kalsim
Mine arrived yesterday the same exact way. Gonna inspect it in the morning. Also, B0baganooshm, how can you tell it was a refurbished board from the part number?
Sorry, that was an error on my part (I just edited above). I meant to say serial number. There's a thread
here (as well as a few others a google search turned up) that seem to come to the conclusion that when the 11th digit is a 9, it is a recertified part. Also, my board is more than 30 days old, so I knew they'd be sending a refurbished part. My grumps were that it was not actually "refurbished" and in fact damaged.
Here's a picture:
If you open that in a new tab it's a big picture and you can see the bent pin (indicated by the red arrow). It looks much worse from the side, as the pin is kinked and twisted downwards, but I couldn't get the camera to show good detail (focus!) from a close angle. You can clearly see it is off-kilter from the top, so the picture suffices, but from a diagonal it was very clear. It even had potential to short once the other pin was pressed down towards it.
The other issue I've seen with this kind of spring-copper (yes, they are coated with gold too, but it's a thin layer) is that if you bend them a few times the stress makes them considerably weaker. Sometimes you can just bend them back and they'll be perfectly fine, but if you're a little off or the springiness is effected from the multiple creases you get bad contact with the CPU pad and that can lead to intermittent failures and problems. By "bend" I mean a dramatic bend/crease/kink that changes the shape, not normal flexing.
I will add that as soon as I found this, even though it was 7:30pm my time, it was 4:30pm Pacific time and Daniel at customer service picked up the phone and helped me out when I called. He was very kind and with one email containing pictures he set up another RMA. The only real issue is that now I have to wait for this board to get back to them, they give me my collateral back, then take new collateral, and cross-ship me a board again.