Capacitors provide for a smooth flow of voltage in the circuit. This is important because the power consumption of the processor can fluctuate very rapidly from low to high, and vice-versa, particularly when executing a HALT or transitioning back to normal state. Voltage regulators can't respond instantaneously to these changes so the voltage must be 'smoothed' out, just as a dam might regulate the flow of water in a river.

The reason that tantalum capacitors are considered a better choice than Aluminum is because Aluminum electrolytic capacitors tend to dry out over time and lose their capacitance, they are generally not as accurate, and they are more sensitive to high temperatures. There are, however, electrolytic capacitors that have effective lifetimes of up to 20 years - more than sufficient for a motherboard that will be obsolete in less than 5 years.

The important factor in choosing a particular capacitor (other than its capacitance) is the ESR, or Equivalent Series Resistance, value. Generally, several capacitors must be placed in parallel to effectively protect the circuit and to keep the resistance low. Resistance tends to reduce the voltage and generate excessive heat, so the ESR value should be as low as possible. This means that the placement and ESR value of the capacitors are the critical factors, not necessarily from what materials the capacitor is made.

Every device in a computer runs to the tick of a clock - but not every device listens to the same clock. The ISA, PCI, AGP, USB and system bus all run at speeds different from each other and therefore require their own clock signal. The processor also requires a clock signal, as do synchronous memory chips such as the SRAM used for L2 cache and SDRAM used for main memory. The clock generator chip provides all of these clock signals.

Each motherboard chipset has particular capabilities in terms of timings, but it does not provide the actual clock signals. Clock generator chips are designed for specific motherboard chipsets, and determine what the selectable system clock speeds will be as well as what the related PCI bus speeds will be. The AGP bus speed may or may not be determined by the clock generator chip, with the i440BX chipset as an example of the latter. The ISA and USB clocks are fixed speed and are also generated by the clock chip.