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First build, couple of big "uh oh" errors?

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Well last night I completed my first build. Everything went surprisingly smoothly and everything turns on just fine. I don't have my monitor set up yet, but I can hear the BIOS beep when I turn it on. Every fan and stuff works just fine on the inside, etc.

However, I did a couple of things last night that are really making me nervous. When I was installing my heat sink to my CPU, I couldn't get the locking arm down to the correct lever (AMD processor). I thought I had done something wrong. Being oblivious, I decided to remove the heat sink to attempt to reinstall. Well the thermal paste had taken hold all ready, and so when the heatsink came off, the CPU did too. Right out of the socket with the locking arm still down.

At this point I was all ready nervous and I couldn't seem to get the CPU back into the socket with the heat sink on, since the heat sink didn't fit into the off set position. So I removed the CPU from the heat sink. They had only been together for five minutes tops, and I didn't do anything about the thermal paste. I got my cpu back in, got the heatsink on and finally got the securing lever down and the rest of the build went smoothly.

Those two errors are making me paranoid though. Did I damage my build? What's the worst case scenerio? How/when will I be able to tell if something went wrong?

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Wow. This is interesting. I'm not exatly sure what motherboard and cpu socket you have but in almost all of today's sockets that securing lever locks into place. Are you sure you're locking that arm all the way in (CPU - locking arm)? I have a hard time believing you pulled the cpu through the locking arm if it was locked down. Just to be clear there's a locking arm for both the cpu and depending on the heatsink, it locks into place aswell.

Bottom line you really want to consider removing the old thermal paste and re-applying some new stuff. you can youtube some best practices for re-applying thermal grease if your not sure how to do it.

Can you give us some more details on motherboard, cpu, and heatsink your useing?

Mobo
Processor

I installed the CPU correctly, and the arm was all the way down and locked in. I'm honestly not sure how it came out. I'm considering taking it in to my local shop to chat with the guys about it, and have them help me check to see if anything was damaged. I'm still beating my head into my desk for such a dumb error, but yeah.

The CPU was locked down. I was having a lot of difficulty locking the heatsink down, which is why I thought I installed it wrong and thought it was a good idea to take it off to try again. In hindsight, pretty dumb. But I guess you live and you learn, so hopefully everything turns out all right.

Best solution

If the CPU or socket are damaged, it likely won't boot up right. If it boots up fine, download speedfan or realtemp, and keep an eye on your temps. If they are ~40C at idle, you should be fine.
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^+1... Agree

You will quickly tell if you damaged the CPU and your temps are out of wack. Also, I would monitor your CPU usage to make sure you are getting activities on all cores (tell if one core could've been damaged).

Thanks for the answer. Since my monitor is currently on it's way, and I won't have an OS until August 23rd, I'm going into a shop on Wednesday. The guys are really good their and offered to help me make sure everything is OK. Thanks to your answers I knew what I wanted help with and could explain everything. Thank you.
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