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I purchased a month ago a motherboard (LGA 1156 - Gigabyte P55A-UD6) at about 328USD.
All worked fine until yesterday, when I saw that I had mounted the CPU fan (Thermaltake Frio - a monster of 1.5kg weight) in the opposite way. I decided to put it in the "normal" position.
When I had to unscrew one screw from the back of the motherboard, the screwdriver slipped and I made a scratch on it. It doesn't seem very deep to me, BUT it hit most traces near the CPU / memory.
The system boots up without any problems on both Windows 7 and Gentoo GNU/Linux.
Worried about the damage, I did a memtest86 test and found 40'000+ errors. I already had problems with memory (one defective module I had to change 1 week ago) and the remaining memory was fine.
So I think I hit the traces from the CPU to the RAM. Tried with only 2 modules instead of 4 but same errors. It's not the memory, it's the damaged motherboard.
The motherboard costed a lot of bucks, I don't know if I should attempt a repair with some solder or leave things as they are now. I remember with the damaged RAM the system would hang or give random segmentation faults.
Should I try to stress it with Prime95 to see the "real" impact of the damage ?
OK thanks. I switched it off after a few attemps to start windows and there were some things which were not going right (slower than usual, graphics not as well, segmentation faults). After that I immediately switched off. I'll wait my new motherboard before power it up again. – user51166 – 2010-10-03T14:23:52.933