About the LGA2011 CPU Socket

The LGA2011 socket from Intel was released in 2011, updated in 2014 and used by many Xeon CPUs. I like to buy used lga2011 parts off ebay for my homelab!

Intel LGA2011 Socket Articles and Videos

Cooler Master NR200 with mATX Chinese X79 Motherboard

Cooler Master NR200 with mATX Chinese X79 Motherboard

Let's see if we can fit a micro-ATX motherboard in the Cooler Master NR200 small form factor case! To be fair, this is a smaller mATX motherboard...

VRM Thermals for X79 Motherboard with Xeon E5 2650v2

VRM Thermals for X79 Motherboard with Xeon E5 2650v2

These chinese X79 motherboards don't have great VRM cooling solutions. I test the thermal performance with a Xeon E5-2650 v2 Processor.

Testing Xeon E5 2650v2 with Chinese X79 Motherboard

Testing Xeon E5 2650v2 with Chinese X79 Motherboard

Check out my latest batch of cheap used server parts off eBay! Xeon E5-2650v2 processors, DDR3 ECC RAM, LGA2011 x79 motherboards, and more...

What is an LGA socket?

LGA stands for “Land Grid Array”.

The land grid array (LGA) is a type of surface-mount packaging for integrated circuits (ICs) that is notable for having the pins on the socket (when a socket is used) rather than the integrated circuit. – Land grid array on Wikipedia

LGA 2011 Socket Revisions

There are three generations or versions of the LGA2011 socket. The original socket is often just referred to as LGA-2011 and later was referred to with a -0 suffix to indicate it was the initial revision (LGA 2011-0). The initial LGA-2011 socket was intended for the Sandy-Bridge and Ivy-Bridge processors from Intel with an X79 or C600 series chipset. This socket could support either DDR3 or DDR4, but you’ll most often see it coupled with DDR3 memory as that was the most common choice at the time.

The second revision of the socket (Revision 2 or R2) is therefor referred to as LGA 2011-1 (R2). This revision appears to have been less common, or at least isn’t as common to see today when shopping used server components on eBay.

The third revision of the socket (Revision 3 or R3) was then referred to as LGA 2011-v3 (R3). This 3rd revision of the LGA2011 socket was intended to use DDR4 memory exlcusively and the socket keying was updated to prevent older processors from fitting in the new socket.

Cooler Mounting Characteristics

There are actually two different cooler mounting patterns for the LGA2011 sockets, both with M4 x 0.7 threads.

  1. Square ILM (80×80 mm mounting pattern)
  2. Narrow ILM (56×94 mm mounting pattern)

The 80mm square mounting pattern is the most common. The narrow mounting pattern was only used in significantly space constrained environments (ie: custom high density server form factors that likely had custom coolers also).

If you are buying used LGA2011 server hardware for use in your homelab, you will most likely end up with the 80mm square cooler mounting option.