It's not salvageable. It has the same (creative only?) issue where the legs move even though the solder is still attached (aka the solder has gone soft). Since all the legs are bent massively, the instant you try to reflow them they all move off their pad. A lot of pads are lifted in the damaged area. I tried pushing them back for maybe a half hour, but I needed to "lift" the legs above the pad, otherwise the leg just pushed the pad out of the way.

It was a mess. I tried to remove it with hot air but whatever solder creative used is so corroded it wouldn't flow properly -- I ended up having to use low-melt solder.

I decided to remove the chip before one of the pads broke off. They're all still there, thankfully. Hopefully I'll be able to attach a new chip. I'm not quite sure how I'm going to do that since neither of my go-to methods will work here (can't use hot air, can't drag solder). It will be interesting.

Broken pins can be repaired. It's not difficult at all.

Postman5 wrote on 2025-10-04, 23:44:

Broken pins can be repaired. It's not difficult at all.

I did try this once a few years ago, without much success -- but I do have much better gear now than I did then...

I thought about attempting the repair, but the broken pin wasn't really the problem (I actually went so far as to get a tiny carbide burr put in my dremel). It was the 6 or so pins to the right of the broken pin that were both bent and had soft solder. As soon as I touched the first one with the iron to try to reflow the bad creative solder it took off into the next pin over. All of the pads were loose from the impact damage so I got the distinct impression that the longer I messed with it the more likely I was to break a pad -- and the next four after the broken pin all went UNDER the chip.

I decided I had better quit while I was ahead and pull the chip while the pads were mostly where they belonged. I put some UV solder mask down to try to hold it and I'll give it a go throwing a new TMU on it when it arives.

There's a lot of video about those fix on Youtube.
See "vswitchzero" and "Bits und Bolts".

This is fixed! New framebuffer transplanted into this board and she’s back in action! Interestingly, I never noticed until I did this that the framebuffer has a lot more pins than the TMUs. That’s probably why I had such a hard time the last time I tried to fix a broken leg. I bet it’s much easier on the TMU…