how deep are the traces on a motherboard

i hit a trace one my motherboard with a screwdriver ,but its just the part on top i dont think it went all the way through. my traces are gold and i can see a little bit of a black dot in the middle where it went through. my motherboard appears to be working fine. how deep are the traces actually?

bump. i cant even run 9x200. how do i find out if it's my motherboard of if it's my ram. my ram ram 195fsb in my 8rda+ could it be crapping out now?. which slots should i have it in? i have it the two gold ones for dual channel.

Try your components in another board.

The traces aren't very deep at all. You may have severed one or more traces completely.

i dont have another board. my friend has a msi kt4 board but i dont think it could test my ram at 200fsb. i just ran 11x166 for about 8hrs prime stable. how can i tell if it's my ram or board ,or should i just return my board to be safe.

I used to work in a circuit board manufacturing facility as a quality technician.

Those traces are very thin and most use nearly the same plating technology around the world. Nearly all have a base layer of copper then run through a solder application process for certain pads and traces. Yes, there are some places where gold is applied (most commonly to tabbed areas like on PCI and AGP cards).

I can almost guarantee that if it was a trace, I doubt it was gold plated. But I believe that trace is cut.

One of the easiest ways to repair it would be to take a small razor blade or X-Acto knife and gently scrape the top layer of mask from the top of the trace (mask is what they used to protect the traces and to give all those boards their color). Once you have a small section scraped away, you find some gold tape (I believe Radio Shack sells some) and gently and very carefully cut a piece to the desired length and width and apply to the trace to "bridge" the gap from your nick.

Then take a bit of epoxy and cover it up to seal it. You can test the trace using a multimeter to see if connectivity is reestablished.

You might not get the old performance, but you should be able to use it again.

Hmm, I didn't know that cut traces could be fixed. Thanks for the info. Now lets hope I don't ever need to use it.

I also forgot to mention one of the easier ways to fix traces. Instead of using the tape method, you can buy a special Silver Ink Pen (around $15).

It's saved my butt a couple times until I finally learned my lesson and not used a screwdriver to pry cpu socket tabs apart....

You could just "trace" were the trace goes and run a jumper wire in it's place.

I've done it alot and seems to work fine.
Rob

well i have examined it more closely and it appears that maybe i just nicked the masked part. it looks like i kinda rubbed some of it off ,but it is still there. is that bad?

Its fine as long as you didn't break the connection of the copper trace. If you just scratched the top mask, you can leave it as is or you can get some 2 part epoxy and cover it back over for protection from air and further scratching. Before you use the epoxy get a multi meter and test it to make sure the connection is still good. I have used 2 part epoxy on motherboards before even installing them, such as on the back side near the mounting holes. My motherboard stand offs are sharp and have a tendency of scratching the traces. Epoxy works wonders for things like that. You can also put a nice layer on the board near the CPU socket tabs for protection when attaching a heatsink if there isn't any already. Maybe glue a nice thin piece of plastic sheeting near them. Another use is protecting the bridges on a cpu after connecting them with a silver trace pen once your sure the cpu works fine.