The Motherboard

The Computer's Motherboard

The motherboard is the central nervous system of the computer. It is a large circuit board, covered with electrical circuits, resistors, sockets, slots, and headers. From here, every component in your computer is connected so that they can all communicate with one another.

PCI Card Slots

With the exception of the video card, all internal cards, such as the sound card, wireless network card, modem, or any other PCI card plug into these slots. The number of them supported by a motherboard can vary, so if you want to install a new PCI card in your computer, you had better make sure that there is room for it unless you are replacing an old card with a new one.

Video Card Slot

This is the connecting slot for your video card on the motherboard. Only a video card can go in this slot. Some high-end gaming computers will have motherboards that contain two of these slots so that you can run two video cards in parallel to increase the video rendering capabilities of your computer.

CPU Heat Sink

This heat sink is a series of thin metal plates designed to collect the heat coming off of the CPU and dissapate it across a large surface area in order to keep the CPU cool and within normal operating temperatures. Fans within the case also keep air moving over this heat sink in order to keep it cool.

RAM Slots

These four slots hold your sticks of RAM. Ram is very easy to install and remove from your motherboard. Al you have to do is pop back the tabs holding it in, and the RAM will pop itself out. Then, when you push a stick of RAM into an empty slot, if it is facing the right direction, it will go in easily and the tabs will snap down to let you know that it has been installed correctly.

Power Connectors

The large one is for the PC Main Power cord, the shorter one is for the auxiliary power cord.

Floppy Disk Connector

The data cable from your floppy disk drive connects here.

IDE Connectors

The long, flat, usually gray cables inside your computer connect from here to all your hard drives and disk drives. Fortunately, they, like the Molex power connectors that connect the same drives to the power supply, run in parallel, so one cable can usually connect two drives to the motherboard, which is why there are only 2 IDE connectors on this motherboard, but the computer can support up to 4 disk drives.

Chipset

The chipset is a series of supporting processors that helps send data along from the CPU to other areas of the motherboard. They work to bridge the distance between the CPU and other components like the video and PCI cards in order to ensure that all necessary information is passed along to them.



Now that you have familiarized yourself with the motherboard, you can check out: