Tuesday, 14 December 2010

Motherboards (P1, P2)

Motherboards are arguably the most important piece of equipment within your computer as everything is connected to it or is built on it. The motherboard a PCB, Printed Circuit Board, and so transfers the electrical signals everywhere. There are different form factors of motherboards, these are:
·         ATX – The most commonly used form factor.
·         EATX – This is Extended ATX and so will only fit in certain cases that have been built to accommodate the larger board but it allows greater expansion.
·         Mini or Micro ATX – These are smaller sized boards that are used in Media PC’s and other PCs that need to be smaller than usual.
·         Baby ATX – This is no longer available but was used in legacy IBM machines
Various sizes of motherboard


The reason the motherboard is so important because of all the components it accommodates, these are:
·         CPU slot
o   Holds the CPU and heatsink with fan in place
·         Chipset
o   North and South bridge
o   BIOS chip
·         Memory Slots
o   RAM
§   DDR2 or DDR3
§  The speed of the slot (1000MHz, 1333MHz etc)
o   ROM
·         Voltage Regulator Module
o   This provides the microprocessors with right voltage supply
·         Expansion Slots
o   AGP
o   PCI
o   PCI Express
·         CMOS battery
·         IDE slots
·         SATA slots
·         Power connectors
o   20-24 pin 12V motherboard power connector
o   12VATX connector for the CPU
o   The CPU heatsink fan connector
o   Internal audio
o   Chassis fan connectors
·         Headers
o   USB 2.0
o   Front panel connectors
o   LED light connectors
o   eSATA connectors
o   Case speaker connector


A motherboard

No comments:

Post a Comment