Hi Taiidan,
I purchased a used g34 opteron off of fleabay (sold as working with no mention of this) and I noticed that it is missing some of the bits on the bottom and that most of them are crooked, I haven't tried it in my system yet and I am wondering should return it? or if there isn't any much risk of it damaging my (expensive kgpe-d16) motherboard and I should see if it works? I got it for half the usual price....guess I should have asked for photos.
I noticed many CPU's sold on ebay have this issue (in those cases they mentioned it) but I can't understand how it happens, for instance I noticed a 6386 for sale where they mentioned that it was missing a few and because of that it doesn't work in a dual socket configuration.
I have a few Opterons which have this issue and it seems to pretty common. I assume that some "expert" put the CPU on a table before mounting it, and they move it one the table - can't imaging how people manage to chop off the chips otherwise. While some of these damaged CPUs seem to work just fine, I had several which do not recognize more than 1-2 pcs of memory and, thus, would not recommend buying one of these.
Cheers, Daniel