How to select a CPU for your motherboard!

We assume in this article that you have already bought a motherboard for your computer and now you want to buy a new CPU for your motherboard. With this presumption in mind, the first and most important thing is to find out if your motherboard supports an INTEL or AMD CPU?  The second most important thing is to find out the “socket type” your motherboard has. You can answer both these questions by reading the motherboard manual which would have come with your purchase or alternatively you can visit the motherboard manufacturer’s website to find which CPUs will be supported.

There are a number of socket types that support different types of CPUs as listed in the tables below. You can reference this table for selecting the right CPU for your CPU socket.

Intel based sockets and supported CPU’s

It is notable that INTEL socket type suggests itself the number of pins the relevant CPU has, hence is no need to guess. LGA here stands for Land Grid Array.

SOCKET TYPE	CPU	ABOUT SOCKET
LGA 775	Pentium 4, Celeron, Core 2 Duo, Xeon, and many other processors.	The most popular socket type by INTEL in the past also sometimes was referred to as socket T. It was superseded by LG 1156 (socket H) & LGA 1366(socket B)
LGA 1156	Core i3/i5/i7, Celeron, Xeon	LGA 1156 processors superseded LGA 775 as they integrated northbridge architecture with the processor itself.
LGA 1155	Core i3/i5/i7, Celeron, Xeon	Also called socket H2 used with sandy bridge and ivy bridge microarchitectures.
LGA 1366	Core i3/i5/i7, Xeon	Also known as Socket B this type of socket did not support integrated graphics.
LGA 2011	Corei7, Core i7 Extreme Edition, Xeon	This type of socket replaced LGA1366 for better performance in desktop and server performance
LGA 1150	Core i3/i5/i7, Pentium, Celeron, Xeon	Based on Haswell and Broadwell architecture
LGA 1151	Core i3/i5/i7, Pentium, Celeron, Xeon	Based on Skylake architecture
LGA 2066	Core i5.i7/i9, Xeon	Also called socket R4 based on Skylake X and Lake X architecture

AMD BASED SOCKETS AND SUPPORTED CPU’s

SOCKET TYPE	PINS	CPU	ABOUT SOCKET
AM3	941	Phenom II, Athlon II, Sempron, Opteron	Launched as a successor to AM2+
AM3+	942	FX	Launched to supersede AM3 with compatibility to AM3 processors
FM1	905	A-Series	These sockets launched integrated graphic features
FM2	904	A-Series
FM2+	906	A-Series	Used by AMD’s Kaveri APU & Godavari APU
G34	1974	Opteron	Socket G34 supports four DDR3 SDRAM channel
C32	1207	Opteron
TR4	4094	Ryzen Threadripper	Launched for support to Zen-based Ryzen Threadripper processors