[Groth]

Originally Posted by Brians256

Hey! I can come up with stupid and insulting things to say all on my own!

I'm no expert by any means, but...

Like the guy Brian quoted earlier, changing the MOSFETs may save you little heat, but it won't appreciably affect Vcore quality. The only effect that might be noticable would be a decrease in ground float at high currents, sort of a small scale droop-mod.

Forget changing the inductors. Not only are they a total bitch to remove (yes, I've done it) but their value is largely determined by the switching freqency (which you can't change). If you want to change 'em anyway, you've got a compromise: lower values will reduce the transients caused by changes in power demand, but store less energy so you get more ripple during constant demand. Higer values give smoother power during constant demand, but bigger transients when demand changes.

The active-droop that Intel specs call for (and people mod to remove) is to help deal with these inductor transients. Reduce the Vcore under load so the high voltage transient from going to idle doesn't kill, increase Vcore at idle so the low voltage transient from going to load doesn't cause crashes.

For the caps, not only the capacitance value and ESR need watching, but the ESL (effective series inductance). Electrolytic caps are rolled, so they always have some inductance, but it's harder than hell to get numbers. Like ESR, ESL will limit the caps ability to absorb a transient, and also allow noise at a specific frequency through, noise than needs to be killed (with a ceramic cap near the CPU, usually).

If you want to play with the caps, add more in parallel instead of replacing (kinda like the engineer who talked about leaving unstuffed holes he could fill at home ). Paralleling increases capacitance and decreases ESR and ESL, so you're not likely to cause problems (if you keep the leads short).

Realistically, you're unlikely to make any positive changes.