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Having build a system with (amongst others)

  • Supermicro X10SRL-F
  • Intel xeon E5 1620 v4

I am about 80-90% sure I placed the triangle-corner in the correct orientation. But there is a slight possibility I might have messed up, as I had to take a phone-call (I know, I know).

The system boots, albeit slightly slowly (even after enabling all 4 cores in the bios) but I just started to worry about this. What if I placed the CPU in the wrong orientation - this cpu has a symetrical form, so it could have fit without me noticing.

Would my system even run/install if this were the case? Should I open it up and check?

Many thanks!

nick88
  • 21

2 Answers2

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It should be impossible to install it the wrong way, every cpu I've seen has had the pins arranged so they fit in the socket only one way.

Looks like an LGA 2011 socket, and strangely Wikipedia has images of a matching cpu's contacts and they do appear very similar when flipped 180 degrees... except for the corner arrow

enter image description hereenter image description here

But Wikipedia says:

These protrusions, also known as ILM keying, have differently placed protrusions which are intended to mate with cutouts in CPU packagings. These protrusions, also known as ILM keying, have the purpose of preventing installation of incompatible CPUs into otherwise physically compatible sockets, and preventing ILMs to be mounted with a 180-degree rotation relative to the CPU socket.[9]

So I'm assuming if it closes, it's in correctly. And I'm confident it wouldn't boot to the BIOS if it weren't in correctly anyway.

(You could worry more about not getting the heatsink & paste on correctly)


Also, as Mokubai says in his comment below (if it were an answer I'd upvote it, if it becomes one I still will):

the pinouts for CPUs are not rotationally symmetric: cdn.overclock.net/e/ed/eda12cf1_pins_clark4mfk.png if you'd put it in the wrong way it would not have worked at all. You would have a lot of power and ground pins where data lines were meant to be and could have potentially destroyed the CPU. – Mokubai♦ Jan 19 at 16:11

That seems too important to leave the pinout image not see like this:

pinout image

So it does appear impossible to spin it and still have it working at all.

Xen2050
  • 14,391
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You couldn't, not without removing a corner pin. And it would run much slower, as in NOT.