[Music] $500. How am I supposed to build a PC on a budget when the part you plug the actual good stuff in, the flipping motherboard, costs as much as my entire first computer? Wait, I've got one idea. You see, the motherboard is one of the easiest parts to accidentally break when you're building a PC, meaning many people have broken them, and eBay is flooded with cheap broken boards that are just begging, Please fix me. But can they be fixed? To find out, we bought one, then we bought another one, then we bought six more. Oh my goodness. And the best part is, as far as we can tell, fixing most of these motherboards should be an easy path to savings. You did not tell me that today was going to be this challenging. Let's go. And the top snapped off just like this. Easy segue to our sponsor, iFixit. They just announced their Fix Hub Power Series lineup, which includes a portable soldering station, a soldering toolkit, and a 100-watt smart soldering iron. Go check it out at the link in the

video description in the old days, the most delicate part of a computer was the little pins on the bottom of the CPU. If you so much as looked at those things sideways, they could end up sideways. The good thing about CPU pins, though, was that they were relatively easy to repair. In fact, we've done a couple of videos in the past on how you can fix everything from broken to outright removed ones. Unfortunately, that's not going to help you that much if you have a modern system because both AMD and Intel have moved the pins from the CPU, where they're their liability, to the motherboard, where they are someone else's liability. And in the process, they've made them even more fragile. You so much as get a little bit of hair caught on one of these and pull it with the force of a mosquito's wings taking off, and your motherboard goes from wicked fast gaming to wicked brick. And there's all kinds of ways that this can accidentally happen. Leave your motherboard sitting out without the little plastic socket cover.

you're probably going to end up with a bent pin. See a little bit of dust in there and go to pick it out. You guessed it, bent pin. I've personally bent pins on a number of occasions. Yep, me too. Do we have that one on camera when you dropped the CPU in the socket as you were trying to put it in? No, that one wasn't repairable anyway. I've also bent them back many times and ended up with a perfectly working motherboard. The question then is, can I apply those skills to a socket that was bent by somebody else? Starting with this ASRock Z690 Extreme Wi-Fi 6E, you're actually going to notice there's going to be a pattern in the boards we're trying to fix. We mostly tried to target higher-end ones because those are the ones that are the most worth putting in our time in order to fix. The story for this guy is that he's a customer return that was untested, and untested is actually a good thing in this case, even though we can't

necessarily believe that because eBay sellers can lie. If it is truly untested, that means that no one else has taken a crack at it, potentially causing further damage. It also means that there's a better chance that it can be repaired because if someone already tried and it's still dead, well, let's see what wasn't worth them bothering to test. Oh well, there's something. Those two pins look bent but very fixable. But the one I'm actually more worried about is this spot right here. That looks like it could be a missing or broken-off pin outright, and those are a lot harder to deal with without specialty tools. Oh look at that, you can barely even tell now. Dude, Alex, find me the pins that were bent. Oh, are we not recording here? Oh, oh, we missed it all right. Well, well, they were there. You saw them in the Pro Blends, now they're not there. Yep, that's not the one that I was most worried about though. The one I'm most worried about is the one that

looks more like it's missing in this corner. I can't even see it. I might need a bit of a different angle here. Uh-oh. Oh, there it is. Oh, we're just... Oh, that's bad news. The way these are made up, there's kind of like a spring portion on the bottom, and then there's another one that goes the other way, and then there's like a ball, like a little contact pad on the bottom that touches the bottom of the CPU. If that breaks off, your only hope is to kind of force the spring portion up so that that contacts the pad on the bottom of the CPU. With that said, some of these pins are extra ground connections or unused pins that might have been for testing purposes or reserved for future functionality and aren't needed now. We could painstakingly look up exactly what that pin does, but now that we fixed the other two, the faster way to deal with this would probably be to just throw a CPU in here and see if it works. I don't know if I'm going to do that though. I

think I'm going to. I think I'm going to go for gold. It looks like there's just one of them that is a little busted here. I found a diagram of what does what on LGA 1700. Oh brilliant, we're five in from the very bottom. It's a ground pin. Maybe, maybe that's what we think. There might be one more here at the edge. Ah, oh wow, yeah, this guy got mangled. Have you tried to fix any of these yet, Alex? No, it's an adventure day. We have so many, and they were all so cheap that even if we only get like two, we win. Like, did you tell them how much this motherboard cost us? I don't think I did. Do you know how much this motherboard cost us? I don't think I do. $30. 30 bucks. And all I have to do is this. Yeah, and then you have $170 savings. Dude, I'm totally going to get this one. And the top snapped off. I think I might have that in position enough. So what we're looking at right here is this.

little nubbin at the end of this. It just needs to touch where this pad does on the in between these two. See that? So as long as we can bring it up high enough, we should have contact. Is it ideal? No, but it wasn't ideal when doofus mcpy here did whatever he did to his socket. That's not my fault. I think the bigger question we should be asking is why is this motherboard bent. Oh wow, which CPU did you choose? Uh, it's a 12 700k. That way we don't need to worry about if it needs a new bios or anything like that. We're just going to throw some goop on approximately where the die is cuz it's not like we're going to be gaming on them. We're just testing for basic functionality. Then AMD coolers are great for this because they just kind of go on there and then we're good to go. I think I figured out why the motherboards bent. Whoever it is dropped it. That does not necessarily preclude it working though.

let's give it a shot. I think NZXT asked us to use this power supply. This is their new C1500. It's 80 plus Platinum, obviously can do up to 1,500 watts. And given what Nvidia's 50 Series cards are rumored to be sucking back, that may be more necessary than you'd think. Anyway, what? Let's flip her on. This is by no means a guarantee yet though. CPU DRAM are both illuminated. We can try another memory slot. It's possible that one of the pins that is bent is a pin that's needed for the operation of that memory slot. So let's go ahead and give this another shot here, shall we? I don't think this is doing anything right now. Sure doesn't seem like it. It doesn't mean we're cooked, but it does mean that our time might be better spent making some notes and moving on to another board for now. Now for our next victim, this is an MSI Pro Z690 A WiFi. We paid 35 bucks for it, and it's worth over

200 new if we can get it working. The seller claims this is an Amazon return and that it is untested. This has clearly been installed, and it looks like it's been installed more than once. To me, the other thing that stands out is there is thermal paste on this thing everywhere, fingerprints. Oh, you do not even know the half of it. Oh, it's in the socket, it's all over the ILM, buddy. I don't have any genius ideas for how to remove that. I mean, theoretically, if it's non-conductive and non-capacitive, it shouldn't really matter. This was my idea, just give her a rinse. [Music] Down. Why would you not do this over the sink? It's fine, and it's good, and it's good. Did that work at all? Honestly, I don't think so. Remember, we only need the top to be clean. That'll do. While we wait for that to dry, let's take a look at victim number three. This one we did not get from eBay. Oh, where did we get this one? We got this from... We

broke it. Next up, we've got a ProArt Z690 Creator Wi-Fi, a very expensive board, which makes this one's origin all the more troubling to me. Oh, Alex, yeah, who did this? I was told who made this system. Mhmm, I don't need to be a Arc right now. Now, something I am wondering is if anyone has actually tried to just fire this thing up, see if it works. That was my question as well, 'cause a lot of the times people will be like, Oh, it doesn't work, but if we just put the RAM in the other slots, maybe it's fine. There's a little tooth here, so if I could bend that back into shape, maybe I could put it back in, and that would at least hold the pins in place. Alex, you did not tell me that today was going to be this challenging. In fairness, that first one I did not look at close enough and not realize it would be that challenging. Mhmm, as you can see, these pins right here are kind of in the right

spot so as long as they have enough spring in them. There you go, see, those are in the right spot, but these guys have popped out. So, the top of the pin should be sticking through this little hole. So, what I want to do is I want to take my pin, bend them down, and push them over so they go into the right spot here. Oh, did that go in? Yes, sick. Hey, there you go. All right, what are my odds? I think it's solid 50/50. The good news is so far, the MSRP of these three boards is $870, and we have only spent 155. This light is green. I need to see more than a green light, though. The lights say it's booted. I know it's not a KF, is it? I don't think so. I didn't think so either. That would mean it doesn't have onboard video. Do we want to just put a GPU in it? By all accounts, it's working other than that. It isn't working. Get on there, buddy. This one needs to work 'cause it makes our Math Workout so

well, if we can get this $470 motherboard going, we can claim some nonsense in the title for sure. Is this a 24-gig memory stick? I really hope it is. Yes. Oh good, let's go for bonus points. I want to try this memory slot, so I lifted up this little piece of metal here, lifted it up, squeezed it back together, then slid it back down. So that's what's holding the slot together now. That was what was broken out before, so in theory, I will be able to just put a memory stick into it, and it'll just work. That was God messaging, says he's on my side today. Let's go. No way, will it run it at full speed? If we want to try running at full speed, we should put in crappier RAM. That's fair. Okay, let's save that as a bonus objective. Either way, we are one for three now. Now that we know that this works, do you want to deploy to one of our internal workstations? Also, that who made it, Elijah? I'm going to go get that one that

was drying off odds on this one. Uh oh, the power switch pins are bent. I think 47% odds, really? Yeah, who? Let's go. No, I optim. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, how we doing? Hey, hey, oh, hey, how you doing? Oh, this is great, dude. Dude, I can't believe that just spraying a bunch of isopropyl on it worked, even though that was my only plan. Clean it, huck it to dry. Motherboard boots up easy. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I want to see, I want to see dual channel operation. I want to see dual channel operation here. Oh, I'm stoked right now. I got to say, I would always read eBay listings assuming untested meant I tested it and it doesn't work, and I don't want to be on the hook for it. That's what I always assumed, so I've never really gotten into this stuff. Oh, like in that GPU one, I flicked a bio switch on one of them, and it started working. Like, people actually don't test them. That's crazy. Like, we are

one for three, no one for two of the eBay ones, and we're two for three overall. And so far, we've only spent like an hour and a half on this, and we only have a bunch of way worse ones 's coming. Well, show me that dual-channel operation. Yeah, buddy. As far as we can tell, fixed motherboard actually working. Now, to be clear, there can be issues that can crop up, random instability. Just because it posts doesn't mean that this is a fully functioning motherboard, and we'd want to give it a fuller suite of testing before we say 100% if it works. Also, it is worth noting that this board, even though it was $210 new, you can get a refurbished one for $90. Oh, which makes our $35 that we spent on it not as good, but still good. 35 bucks, still good. Yep, still very good. Next up, we've got a Prime Z690 M Plus D4, which we got for $60 but retails for $260. Why is it so

much I don't know. Also, the listing said no turbo bent pins. Bent pins affect the CPU's ability to Turbo boost. Maybe can confirm definitely bent pins. I made it worse. Oh, I accidentally bent it too much the opposite way. Now I got to go back. Yeah, you want to avoid doing that as much as possible because the more that you bend the pins, the more likely it is that they are going to break. These are made out of copper, which is really good for cold working, which means that it actually gets stronger the more that you bend it, which is kind of not what you would expect. But here we've got the PIN, and I've drawn roughly what the grain structure would look like inside of it. Basically, when your metal cools down, it just kind of randomly decides where it's going to grow crystals, and it looks something like that. As you bend it, little cracks are going to form, something like that, and some of these crystals are going to move against each other. But as you do that more and more and more, the chances that

one of these cracks terminates in one of the other cracks that you've already made is better, so it gets stronger. But you do too many of them all over the place, and it's gone. The good news is I think I got that one back in position. Nice. The bad news is that I think there's more. Ooh, it's just hard to hold steady enough. That might be good enough. Oh man, this one too. Jeez buddy, I think this one's going to work. Oh hey Dash, I don't know what's going to happen here, but what I do know is that we're going for bonus marks on this one. Oh oh, we are right into Windows folks. I'm feeling really good. There we go. Okay, what's this CPU supposed to Turbo to? 12 700k up to 5 GHz. Okay, I want to see one of my cores turboing up to 5 GHz then. I don't think it's going to go that high, but I mean they're at 4.5. That's not base clock, is it? No.

that's way higher than base clock, but ALS also just not really a clock speed that makes sense. How's our package power 32 watts? That seems really low. It's only for one core though. You know what? Before we do anything more, this is a 2-year-old BIOS. I think an update is probably in order. Yeah, let's get you the other ASRock Z690 Extreme and see if that one works. Cool. Can confirm bent pins. Lots of bent pins. I can't even see this one in the microscope. There's some junk in there, so that's not actually a bent pin. That's just some [Music] junk. I think I'm getting better at this. Just doing a few boards today. What's a microscope like this worth? Like 100 bucks? 70? Not bad. Oh, that's a bad one. That's bad. This one right here. Oh yeah. Oh, nailed that one. Oh, what was that? Like 5 minutes? It's way less than the time it takes to update a BIOS, that's for sure. Nice. Hey, this BIOS has

flashed through. Let's find out if this one turbos before we try that one. Then what was it last time? It was 4.5, right? Yep, 4.9. Heck yeah, let's go. Whoa, all right, turbo works. Let's do a multi-core bench and see what happens. There you go, bunch of them at 4.7, 4.8. Yeah, oh dude, this is a working great turboing working motherboard. Sweet. What do we pay for it? 60 bucks. 60 bucks. If I'm calling this one fixed, y dude, our stats at the end of this are going to look sick if we can keep this up. Dude, it just worked. Just worked. Oh my God, this is sick. I don't even know what to tell you other than this didn't post before, right? It was completely not working. Like you saw those pins. Oh yeah, I guess that's true. Sick. Okay, one thing that I would like to check though, just because two of them slots work doesn't necessarily mean they all work. Those two working pretty good.

indicator that's true, and those are the main ones that matter, because as soon as you populate all four slots, you're going to be giving up some speed. But I'd be curious to see if all of them work on this board. Okay, so Alex will work on that while I crack open this supposedly nothing wrong with it, z790 udac. Do you happen to remember what we paid for this bad boy? We paid $66, and I looked at it, and apparently the listing says that two Ram slots don't work. Okay, which would normally indicate either a problem with the pins in the socket that connect to the ram slots or a problem with the ram slots, both of which are things we've tackled today. And also, if two of the ram slots just plain work, are you willing to give up two Ram slots to just like save 170 bucks or whatever? I would. You would be saving $133 still. Yeah, that CPU went to 5.3 gigahertz almost immediately. Oh, and it's really hot now. I'm actually gonna stop

Yeah, I don't have a proper cooler on this one, Alex, but she works. Yeah, it works great. That moment when you repair five motherboards and cook a CPU that'll wipe out your savings pretty quick. Dude, I got to back you up on this one. I do not see a problem. Feel like we need to get this on the bench. Oh, no way, dude. It's into Windows, dude. Just skipped the BIOS, dude. Did they have a bad CPU and just thought it was the motherboard and sold it? Or maybe they had like a 14th gen and it has an older BIOS. This was supposed to be the curveball where it was like, it looks fine, why is it broken? It's just not broken. I've heard of this. I mean, you said when we bought all the video cards, one of them just, you hit a BIOS switch and it just worked. Yeah, user error. I mean, if user error can break the pins and you bend the RAM slot, then user error can just have no idea how to put a computer together, clearly. Yeah, the BIOS.

is from uh July of 2023. So, I wonder if they just bought a 14th gen, popped it in here, it didn't work, and they just didn't know how to troubleshoot it. And then nobody checked it when it was returned. 14900 K launch October 17th. Yep, that's probably what happened. $200 MSRP, got it for 66 bucks, not bad. I think repairing motherboards from eBay is my new career. Like seriously, I'm making some of the best money I've made in a while doing this. This is great dude. Okay, if I didn't have to film any of this, I've only spent like a couple hours fixing boards today, and I've made hundreds of dollars. The only one that didn't work was 15 bucks. Speaking of which, let's look at some other ones that might not work. Alright, let's do it. I can't believe how much fun I'm having today. Do you want to see one that's not so fun? I would love to. This one is $210.

normally we paid 56. I think I found the problem. So, the listing for this one says the board looks perfect, seems just untested. This one might be super easy. This socket is mangled, dude. It is possible that it was fine when they sent it. It was shipped without a socket cover, so it might have just got completely mangled in shipping. I blame the seller at that point. You can't ship a motherboard without a socket cover. Also, it's covered in thermal goop right there. There's supposed to be a thing, and that one, oh my goodness, they're bent backward. There's no way that happened in shipping. Seller's a liar. Seller's a liar, dude. There's also this dude. The only way they could be more of a lying seller is if they were a dishonest below-floor, below-ground house basement. What a lying seller. Uh, uh, dude, I think I just got one of them. See, the pins are really small, but the pads on the bottom of the CPU are not that small. So, as long as you can

nail that pad space and not hit the one next to it, then you're good. My success rate today is cray cray, dude. I think I just nailed this one. I don't want to give you guys unrealistic expectations. Our rate of success today is very high, and I wouldn't expect to have the same, but we also have shown with a sample size of far more than one that this is a thing that you can do and potentially succeed at. As much fun as I'm having, it also makes me sad that people just discard stuff like, Did anyone even try to fix these boards? If they had, they'd still have them, and they'd still be working. Just seems wasteful. Okay, what do we pay for this one, and what's it worth again? This is uh, z790 PG lightning. We paid $56, and it is worth $210. Keyboard, keyboard did something. Wait for it, dude. Holy crap, let's go. No way, dude. I genuinely did not think that one was coming back. That was supposed to be our example of sometimes B pins can

be too much, but it turns out it getting dropped can be too much. Besides that, you never know, and professional shops can do full socket replacements. Just because we don't have those capabilities in our makeshift table tennis table lab here doesn't mean that anything is necessarily too far gone when it goes to socket repairs. It's generally only worth it to do those kinds of repairs on a very premium board, though, because otherwise you're going to spend more than the value of the board in order to fix it. She's running pretty hot. I didn't even put fresh thermal compound on it, but it's very clear that this system is working. All 32 gigs of RAM are showing up. It works, brother. Damn, how far ahead are we today? In total, we paid $352 so far. We have fixed $1,550 worth of motherboards. That's like 250 bucks an hour. It's actually crazy, yeah. Mind you, that's brand new pricing that he's comparing against, and these realistically are reworked boards now. But even if we had to give a significant

discount on them. You know, for our small computer repair shop or Facebook Marketplace Builder business, we're doing pretty good. Or if you're just a normal person, you can just get a $250 motherboard for $30, especially if you're a hobbyist and you already have, you know, some fine tools and a microscope or something like that, or you could borrow one from school or whatever. Yeah, next up, we've got a throwback x299 back when Intel had a high-end desktop platform. I don't see anything wrong with it though, which is tripping me out a little bit here. Yeah, this one's very strange. The listing says that it is broken and the CPU slot has bent pins. MH, I do not see any bent pins. Just going to look for any like scratched traces on the back or anything like that. I'm surprised we didn't get more of that, like people accidentally installing an extra standoff and scratching traces, stuff like that. It's pretty common, or at least it used to be, and can be a royal pain in the butt to repair if you can do

it at all 'cause you basically have to put these little tiny traces back together with a little bit of wire. It's beyond my capabilities. Can we just throw a CPU in and see what happens? Yes, we do. What are the odds this one just works? I think it's low. I think it's low. I've seen a lot of these boards die in the field. This is not how statistical probability works, but I feel like we're due for a failure. You know what the hell unal? Why does this work unreal? What did we pay for this? We paid $50 for it. We paid 50 bucks for this board. $500 motherboard. What just happened? We have fixed $2,046 worth of motherboards. We paid $350 to. And what's crazy about this is Alex and I were talking about this before. These older Intel platforms, the CPUs are dirt cheap because the motherboards tend to fail before the CPUs do. How ironic. You could build a system around this thing for like nothing these days. This one was

supposed to be a cautionary tale. Okay, how many more boards are left? No, that's it. That's it. We have repaired seven of eight. Okay, I want to go back to that first one for bonus. I want that one now. There's no way. There's no way. I want it. I could not have scripted this better. Like, if I was scripting this, I would have had us fail more. Yeah, exactly, 'cause this doesn't seem believable. Guys, we bought these boards on eBay, except the one. This makes no sense. Okay, so this is that first board and the only one that I have not been able to successfully boot today. I'm straightening it because it's not long enough. It's missing some of the material, straightening it out, and then I'm trying to get it to reach over. I'm ready to try this one again. This one doesn't make it. I think I will forgive myself. CPU and DAM lights are on, but as I recall, that was the same behavior we got last time. I think this one might be

hooped. I have seen just bios. Flash starts working before he is not wrong. Bios flash worked. I'm just going to power cycle her. I don't think this is going to work. I don't think so either. However, I have seen situations where the BIOS has become unstable for some reason and like a really long seos clear like letting it sit for a week with the battery out or a bio. Oh my God. I think it's going to work. No way. I was sitting here giving a lecture on how what there is absolutely no way this is going to happen but I have seen it. Bios flashback for the win. I eight of eight. That's great mate. What the hell. We didn't even break out the real camera cuz we didn't think this would work. Yeah this this is shot on Colin's iPhone dude. Why is it working. We're going all the way to Windows boys. Holy crap. There you go. We're back to the real camera and we're back to our conclusion. This is a perfectly working motherboard with all

four sticks of RAM, XMP enabled on a bowed motherboard. Other than the little mangled corner that doesn't seem to affect anything, this just works. What's our total, Alex? How'd we do? We bought $352 worth of motherboards, and we have made, if you go by MSRP, $2,246 worth of motherboards work, eight of eight. I cannot believe it. Now, on the secondhand market, these are obviously going to qualify as referred or recertified or whatever you want to call it, so we're probably going to end up somewhere behind that number, but it is still clear that with a little over $300 US out of our pocket, having eight working LGA 1700 motherboards is an unbelievable bargain. Yep, just like this span segue. Yeah, that was a pretty bad one. Yeah, to our sponsor, I Fix It. You guys got to know who they are by now, right? Replacement parts, comprehensive guides, high-quality toolkits, all of that good stuff. But now there's more. They just announced their Fix Hub power.

series. Let's run through it real quick. First is the 100-watt smart soldering iron. It charges through USB-C, heats up in 5 seconds, and you can even adjust the tip temperature using a handy web interface. Next, we've got their portable soldering station, a benchtop setup you can carry around with you that features USB-C power delivery and boasts up to 8 hours of soldering time on a single charge. Finally, for their most comprehensive package, there's the soldering toolkit. It's an all-in-one solution that comes with the power station, soldering iron, and a bunch of other useful tools like an iron cap, mandible wire strippers, and angled tweezers. Honestly, there's so much stuff in the kit, you'll have to check it out for yourself. So head over to our link in the description to learn more about iFixit's new fix Hub power series. If you guys enjoyed this video, maybe you like the one where we repaired CPU pins and tried to see if it was a viable side

hustle not as profitable as motherboards. I'll say that much though. spoil. I can't believe it still.

How to Get $500 Motherboards for $50

Linus Tech Tips is a passionate team of "professionally curious" experts in consumer technology and video production who aim to educate and entertain.
