Prepping for Sugery

Right, let's start preparing the system for some serious surgery!

The key feature of course was PCI Express with options in 16x and 1x busses, but also the introduction of LGA775, the new Pentium 4 Socket with rather hot CPU's. A strong new platform that had to battle AMD's Athlon 64. A harsh battle as Intel's Prescott CPU's run rather hot and use up a lot of wattage compared to it's competitor. Right let's take off that nasty big ol' fan.

Once we remove the fan we expose the the breathtaking, yet unfortunately rather expensive (1000 USD), 3.46GHz Pentium 4 Extreme Edition. If you look at bit better at the mainboard you can see the 4 drilling holes that are so important. This clamps the waterblock, I already inserted one, metal guide to show you this a tad better.

When we flip the mainboard around we place a plastic washer on the holes and insert 4 metal guides through the mainboard. The LGA 755 Socket is now ready to be seated with the waterblock. But something very important needs to be dealt with first. Do you notice all that grey stuff on the CPU ?