Intel went to LGA where we the pins are on the motherboard. In my experience they are much less likely to be damaged there as they get protection from the socket.

I’m not sure why AMD stuck with PGA.

LGA designs place the quality control onus on the motherboard manufacturer and their supply base. When your marketshare has relegated you to being the "budget-conscious" choice like AMD found itself for over a decade, the last thing you want is the budget quality motherboards 3rd parties are supplying to cut corners and potentially tarnish an already shaky brand perception. I've always applauded AMD for bringing excellent low to low-midrange hardware to market even during the worst of times, but of the many Phenom II, Piledriver, and Kaveri builds I put together for people back in the day, only a handful included a midrange or high end motherboard. Most were built with overall price/performance on a strict budget as the #1 goal and the $55-80 motherboards that ruled that market weren't as lovingly designed and carefully packaged as the $90-130 motherboards that dominated the Intel market at the time. You can find plenty of forum posts complaining about budget Intel boards coming with bent pins out of the box and the usual advice was to just buy a nicer motherboard. Now consider that a "nicer motherboard" would blow the budget for many of these AMD systems and that they often used even lower end boards than the cheapest recommended Intel builds. Manufacturing and making sure a female PGA socket survives packaging and shipping is far more error tolerant than manufacturing an LGA, especially if that LGA would only be made in quantities 1/20th the number of Intel LGAs. In short, I believe AMD keeps using a PGA expressly to avoid these issues given their market position.

Lower cost, and some people are really attached to it because it's easier to repair pins if they get bent. You can straighten out PGA pins with a razor blade or a mechanical pencil pretty easily, LGA pins are... "challenging". It can be done but it's not easy.

(also, to be blunt, AMD processors undergo such extreme depreciation that they're practically disposable. After two years, AMD's flagship 1800X processor has lost 2/3 of its value, a nice high-end mobo like a C6H is literally more valuable than the flagship processor you had put on it. So it makes sense to have the processor be the one with the easy-to-damage sacrificial part on it. Intel it's the other way around, the processors are expensive and your mobo is probably the cheaper part to replace if needed.)

WOW you aren't kidding. First gen Threadrippers are cheap now.

I've seen the 1950X as low as $450 at Microcenter. TR4 motherboards are quite expensive, but right now the Taichi is around $260 after rebate at Newegg. Note that not all of the motherboards are designed to handle the higher-TDP 2970WX/2990WX, if you think that's an upgrade you'd make then look for one with a beefier VRM. Also, the cheaper ones lack 10 GbE or some other higher-end features.

You can also find the 1700 as low as $130 if you watch around. Needless to say, if you have any batch-processing type tasks that don't need AVX2, that's a hell of a deal too.

Threadripper and Epyc are LGA though. They probably stick with PGA for Ryzen because of cost.

> I just bent a few on an AMD Ryzen 7 that got popped out of its socket due to too weak a socket clamp while removing the fan.

Twist/shear the fan off instead off pulling straight.