Discovered a fixed broken Z690 Apex for £130 on eBay.
Discovered a fixed broken Z690 Apex for £130 on eBay.
I thought I'd mention this. A few days back I purchased the Z690 Apex for £130 on eBay. The pins were bent and the RESET button was missing (it came in the box but damaged the pads). I fixed it by bending the pins back, installed my friends' 12700K, added an Intel stock cooler, and a spare PSU I had lying around with some DDR5 RAM. It's now working! Sometimes it helps to check eBay for broken items—you never know what you might find.
That's an incredibly clean board and socket for being sold for that price. You snagged a great deal. This is all I've been doing lately. Borked up a Z690 in a drunken trying to put the socket cover back on and wanting to fix that has me constantly scouring for deal on eBay anymore.
It's interesting to know whether you received a high-end board or one from the initial production batch. Many early units in 2021 had performance limitations, often capping around 6200MT/s instead of the higher speeds seen later. Did you get a chance to test it?
I also work on repairing mobos. The three types with the highest priority are already functional but there are some problems—like Windows errors, unexpected shutdowns, and many broken boards, especially if some still work. There are also bent pins or any board with a very obvious issue. Usually I skip boards that have no clear problems, except for untested ones, since they might be working or only have minor issues that get ignored over time. Problems can vary from dirt to serious faults like shorts, faulty parts, or other things that can't be fixed unless you have basic tools like cleaning or pin bending. It’s not surprising your board is fine if it works perfectly.
I'll check. I own a kit compatible with this board. If it doesn't show 6400Mhz CL32 from QVL, I can trade it in for a new one from ASUS.
This scenario occurs only when RAM isn't synchronized with QVL RAM.
If the board is faulty but you can replace it, then if it isn’t broken and you can't get a fresh one, it’s still possible.