So I've seen a good number of people on here talking about receiving an Intel motherboard with bent pins. I thought I'd offer some words of encouragement to those of you thinking about attempting to correct the issue.
*WARNING* - This is not for the faint of heart, those with a constitution check of less than 20 (d20), or individuals with parkinson's disease.
Tools Needed
Magnifying Glass (if you aren't perfectly near sighted like me)
Compressed Air straw
Adequate light
***Check List***
0. Is this a new board? If so you may want to consider an RMA before touching anything....
1. How many pins are bent? (1 or 2? Or is half of the grid bent)
2. What appeared to cause the bent pins? Does it look like a large area of bent pins from something pressing down on them or random "rogue" pins?
3. How bad are the pins, are they just misaligned to the left or right, or are they pushed down under another? Does the base of the pin appear to be attached correct?
If its only a few pins, and it doesn't look like the base of the pin has been pressed down so hard that it could have caused other damage and they appear to just be "leaning"... then your board may be a candidate for Pin Correction Surgery!
***Procedures***
For these Intel pin grids, simple look at this from a 45 degree angle towards a good light source and you can spot the individual pins that are misaligned. Once you have determined which pins are incorrectly bent, use a magnifying glass to determine which direction it need to be corrected towards. Without the magnifying glass look top down direction at the pins with light above your head and you will see a gold little dot for each pin tip. You can usually see the rows that are off a little bit and will see a single pin that isn't correct.
1 . . . . . . . .
2 . . . . . . . .
3 . . . . . . . .
As you can see in the above "Schematic" (yep I'm calling it that), Row 1 appears to be perfectly fine. Row 2's pin #2 is shifted to the left and Row 3's pin #3 is also to the left.
What you will want to do is take the tip of the Compressed air straw and simply (and ULTRA carefully) slip the pin inside the straw's hole. Don't push down at all and don't leverage the straw very hard at all. You will ever so slightly just lean the straw in the direction that the pin needs to go. After every slight adjustment, remove the stray and double check the position of the pin. I can't stress this enough how slightly you need to move the straw to correct the pin. This may seem like a very crude way to deal with such fine electrical components, but done by the right hands you can bring your motherboard back into operational status. I was able to do this with a Mini ITX board that was unable to post until I performed the above. Good luck guys, just remember to be VERRRRRRRY delicate.