Two questions

Maximilian

Lifer
Feb 8, 2004
12,604
15
81
Question 1: What are those things underneath the CPU called? No not the pins.... ;) Those umm things that are underneath pentium 4's in the middle, and on top of athlon xp's around the sides. They are usually brown in color with metal around the sides of them and rectangular in shape. I have a cyrix MII which has 8 of them and a pentium III 600 which has 12. What are they and why do newer/faster cpu's have more??

Slotted CPU's and the pentium PRO seem to be the only ones that dont have these things, athlon 64's dont have visible things but they are underneath the IHS.

Question 2: Why does the pentium 4 xeon have these things around the side of it? It also somtimes seems to feature two little black chips bigger than the things i described above. Whys it got this? It like a souped up P4 thats been modded to hell.
 

Furen

Golden Member
Oct 21, 2004
1,567
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I believe they are capacitors. I havent looked at a Xeon closely enough to be notice the black parts you're talking about, though.
 

Maximilian

Lifer
Feb 8, 2004
12,604
15
81
Capacitors... kewl. Nice to know these things :)

Anyways, the black things are on the right hand side of this pic, theres 3 on each CPU.
 

BrownTown

Diamond Member
Dec 1, 2005
5,314
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look them up in google, I can only read one of them, the LP2951, says its an "adjustable micropower voltage regulator", if you can read the numbers of the other ICs you should be able to look them up too.