The guys over at Anandtech have run into trouble after trying some extreme overclocking of the Core i7 870, but it turned out that the culprit was the actual socket, which is manufactured by Foxconn. And by trouble, we mean frying a few motherboards as well as CPUs.

After closer analysis, it turned out that the actual socket suffers from little or no pin-to-pad contact. This significantly reduces the power delivery, the end result being fried CPUs and motherboards.

Unfortunately, Foxconn makes LGA1156 sockets for many manufacturers, including Gigabyte, Asus, MSI and DFI, but there are alternatives in LOTES or Tyco AMP-made sockets, which have so far worked perfectly fine and exhibited no such behaviour. An example of this would be EVGA's top-tier P55 motherboards, as they're exclusively using LOTES.

On the other hand, buying EVGA's P55 FTW model E657 gives you a 50%-50% chance to end up with Foxconn's socket instead of Tyco AMP's one and some already shipped batches of MSI's and DFI's motherboards allegedly come with LOTES sockets, although we can't confirm that with certainty. Furthermore, DFI claims to have dropped the usage of Foxconn's sockets alltogether.

Apparently, the LOTES and Tyco AMP sockets have been and are in short supply which left some market space for Foxconn. It now seems that such a move has backfired on both Foxconn and the rest of the affiliated companies, and it clearly points to a sluggish execution of a seemingly mundane mechanism. On the other hand, the problem will not affect regular users nor those who overclock their CPU in a "non-extreme" way, meaning LN2 is out the window. So, if you've got a Lynnfield CPU and a P55 motherboard, and plan to do some extreme overclocking, you better check your socket manufacturer before you attempt to push your CPU to the limit.

You can check out the full "encounter" and view some detailed pics here.