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A fun part of retro computing is saving ‘e-waste’ that was headed for certain destruction. These boards can have any number of defects, modifications and more that have to be remedied prior to using them. In the case of the Asus P5A-B Socket 7 mainboard that [Bits und Bolts] rescued from the scrapheap at least one issue was obvious: someone had ripped off the plastic part of the ZIF socket, leaving only the metal pins poking out like an awkward kind of LGA socket.
In addition to the busted PGA ZIF socket there was additional damage, including a broken SMT capacitor and missing resistor. Interestingly, someone had apparently modded the ATX power connector to permanently power on the system by removing a pin and bridging to the power-on signal. Obviously this mod had to be undone by removing the bridge and installing a new pin. After this cracked solder joints had to be addressed, before the tedious task of removing the stray PGA socket pins one by one started.
Exactly what was done to this mainboard and why will likely forever remain a mystery, but at least there didn’t seem to be any serious damage. After installing a CPU it was possible to boot and access the BIOS as well as run a couple of tools, confirming that one more Socket 7 board has been saved from the scrapper.
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