I recently found that a part on my ASRock Z97 Extreme6 might have sustained physical trauma.  I'd had the side panel off my case cause I was swapping hard drives & SSDs in and out a lot (doing backups / reorganization and things), then had to leave for some reason.  (I did power off the system before I left.)

When I returned, I saw this.  Someone had pushed my piano bench into the computer, touching the back of the motherboard. (Yes, I'm using my piano as a computer desk for that computer.  Right now I'm typing this on my laptop.)

Upon closer inspection, I see this.t is that looks like it broke off?  What is its purpose?  Is it critical to the safe operation of the system?  (I'm guessing it's fairly important, as I believe the VRMs are right there.)

Here's another somewhat zoomed out pic, without the piano bench, to get an idea of where it is.  It's the upper of the 3 clusters of parts to the right of the CPU socket, where the issue is.

I haven't attempted to power on the system since it happened the other day, as I'm not 100% sure that I won't kill my CPU or something else by attempting to turn it on.  (As I mentioned, the system was off when the incident occurred.)

Might it be possible to replace that part (assuming I could steady my hands and solder a replacement on), or do I need to be looking at getting a new board?  I bought the board in January 2015, so I'm pretty sure it's out of warranty already (not that what happened would be covered anyway).

If I went with something new, I might consider either another LGA1150 board (I wasn't planning to get a new one until like 2020-2022 anyway), or I might go AM4 and Ryzen 7.  (Threadripper/Epyc would be nice, but is a bit of a stretch for the wallet.  That (or similar) what I probably WOULD have upgraded too though had I waited until 2020+.)

(I also have an orphaned i3-6100, but if I built around that, it'd probably be a NAS.  I have like 18 3.5" hard drives (80GB to 8TB) or so, last I counted.  But then maybe the NAS would be better suited with an LGA771 / LGA1366 / LGA2011 Xeon setup.)

EDITED by wardog, Moderator, to display pics.

FYI: OP, only file names ending in pic format, jpg jpeg, tiff etc can be used.

Yeah, that's what I was thinking - something fairly critical for operation.  My dad is 71 now, and while he's had more experience with soldering than I've been alive probably, it's mostly on older technology.

I'm thinking, chances are the computer repair shop would probably charge almost as much for a new board for the labor.

As for a new board, some options I'm considering include:

I don't want to try it (just in case doing so would kill something else that was spared death because the system wasn't running at the time), but what might happen if I attempted to power on the system in its current state?

If I didn't mention earlier, it has an i7-4790K running at stock, and 32GB DDR4-1600 G.Skill Ares RAM.  Also a 3GB GTX 1060, & ~18 hard drives (but of course not all connected because too few ports).  PSU is a Corsair AX760 which I plan to keep, and case is a Rosewill Thor V2 (considering replacing with a FD Define R5, exploring other options as well).

That's what I'm thinking.  Also, if I'm gonna be taking everything off the board anyway, I probably may as well just get a new board.

I looked briefly, but the carpet is not exactly "thin".  (My thumbnail sinks entirely into the carpet when I press down in that area.)  I presume there's a better chance of ASRock giving everyone on earth a free EP2C622D24LM or Fatal1ty X399, than me finding that part.   And even if I was lucky and it fell inside the case, there aren't dust filters on the bottom vents right now.

Now I gotta decide what I want to replace it with .... AM4, TR4, LGA1151, LGA1150, LGA2011, LGA1366, LGA771 .... 

Leaning toward AM4 for now.  TR4 is a bit hard on budget, LGA1150 would only be for if I was keeping everything else, and the rest would be if I build a NAS.  (I do have my laptop I'm using for now, which is "okay" - i7-6700K (not HQ - yes it's LGA1151), 40GB RAM, 250+1050GB SSD, GTX 970M.)