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Required Hardware
Now that I've briefed you on some of the technical features of the Pentium 4 processor, it's time to find out the basic hardware needed in order to set up one of these babies.
New CPU
Obviously, the actual CPU is required. As mentioned before, I'll be using the 1.7GHz version of the Pentium 4 for this series. Here's a shot of my processor, beside a Pentium III 1GHz and an AMD Duron 650MHz (all relatively scaled).
As you can see, the Pentium 4, when compared with other processors on the market is HUGE! This is because the Pentium 4 is still based on the same-sized .18 micron process that the Pentium III uses, but is a lot more complex and has a lot more transistors than its predecessor, hence, the extra size. Now let's zoom in and take a closer look (the top one is the top of the processor and the bottom is the bottom):
Just to let you know in case you didn't know before, the actual die of the Pentium 4 that's underneath the metal part is considerably smaller (but still quite a bit bigger than the Pentium III's or Athlon/Duron's). Plus, just for general knowledge, the metal plate is actually a heat dissipater plate, designed to give more surface area contact to a heatsink and to also make sure that the core doesn't get crushed. A similar plate was used on Intel's PPGA Socket 370 Celeron processors as well their old Pentium Classic MMX processors.
Finally, let's zoom in some more and take a peek at the heat dissipater plate. On it, we see the following:
Paying closer attention to it, we see that my Pentium 4 says that it's a 1.7GHz version. The second number shows the size of the L2 cache in this processor (256KB, same as the Pentium III), third shows the 400MHz bus (explained below) and, finally, we've got the voltage that this processor runs at (1.75V), which is only 0.5V higher than a Pentium III 1.0GHz.
 On to: Required Hardware -cont.
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