2.4Central Processing Unit (CPU)

2.4.1 Overview

The motherboard comes with a surface mount 478-pin Zero Insertion Force (ZIF) socket. This socket is specifically designed for the Intel® Pentium® 4 478/Northwood Processor.

The Intel Pentium 4 Processor in the 478-pin package uses the Flip-Chip Pin Grid Array 2 (FC-PGA2) package technology, and includes the Intel® NetBurst™ micro-architecture. The Intel NetBurst micro-architecture features the hyper-pipelined technology, rapid execution engine, 400MHz system bus, and execution trace cache. Together, these attributes improve system performance by allowing higher processor frequencies, faster execution of integer instructions, and a data transfer rate of 3.2GB/s.

Gold Mark

Figure 2-4 Intel Pentium 4 478/Northwood Processor

Note in the illustration that the CPU has a gold triangular mark on one corner. This mark indicates the processor Pin 1 that should match a specific corner of the CPU socket.

Incorrect installation of the CPU into the socket may bend the pins and severely damage the CPU!

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Chapter 2: Hardware information