After the recent spate of burnt LGA 1156 sockets, several articles have appeared with various theories, but all of them have the same conclusion, that the Foxconn socket is to blame - Whether it is due to poor contact between the underside of the CPU and the pins in the Foxconn socket, or another design flaw seems to be irrelevant as boards fitted with LOTES and Tyco AMP sockets appear to be free of the problem.

As far as we can tell, the issue only seems to surface when pushing the CPUs relatively hard with high voltages.

We've spoken to a couple of manufacturers this week to try and clarify if Foxconn are working on a fix - DFI said that they were able to replicate the socket burn out issue and have subsequently changed over to LOTES sockets.  Gigabyte UK said that they hadn't heard of such an issue, so we gave them all the information we had and they wrote to Foxconn.  Today, we got this letter from Foxconn in our mailbox.

Click image for full size.

As you can see, they do not accept that anything is wrong and the last line "Foxconn assures quality of LGA 1156 under proper operation and application" would seem to hint at the old, "if it's overclocked, it's outside warranty" line.

Our main worry is that there are a lot of P55 motherboards out there marketed as "overclocking boards", it appears that by carrying the Foxconn socket, these claims may prove to be somewhat risky.

We'd love to hear your thoughts - Discuss on the forums.