Trying to repair a broken PCIe slot

This is one of those projects that clearly isn’t worth the time I’ve already invested, but it’s more of a “can it be done” adventure than a practical thing. I got my hands on an eVGA 790i board that was damaged in a shipping accident. There’s no insurance, there’s no warranty (eVGA won’t put on a new slot for me), so I’m left to my own devices here. I tested the motherboard and it works fine with a PCI video card, but not with a PCIe video card in either of the other slots. I get an error message telling me to move my video card to the top slot (I wish) for non-SLI operation.

Here’s my first attempt at removing a PCIe 16x slot from a 680i donor board. I figured if I torched it I might be able to remove it in one piece with all pins attached. Also I was hoping the pins would be relatively clean for re-insertion into the 790i board. It worked very well except for that fact that the slot bent from the heat while I was removing it.

Then I tried a more brute force approach and simply ripped off a PCIe slot. I’m currently in the process of re-pinning this one using pins from the other two that I tried to torch off.

As for the 790i board, well, I’m going to have to get pretty creative when it comes to removing the pin nubbs that are left over. If anyone’s got any ideas, I’m open to them. Right now it looks like what I’ll need is an incredibly fine soldering tip, and then something else to poke through and make a hole. Once I do every hole that way, I should be able to insert the new slot and solder it from the back. Wish me luck… I’m not exactly skilled with a soldering iron so the temptation is obviously also there to just run the board with PCIe video in some sort of “non-gaming” machine like the girlfriend’s sister’s media PC or something… It kinda kills me to use a 790i and DDR3 for something like that though………