What do the manufacturers think?

[DR]

As with all the reports of the LGA socket being more susceptible to user damage we decided to speak to some mainboard manufacturers to find out what they thought.

We have been informed that, as with any product user damage is outside all RMA issues. This, due to Intel and other companies killing the pricing on the mainboards and a very competitive market means that margins are at an all time low. This means that if the end user does damage their board the manufacturers are going to be very unlikely to change it as ‘good will’ since the lack of profit in parts.

“RMA is different now to what it was 2 or 3 years ago - as margins are down so much it has to be treated more strictly - we used to be able to do a great deal of user damage stuff out of goodwill - but now have to be more business like.”

Manufacturers believe that the price of the socket will drop rapidly as it is licensed to other companies – socket 423 was very expensive when Foxxconn were the only company making it, they believe if it is licensed to someone like AMP it will drop massively. They believe that it will take around 12 months to come in to play, by which time there is suggestions that Intel will have another new socket. They believe that AMD have the game plan set straight at the moment, 939 will be a much larger success but Intel will slowly bring value and performance back to the scene with new processor development.

There are 2 huge values to this new change and that is the features of the ICH6, and the superb CPU retention, no chance of pulling your CPU out of the socket.

[turkster]

Well we'll just have to be careful fitting our CPUs then

[DR]

xactly

[turkster]

I'd love to know exactly how easy it is to bend the pins on the socket

I mean are they more fragile then PGA processor pins?
After all youd need to be a bit heavy handed to bend PGA pins in the process of inserting the CPU .

[DR]

I have one here and it isn't that easy....

.... it is easier to bend the PGA pins....