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Comment by jjkaczor | Hacker News Reader

My first job was working for a small retail/VAR shop - just me and my engineering-background boss/owner who specialized in CAD/CAM transitions for manufacturing. (Plus blueprint scanning/digitalization and vector conversion)

Our very first order came in for an i486 - so excited, I grabbed all the components, headed into the backroom and built the machine.

Once it was all together - I eagerly threw the power switch on... Darkness... the breaker blew, the lights were out...

Well... turns out, I had rotated the CPU 180 degrees from it's required position. OMG... here I am a teenager and now I am going to have to pay for a $1200+ part?

My boss calmly reseated the CPU correctly, and... it worked!

We did a 5-day burn-in/benchmark with no problems, and never had any callbacks from the customer.

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> Well... turns out, I had rotated the CPU 180 degrees from it's required position. OMG... here I am a teenager and now I am going to have to pay for a $1200+ part?

I did something similar with an i486 DX4-100; I wasn’t so lucky: the power supply held up, the CPU smoked and it took out the motherboard. Thankfully this was well into the Pentium-II era, but it was still pretty devastating. If I recall correctly, it just slotted in the wrong way like it was meant to go; I guess modern CPU sockets have fixed that.

> I guess modern CPU sockets have fixed that.

Kinda. All that's stopping you from inserting a Ryzen CPU wrong way around is a 0.3mm copper pin that exists in one corner, but not the other. So there's still that worry of, "should I force it because it needs a bit of force, or should I not force it because I'll break it?" I think Core CPUs are the same way.

Seems like knowing when to apply force is half the battle of building a PC. For reference, modern CPU installation should require NO force if done properly. Gravity alone should let settle into the socket. Gently attempting to twist it should yield no movement if it is seated correctly.

The first computer I ever upgraded on my own was a P3 system (my family owned a few, we just never upgraded them without taking them to a shop). I knew if I broke something/did something wrong my parents would never forgive me, so before I tried upgrading the RAM I read all the documentation and a couple A+ books.

The thing they all repeated was how applying force was absolutely the wrong thing, you should never need to force anything into place.

Well, I'm sure you know how this turned out: none of the RAM I installed was seated in its socket properly so in a cold sweat I forced all of them into place. Still feel nervous about installing RAM to this day.

That KKKKRACK! when you put brand new ram into a brand new motherboard for the first time is the worst. Nothing gives me greater anxiety about the future of my new baby PC than that sound. It's the PC building equivalent of cutting the umbilical cord.

Intel CPUs are not the same way, and haven't been for nearly 20 years. The pins are on the motherboard, and the CPU has lands; hence the name 'Land Grid Array' (starting with the LGA775).

Most of AMD's CPUs are still of the PGA (Pin Grid Array) type; but it's worth noting that this isn't true for Socket AM5, which is itself an LGA socket, and the socket for the Threadrippers has been LGA since its inception.

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