PARTS OF A MOTHERBOARD

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PARTS OF A MOTHERBOARD
1. CPU HOLDER is a portion in the motherboard which holds the CPU (Central Processing
Unit) or simply as processor.

The LGA (Land Grid Array) Type CPU support


The PGA (Pin Grid Array) type CPU support

2. MEMORY (RAM) HOLDER or MEMORY SLOT. This is the slot where you will insert the
memory module or memory card. Some motherboard comes with two to four slots.
Aside from the motherboard specification, looking at the memory slots would help you
to know which type of memory card is compatible.

Memory Slots

3. POWER SUPPLY CONTROLER is the portion where you can connect the power supply
unit (PSU) cable connector. Motherboards come with different power supply controller.
Old motherboard needs AT power supply unit while new motherboard needs ATX
power supply

24 Pins PSU Controller

4. CHIPSET is the base or platform that supports and provides data-transfer connections
between the processor, memory, AGP, PCI-E, and PCI expansion cards, disk drives, and
other peripheral devices.
A. North Bridge Chipset- this chipset handles the data-transfer duties of memory, CPU, and AGP
and to make the most efficient use of available resources.
B. South Bridge Chipset- this chipset component provides support for a wide variety of devices
with many differing bus speeds and designs. Control over secondary buses such as USB, IDE,
PS/2, Ethernet is the Southbridge's main role.
5. CMOS or BIOS Chip:(Complementary Metal Oxide Semi-conductor) is also a chipset which
contains the BIOS (Basic Input Output System). The BIOSis the built-in software that
tells what a computer can do without accessing programs from a disk.


6. CMOS BATTERYis a battery that maintains the time, date, hard disk and other configuration
settings in the CMOS memory. CMOS batteries are small and are attached directly to the
motherboard.


7. IDE (Intelligent Drive Electronics) CONTROLLER FOR HARD DISK DRIVE AND OPTICAL
DRIVE are the connectors to which you will insert an IDE cable (supplied with
motherboard). IDE cables connect devices such as hard drive, CD Drives and DVD
Drives.


8. IDE CONTROLLER FOR FLOPPY DRIVE is smaller than the IDE controller of hard drive
and optical drive. This is where you connect the floppy drive thru IDE cable.

Obsolete Technology but may still exist on some motherboards for the connection of some
Disc drives.


9. SATA -Newest computer mother boards have the new interface called Serial Advance
Technology Attachment (S-ATA). SATA has a faster transfer rate than ATA and only 1
device can be attached to it.


10. AGP(Accelerated Graphic Port)was designed specifically for AGP video cards. AGP
provided a faster bus speed (66 MHz 1x - 133Mhz 2x - 266Mhz 4x effectively). AGP is a
port not a bus unlike the ISA and PCI local buses because it is not expandable, it only
involves the two devices the graphics card and the CPU.


11. PCI-EXPRESS:(Peripheral Component Interconnect Express)officially abbreviated as PCI-
E or PCIe, is a computer expansion card standard introduced by Intel in 2004, and
currently is the most recent and high-performance standard for expansion cards that is
generally available on modern personal computers. PCIe was designed to replace PCI,
PCI-X, and AGP. Unlike previous PC expansion standards, rather than being a shared
parallel bus, it is structured around point-to-point serial links called lanes.


12. PCI:(Peripheral Component Interconnect)some pcs have a number of PCI slots from 1 up
to about 6. These PCI bus runs at 33Mhz and normally 32bits. The PCI bus was the first
one to fully support plug and play, where IRQ's and other resources are set up by the OS
and there are no need to alter jumpers etc on the hardware. You may insert different
peripherals on PCI bus, from sound cards to DVD decoders and graphics accelerators.


14. Ports: These are plug-ins seen at the back of your system unit when the motherboard is
placed inside it. The following are the common ports usually seen on a motherboard:
PS2 Ports
USB Ports
Serial Ports
Parallel Ports (Printer Port, VGA Port, Game Port )
Audio Ports
Ethernet port
Firewire port


Let us test your skills in identifying the parts of the
motherboard! Answer the quiz below.