouth and I'm not gonna overpay for old motherboards) and decided to just make a z370 micro build instead. Spent 320 bucks on an open box 8700k from Microcenter (very random find, tbh, was still eligible for the 30$ combo discount; still had thermal paste all over it, looked very sketch. Probably a bad overclocker?), some open box RAM (16G@3200 for 160 or something), a samsung EVO 256GB NVME drive, and this motherboard. Which I have read has terrible coil whine on Amazon, will have to see tomorrow. Initially I wanted to just make sure everything tested right, so the PSU wasn't even inside of the case. I had the AIO CPU radiator dangling out to the side. I took some pictures, it's a hilariously messy setup. But everything booted up just fine, and the NVME drive is freaking fast as hell. Installed Windows 10 Education edition on it (which I need to give the powershell bloat shredding treatment). Hopefully games will just use it as a cache and I can take advantage of it even with my slower SSD's or HDD's.. I can't say this was 800$ worth it, but I guess I finally have my smaller form factor build done, and it's gonna be futureproof for a while yet with the 6 cores.

Wow they took a CPU back with thermal paste still on it?
 
Yeah, a decent amount on the top, some on the bottom. The really gooey stuff, too, annoying to clean. Still, it was 50$ off and eligible for Intel's warranty either way, and it's working just fine thus far. Just cleaned it off a little. Will have to stress test it a bit later. *shrug*
 
Nice job on the discounted parts!

Lol..... thermal paste on the bottom of the CPU?

The guy who returned those parts really should not be trying to build computers.

.
 
Nice job on the discounted parts!

Lol..... thermal paste on the bottom of the CPU?

The guy who returned those parts really should not be trying to build computers.

.

Well to be fair, the thermal paste on bottom might have been because he just crammed it back into the box with it still on top, so maybe it got squished and spread to the bottom.

Anyway, I've been gaming on this for a bit over a week, and it has been wonderful. The NVME SSD makes my bootup time nonexistent, and all of my programs start pretty much instantly (even the ones on my slower SSD, which I think points to it working as a cache). This motherboard has something I didn't expect, which is DC fan voltage control. Which means you don't need PWM case fans in order for the build to be quiet. After a quick bit of tweaking (it includes an automatic fan profile tweaker, which works well enough, but needs a little work to accommodate the GPU), the build is pretty very quiet during any normal use. Just literally air movement noise, no actual fan noise. Put a few of my Noctua 14 inches in there. Very tight fit, but they're doing their job. Filled out the entire 3.5" bay and then shoved a tiny fan in there, and those are staying very cool. Over 22TB of space since I got in on that 8TB WD red deal and then shoved in a 5TB on top of 2 of those. Pretty much lost no disk space even though I moved to a smaller form factor.

The CPU boosts to 4.7Ghz (though that seems to be standard) and stays under 43-50C doing it (~1.3 vcore or under from what I gather), while playing a game like Civ 6. That's pretty amazing in my books, considering I'm using an old H65 (or is it H75, idk, I got it a really long time ago) to cool it, and the fans aren't even running at full speed during load. I don't think it's worth overclocking yet, but I wonder why the previous user returned it. It's such a cool running beast. I mean maybe I can't get it up to 5Ghz as easily, but that's not even that much of a performance increase. GPU is staying under its temp threshold while not even running the fans that high.

Don't understand why I can't use Openhardwaremonitor to monitor CPU temps, though. I have to use the ASUS suite. Weird.

Probably also the cleanest build I've done, probably because the Micro form factor kind of makes it necessary. Overall just really happy with the way this turned out. Usually CPU and platform upgrades don't do jack, but somehow going from the 4770k to this microatx 8700k build did a lot of things right for me, and solved a lot of the issues I've had (including some stutter I had in a lot of games; everything is much smoother now). Probably the biggest of which was the stupid Killer ethernet. God I'm so glad this motherboard uses an Intel network chip. Both the wireless and wired speeds fly. Screw Killer, it's horrible! :mad: Oh, and I can actually take this to friends' houses now. Whereas the Thermaltake Core X9... yeah no.

Might post some pics and whatnot on PCPartpicker sometime and link it here.
 
>>Well to be fair, the thermal paste on bottom might have been because he just crammed it back into the box with it still on top, so maybe it got squished and spread to the bottom.

I bet you're right on that. It sounds like a newbie builder got frustrated and crammed it back in the box. But it's exactly that carelessness of cramming things in boxes that speaks to
the person's ability to successfully build a computer. They don't have the skill or patience to do it correctly. They get frustrated, give up, and everything gets returned.

Nice job on getting your build dialed-in. I'm happy with my 8700K upgrade too (from a 4790K).

Pics would be great, post 'em!

.
 
Well... I stumbled upon a situation like that and I straightened out the pins to the best of my ability and fired it up. It worked.

But that was a used computer having issues that I was fixing, so if everything went belly up it would be par for the course. Totally different situation.

In your case, if you can, I would just return it.
 
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