So the blown up board was just an "extra" I got from an ebay auction where I bought the bundle for the Noctura AM3 brackets. It came with an Athlon II X4 630 also which worked fine - I even played around overclocking it a bit on the board but didn't take any pics.
Unless I'm reading this wrong,
it claims support for the X6 so it shouldn't have been anything insta-bad like trying to shove an FX in it. The socket was kinda dirty and had some smutz in it - maybe when I sprayed 91% alcohol in there to try and flush it out I shorted it?
I never even got a first post. First time I pressed power "nothing" happened - which sadly is one of those things you only realize in retrospect was the dead short protection on the PSU triggering. Second attempt "nothing" - unplugged and reseated power connectors to board thinking maybe that. Third attempt got the pop and spark shower. RIP. Sucks too cause it seemed a fun little board for some retro fun.
As for repairing it, it's probably totally doable assuming it's just the blown mosfet (are they even called that anymore?) - it might even work if i just remove the shorted corpse. I'm not versed enough on how the phases are laid out on this board (what was this section powering? CPU_NB?), and I don't really have the rework experience - that said this might be a good starter project ;p
At some point I may try the 1045T in something else, I'm now discovering that the Asus M5A97 R2.0 I was originally torturing the Phenom on kinda... has some definite persona when it comes to it's interpretations of "voltage." With the FX 8310 I threw in here now, yea... she sags
a lot ... like a stupid amount. I have 1.525v vCore (which is stupid high) in bios just to get like 1.35v loaded. If i turn on the compensation it doesn't like to boot. Yeeeaaa... in this board's defense, I think it's seen a rough life before I ever had it. The onboard ethernet is dead, and the socket is all chowdered cause someone managed to attempt mounting a processor in it the wrong way... which is how I got a hold the board originally. I unbent all the pins on the FX 8300 he had and swapped him a motherboard - ironically a M5A97 OEM variant that had absolutely no overclocking allowed in the firmware (ASUS M5A97 EVO2/M52BC/DP_MB) - and is unique enough you couldn't crossflash it to anything fun either - but since he had no interest in overclocking it worked out.
The sag is real... the CPU vCore is... yea less than ideal =P