Week 5

Information Sheet No. 1.1-5

THE MOTHERBOARD AND ITS PARTS

1. Motherboard – is also called the “System Board,” it is the main printed circuit board in an electronic device, which contains sockets or slots that accept additional boards.

2. CPU socket – is a portion in the motherboard which holds the CPU (Central Processing Unit) or simply the processor.

3. Memory(RAM) Slot – 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.

4. 24-Pin ATX Power Connector – is the portion where you can connect the power supply unit (PSU) power connector. Motherboards come with different power supply controller. Old motherboard needs AT power supply unit while new motherboard needs ATX power supply.

5. Northbridge Chip Set – handles the data-transfer duties memory, CPU, and AGP and to make the most efficient use available resources

6. Southbridge Chip Set – it 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.

7. CMOS or BIOS chip (Complementary Metal Oxide Semi-conductor) is also a chipset which contains the BIOS (Basic Input Output System). The BIOS is the built-in software that tells what a computer can do without accessing programs from a disk.