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Post Graduation Diploma In Computer Application
(PGDCA)
Motherboard
Description of Motherboard
Features of Motherboard
Popular Manufacturers
Basic Components Of Motherboard
Form factors
Chipsets
Bus Speed
Processor sockets
Memory slots
Expansion slots
Disk Connectors
Power connectors
BIOS/firmware
CMOS and CMOS battery
Back-panel connectors
Ports
Front-panel connectors
Motherboard:-
If you've ever taken the case off of a computer, you've seen the one
piece of equipment that ties everything together -- the
motherboard. A motherboard allows all the parts of your computer
to receive power and communicate with one another.
Motherboards have come a long way in the last twenty years. The
first motherboards held very few actual components. The first
IBM PC motherboard had only a processor and card slots. Users
plugged components like floppy drive controllers and memory into
the slots.
The motherboard serves as a single platform to connect all of the
parts of a computer together and it acts as a nervous system of the
computer. It can be also called system board or main board. It
connects the CPU, memory, hard drives, optical drives, video card,
sound card, and other ports and expansion cards directly or via
cables. It can be considered as the backbone of a computer.
Description of Motherboard:-
Popular Manufacturers:-
Following are the popular manufacturers of the motherboard.
Intel
ASUS
ASRock
Digilite
Biostar
Gigabyte
MSI
ECS
Form Factor:-
Chipsets:-
The chipset is the "glue" that connects the microprocessor to the rest
of the motherboard and therefore to the rest of the computer. On a
PC, it consists of two basic parts -- the northbridge and
the southbridge. All of the various components of the computer
communicate with the CPU through the chipset.
The northbridge connects directly to the processor via the front side
bus (FSB). A memory controller is located on the northbridge, which
gives the CPU fast access to the memory. The northbridge also
connects to the AGP or PCI Express bus and to the memory itself.
The southbridge is slower than the northbridge, and information
from the CPU has to go through the northbridge before reaching the
southbridge. Other busses connect the southbridge to the PCI bus,
the USB ports and the IDE or SATA hard disk connections.
Chipset selection and CPU selection go hand in hand, because
manufacturers optimize chipsets to work with specific CPUs. The
chipset is an integrated part of the motherboard, so it cannot be
removed or upgraded. This means that not only must the
motherboard's socket fit the CPU, the motherboard's chipset must
work optimally with the CPU.
Figure: Northbridge and Southbridge architecture on chipset
Bus Speed:-
The back side bus connects the CPU with the level 2 (L2) cache,
also known as secondary or external cache. The processor
determines the speed of the back side bus.
The memory bus connects the northbridge to the memory.
The IDE or ATA bus connects the southbridge to the disk drives.
The AGP bus connects the video card to the memory and
the CPU. The speed of the AGP bus is usually 66 MHz.
The PCI bus connects PCI slots to the southbridge. On most
systems, the speed of the PCI bus is 33 MHz. Also compatible
with PCI is PCI Express, which is much faster than PCI but is still
compatible with current software and operating systems. PCI
Express is likely to replace both PCI and AGP busses.
The CPU is the first thing that comes to mind when many people
think about a computer's speed and performance. The faster the
processor, the faster the computer can think. In the early days of PC
computers, all processors had the same set of pins that would
connect the CPU to the motherboard, called the Pin Grid
Array (PGA). These pins fit into a socket layout called Socket 7. This
meant that any processor would fit into any motherboard.
Today, however, CPU manufacturers Intel and AMD use a variety of
PGAs, none of which fit into Socket 7. As microprocessors advance,
they need more and more pins, both to handle new features and to
provide more and more power to the chip.
Current socket arrangements are often named for the number of
pins in the PGA. Commonly used sockets are:
Memory slots are used for holding memory chips that make up
primary memory that is used to store currently used data and
instructions for the CPU and that primary memory is also called RAM
(Random Access Memory). Memory for desktops comes on circuit
boards called dual inline memory modules (DIMMs) and for laptops
on small outline DIMMs (SODIMMs).
Memory slots are long and slender type and generally close to the
CPU socket. They are available in different colors and mostly in white
color.
The expansion slots have further three types which are using today
and that slots are:
The following figure shows the different expansion slots and notice
their color and sizes.
Motherboards have Disk Connectors that are used for connecting the
hard drive which is permanent storing device. There are a few
different kinds of hard drive connectors available today. One
is Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) connector or Parallel Advanced
Technology Attachment (PATA) which is older one. The other one
is Serial ATA (SATA) which is newer and much faster than PATA.
PATA has large number of pins while SATA doesn’t have any pin.
The CMOS chip have a battery which is integrated near the chip on
the motherboard and it is used to supply power continuously to the
CMOS chip so that the BIOS settings are permanently stored.
Characteristics of Ports:-
Serial Port:-
Parallel Port:-
PS/2 Port:-
VGA Port:-
Power Connector:-
Three-pronged plug.
Connects to the computer's power cable that plugs into a
power bar or wall socket.
Firewire Port:-
Modem Port:-
Ethernet Port:-
Connect a joystick to a PC
Now replaced by USB