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MOTHERBOARD
CPU HOLDER is a portion in the motherboard which holds the CPU (C
entral Processing Unit) or simply as processor.
MEMORY (RAM) HOLDER this is the slot where you will insert the memory m
odule or memory card. Some motherboard comes with two to four slots. Asi
de from the motherboard specification, looking at the memory slots would h
elp you to know which type of memory card is compatible.
POWER SUPPLY CONTROLER is the portion where you can connect the power su
pply unit (PSU) cable connector. Motherboards come with different power supp
ly controller. Old motherboard needs AT power supply unit while new motherbo
ard needs ATX power supply
North Bridge Chipset- this ch
ipset handles the data-transf
er duties of memory, CPU, a
nd AGP and to make the mos
t efficient use of available re
sources.
South Bridge Chipset- this ch
ipset component provides s
upport for a wide variety of
devices with many differing
bus speeds and designs. Con
trol over secondary buses su
ch as USB, IDE, PS/2, Ethern
et is the Southbridge's main
role.
CMOS or BIOS Chip: (Com
plementary Metal Oxide S
emi-conductor) is also a c
hipset which contains the
BIOS (Basic Input Output
System). The BIOS is the b
uilt-in software that tells
what a computer can do
without accessing progra
ms from a disk.
CMOS BATTERY is a
battery that maintai
ns the time, date, ha
rd disk and other con
figuration settings in
the CMOS memory.
CMOS batteries are s
mall and are attache
d directly to the mot
herboard.
EIDE (Enhanced Integrated Dri
ve Electronics) CONTROLLER F
OR HARDISK AND OPTICAL DRI
VE are the connectors to whic
h you will insert an IDE cable (s
upplied with motherboard). ID
E cables connect devices such
as hard drive, CD Drives and D
VD Drives.
IDE CONTROLLER FOR FLOPPY DRIVE: smaller than the ID
E controller of hard drive and optical drive. This is where
you connect the floppy drive thru IDE cable.
SATA CONTROLLER -Newest comp
uter mother boards have the new
interface called Serial Advance Te
chnology Attachment (S-ATA). SAT
A has a faster transfer rate than A
TA and only 1 device can be attac
hed to it.
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, i
t only involves the two devices the graphics card and the CPU.
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 a
vailable on modern personal computers. PCIe was designed to replace PCI, PCI-X, and AG
P. Unlike previous PC expansion standards, rather than being a shared parallel bus, it is st
ructured around point-to-point serial links called lanes.
PCI: Peripheral Component Interconnect. Some pc’s have a number of PCI slots fr
om 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 a
re set up by the OS and there are no need to alter jumpers etc on the hardware. Y
ou may insert different peripherals on PCI bus, from sound cards to DVD decoders
and graphics accelerators.