Thanks for your kind comments, Alan! I hope some of the others enjoyed it as well. It's a long article and is best read by downloading and studying the Intel article and the referenced datasheets, so that's a time-consuming scene, hours even.
Alan, were you able to view the two mobo pictures I posted on a.b.s.e.? I saw the first large picture, but I can't see the closeup I posted last night, my newsreader says it's incomplete.
I read in sci.electronics.design that Winfield Hill wrote (in ) about 'Motherboard inductors, ASUS Pentium
4 mobo teardown', on Fri, 8 Apr 2005:One part arrived here as a part of a multiple-part posting, and the other as a binary rendered as text. Your news client seems to have a problem with sending attachments.
Ignoring the big toroids used in the buck regulators, there are other inductors on your board - smd beads gathered generally around the I/O ports to assist in obtaining electromagnetic compatability.
RL
Properly studying the Intel document is still on my to-do list, but I think I will have a go at it! It really amazes me that these power supplies work at all. The fact that the complete motherboard is $100 or so really boggles the mind.
I can only see one post with an attachment in the ASUS thread. The file name of the attachment is "asus_p4c800.jpg" but I can't decode it because part 1 is missing (I have part 2 of 2).
Thanks!
Regards, Alan
That's the way they are when they come out of the circuit board mines in China, so there's very little additional processing involved. The reason individual components are so expensive is that they have to manually unsolder them from the motherboards, and there's a lot of wastage in that process.
Analog components are especially expensive because they have to search through a lot of boards to find them; also, the boards with analog components tend to be buried in deeper strata, so it's more expensive to get to them.
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