>Then again, I hear the sockets we use for the BGA chips I work with cost in the thousands of dollars (because custom-desiged), so I can kind of understand that the razor-thin margins the custom PC industry works with stays with cheap old connectors.

BGA means 'ball-grid array' - meaning it's an array of solder balls, meaning that ouside of testing, it will be soldered to the board... no socket required.

Your sockets for testing are super expensive because they are taking a chip that was never meant to be socketed... and socketing it, which is pretty useful when you are testing the things.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ball_grid_array

What socket was it? I think all modern sockets are LGA - and even before that, they were ZIF for a long time.

AMD processors still use PGA sockets, but they are ZIF.

Really? the last opteron I saw with a zif pga socket was an opteron 940, which was obsolete a decade ago. I haven't worked with the gaming amd sockets, but I bought a tonne of 2000 series opterons, socket F is LGA, and a few c32 and G34 opterons, all LGA.

The AM4[1] socket (for consumer processors) is PGA-ZIF.

The TR4[2] (for enthusiast Threadripper processors) and the SP3[3] (for server Epyc processors) sockets, however, are LGA.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_AM4 [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_TR4 [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socket_SP3

My current CPU (AMD FX-8350) is a ZIF PGA Socket (AM3+)

And AM4 ("zen" architecture, not threadripper) is a _very_ similar looking and feeling ZIF socket - total pin count might be different, I'm not sure.