Had a friend of mine bring me an Acer Aspire AM5100 system that he tried to clean the dust out of and in the process he took the cpu out of it's socket. Then when he tried to put it back in he bent and broke the pins off the cpu and chewed up the MB socket. I have cleaned up the socket but when trying to find a cpu to replace the Athlon 64 X2 5200 cpu I can't find a replacement that the board will accept. I've tried a Athlon-64 LE1660 AM2 45W and a Sempron 64 3400 1.8GHz and the system won't post with either of them. So without knowing if the board is bad I don't dare to buy a 5200 off ebay which I won't be able to return if the mb is bad. If i buy a new MB to fit the LE1660 then the guys Vista key may not activate where it's not a acer system anymore? Any suggestions?

If only the motherboard used a LIF (Lots of Insertion Force) instead of a ZIF socket he wouldn't be in this problem.

Anyways, I would try getting the latest BIOS for the board and seeing if that lets you use one of the two chips you've tried... getting the BIOS might be easier said than done for an Acer system though.

The 5000+'s are like $40 now lol

Thats the problem with alot of pre fab machines. I have repaired quite a few and more often than not - no matter how careful you are, when you try to remove the cpu cooler, the cpu comes with it. gotta use a flat top screwdriver to gently pop it off the heat sink. sucks - at times pins get bent no matter how gentle you try to be when you pull the supposedly detached cooler up. Never had any break, but had a few minor bends fixable with a debit card.


are some of the pins broken off in the board? would explain why you got issues with getting it to seat correctly.

Vista will activate, I am running a Dell license on my machine now and its on its 3 or 4th motherboard lol. At most you will have to do phone activation.

If it were me i would replace both the board and the chip. I wouldn't run a questionable motherboard on a new chip as a damaged socket could damage the new cpu.

Yeah I just ordered him the ASUS M3A76-CM and I already have the Athlon-64 LE1660 AM2 so as long as I can use his Vista CD-Key then he's good to go. But he's kicking himself in the butt for messing with it in the first place .. all because he was too cheap to buy a can of compressed air.

The cpu came out of the socket still stuck to the heatsink so instead of removing it first then putting it back in he tried to install it all at once. No wonder he bent and broke pins FFS.

I thought of that at first but then thought it's his dumb mistake that caused the problem so he's gonna have to suck up the extra cost for a new MB.

Yeah, good decision. Besides, it's good to buy a new mobo in foresight of future CPU/ram upgrades.