When I was building my latest computer, I dropped the CPU (i7-870) into the case, and it bounced a couple of times on the motherboard. I cursed, but still finished the build. The contacts on the bottom of the CPU appeared unharmed.

It worked fine, pretty much, tho' I am returning the motherboard for some tweaky behavior (random network shutoffs, mostly, but a few other things). It passed an overnight run of memtest86+ just fine, however, and I installed Windows 7 and Ubuntu 10.10 on it, no problems.

I would *think* that if something was going to have gone wrong from my dropping the processor, it would go wrong CATASTROPHICALLY, and not just have something pop up unexpectedly suddenly or from time to time.

Anyone ever drop a CPU, and it failed *later* (as opposed to right away)?

- Tim

CPUs are fairly shock resistant. They can handle water pretty good as well, I know that from experience.
ESD might kill it though, if you handle it improperly.

Always by the edges, of cawse.

- Tim

Intel CPUs are quite resilient these days, since the pins are no longer on the processors themselves.

Intel CPUs are resilient, yes, but modern motherboards less so. They're so jam-packed with tracing and components that even a slight bend might send something astray. I think you're right in trying an RMA if the board or its components are going haywire - I've had more failed motherboards the last 4 years than any other component.

Nothing gonna happen .

I dropped , threw etc. many CPU's , nothing . Friend of mine runs computer shop , and deals with warranties , servicing etc. . He never had broken CPU.

Motherboards ? I wash them in the shower .

Part of my job is computer parts stress testing , people are not aware how much beating can normal computer hardware take.

Most broken components are (from my experience) : 1HDD's (2,5inches especially) , Graphics cards , Motherboards . Recently saw first ever broken DDR2 RAM.