I bought 4 AMD DX4-100 CPUs from a Chinese ebay seller. When they arrived, I threw them away because 90% of the pins on all 4 CPUs were bent. When I say "threw them away", I put them out with the rubbish, so they were still on hand. I searched for their replacements on ebay, and found them much too expensive, and so I had a change of heart with the "broken ones", and decided to test one out. I shoved the CPU in to an old mobo (zif) socket, and after much swearing, managed to extract it again using tweezers to pull it out of the socket.

So, in it went in to my test board, and I was so surprised because it worked! It even ran Magic Carpet & Hexen, two games that my other AMD CPU wouldn't run. So, I dug out another "broken" CPU from the rubbish pile, and after much effort in straightening the pins, that worked too.

No prizes for guessing if the final 2 CPUs worked or not... 😀

So, if a CPU has (lots of) bent pins, it ain't necessarily broken.

End of sermon. 😉