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> CPUs still have a forest of fragile pins on the bottom that can easily be bent or broken

Not really - the pins have been on the socket for some time now (for Intel at least - I haven't built anything AMD for some time I'm afraid) and are much, much harder to damage. The levers on the sockets have gotten much better, as have the HSF mountpoints, and inserting a CPU and attaching the HSF has not made me feel like I'm going to break the motherboard for many years (let alone actually broken it - I can remember boards where you had to jam a screwdriver into the heatsink retention bracket and apply pressure towards the motherboard... I'm getting cold sweats just thinking about it)

> You also have to manually add thermal protections like fans, heat sinks, thermal paste, etc., which all require selection and installation

Thermal paste is optional, if the CPU and heatsink make good contact it doesn't make so much difference. You don't have to select if you buy retail boxes instead of OEM, which come with HSFs already selected for you in the box, and with thermal gunk pre-applied.

I do agree that it's rare to upgrade the CPU and not motherboard, but you could say the same thing about most of the components in my PC (I tend to upgrade all at once).

As for trickiest, most delicate part of building your own pc... honestly if you're installing the CPU into the motherboard before putting into the case, I would have to disagree with you there.

>Thermal paste is optional, if the CPU and heatsink make good contact it doesn't make so much difference.

Err... it makes a massive difference. Try running your brand new Xeon workstation without TIM. Your PC will shut down or blow up within seconds of doing anything. Try living in Australia, or I guess Texas and doing CAD/rendering work or playing games in summer. If you don't have aircon you'll need aftermarket cooling or your CPU will throttle.

Intel used cheap thermal paste to stick the CPU to its heatspreader on their latest chip offerings instead of soldering it on. This is between CPU and heatspreader, not between heatspreader and heatsink. That alone caused load temperatures shot up by more than 10 degrees Celcius (18F). In addition to that I've reduced some of my friends' load temps by 30 degrees just by reapplying thermal paste properly and reseating the HSF.

I have run computers without TIM, for extended periods of time, and it is perfectly possible. In fact, most people put far, far too much TIM on which gives you far worse thermal transfer than no TIM at all!

All the TIM is meant to do is fill in the microscopic gaps between the heatsink base and the top of the CPU, so it fills in the gaps where air would otherwise be. However, with a decently smooth HS and CPU, there should be a lot of direct contact between the two surfaces, and metal <-> metal transfers heat better than metal <-> thermal goo <-> metal.

If you were able to get a 30 degree drop then they probably either had far too much TIM on, or the heatsink was not making good contact with the CPU.

However, this all said, I think I have now disproven my point that the CPU is not the most complex part of building a system (not that it being integrated into the motherboard will make heatsink selection & attachment any easier).

> Not really - the pins ... for Intel at least ... are much, much harder to damage.

Having built all my machines w/AMD cpu's I'll say that bent pins can be common, at least enough to justify taking care when installing the cpu on the mobo. To supplement, I've bent a couple myself, and have helped a couple friends straighten some of theirs out as well. They're not that hard to bend.

The trouble is with repairing old hardware. Recently I had a motherboard die on an old system, and needed to go to Ebay for a replacement. With forced bundling, replacement parts will be more expensive, and harder to find.

For the motherboard manufacturer, they'll need to buy CPUs and estimate the relative demand of each, instead of leaving that to the consumer or OEM.

The biggest problem is stock - you're going to have to stock 5 times as many types of motherboards now.

Which is impractical, so the net result is fewer motherboard to choose from.

It will, however, make hardware debugging harder. Being able to swap the CPU into another motherboard comes in handy.

As a person who has worked for a few hardware OEMs in the past in various roles from phone jockey to sustaining engineer, this bothers me greatly.

First, if one part fails (which is not extremely rare) you'll have to replace both parts.

Second, you'll still have to deal with thermal protections like hsfs, thermal paste, etc. You will not have to skip all that hassle and can still damage the CPU.

You're not saving much effort, will have less options when putting the PC together, will likely pay more, and the toughest parts of putting together a PC will still be present.

A-yup, couldn't agree more. It's already common practice to buy bundled CPUs and boards. We might as well be buying them as one solid piece.

I run a site dedicated to people who build their own computers. Like you, I am not terribly concerned by this move. From my experience, the number of people who upgrade CPUs keeping a given motherboard, or upgrade motherboards keeping the same CPU is very limited. CPUs typically don't depreciate in value that much, and by the time someone does decide to upgrade availability is limited to the point that prices often go up rather than down. If you wait a year or two, it's often more cost effective to just upgrade both.

The pins are sort of fragile, but it's usually a fairly smooth operation to plug in a CPU. I wonder if there are reliable statistics from people doing this in large numbers.

Installing the cooler can be much more tricky depending on the retention system. Pre-installing them could have a number of benefits. But it'd be a shame to lose the ability to chose your own cooling system, more so than having the CPU soldered on, in a way.

And if you want to add more CPUs to your 2, 4 or 8 socket motherboard?

Multi-socket mobos and CPUs command a significant price premium. I, personally, when building a new system will probably just build a 6-core single socket system, rather than buy a two socket mobo that can take two quad-core processors. Maybe spend the money saved on more memory, faster hard drive, etc.

I suspect Xeons will remain socketed. As a side benefit, Intel probably won't mind if people spend extra money on principle to get a socketed processor.