What is that hole on a P4?

[mrkorb]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image😛entium4_northwood.png

What is that hole there in the lower left corner? Should I be worried about any thermal compound that gets in there when I'm cleaning it? I'd assume that Intel knows what they're doing and wouldn't design these things with such a glaring potential flaw, but I'm curious.

 

[albenza]

As far as I know it's just a hole, I never thought about why it's there.. good question.

Don't worry about thermal compund getting in there, I never experienced any trouble because of that. Watch if some get's on the side of the CPU though, may make it not boot at all, happend to me with both P4 and AMD XP CPU's, nothing serious though, just need to clean it and apply compound again.. annoying.

 

[englandr753]

Not sure if this is the case but sometimes in manufacturing a hole can be used to place a line up pin to correctly place parts to be assembled by machine or jigs.

I'd say it is for assembly purposes but I don't know this for sure. This would be good to know just for curiousity...

Antec 900 Gaming Case
Antec 700 Watt PSU
Gigabyte GA M55SLI-S4 Rev.2 mobo
AMD 6000+ AM2 CPU
4G OCZ 6400 800Mhz SLI Memory
EVGA 8800GTX ACS3 768MB Video Card
250G & 200G SATA WD HD
2 Sony DRU 710A DVD Drives
1 Sony DRU 835A LS DVD Drive
Media Center 2005 OS

 

[dragonsprayer]

simple, to wear around your neck, for or to the amd convention in africa and/or after you install the core 2 chip in your computer since the p4 is around your neck!

insert string and tie knot to make your intel rocks necklace

 

[dragonsprayer]

its probably a key hole for manufacturing or testing!

 

[Reynod]

wow ... never noticed it before.

I liked the ol Northwoods ... the 2.4 was great - went well overclocked.

Might it have something to do with condensation under the IHS ?

With clock speed ramping up at that point in cpu development perhaps they considered it an issue? They were starting to push considerable heat past 2Ghz with the Pentiums and AthlonXP's ...

or maybe the hole is for ease of manufacturing ... automated assembly process.

A post from someone who actually knows woulf be helpful.

 

[Mousemonkey]

Maybe it's a doorway for the magical blue smoke fairy. :lol:

 

[Nitro350Z]

It's that when they put the IHS on, the gas that is trapped inside there in this process is also heated and expands. This hole is made beforehand so that the trapped gas doesn't make the IHS concave and so that they wont pop the IHS off altogether. I remember reading this somewhere on these forums, but that was a while ago and I'm not 100% sure that I'm right.