[cc439]

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.