Motherboards

The motherboard, also known as the system board or the main board, is the backbone of the computer. As shown in the figure, a motherboard is a printed circuit board (PCB) that contains buses, or electrical pathways, that interconnect electronic components. These components may be soldered directly to the motherboard or added using sockets, expansion slots, and ports.

Motherboard Components

These are some connections on the motherboard where computer components can be added

• Central Processing Unit (CPU) - This is considered the brain of the computer.

• Random Access Memory (RAM) - This is a temporary location to store data and applications.

• Expansion slots - These provide locations to connect additional components.

• Chipset - This consists of the integrated circuits on the motherboard that control how system hardware interacts with the CPU and motherboard. It also establishes how much memory can be added to a motherboard and the type of connectors on the motherboard.

• Basic input/output system (BIOS) chip and Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) chip - BIOS is used to help boot the computer and manage the flow of data between the hard drive, video card, keyboard, mouse, and more. In modern computers, BIOS has been replaced by UEFI. UEFI specifies a different firmware for boot and runtime services. Firmware is programming that allows a computer operating system to control the hardware.

Motherboard Chipset

• Northbridge – Controls highspeed access to the RAM and video card. It also controls the speed at which the CPU communicates with all of the other components in the computer. Video capability is sometimes integrated into the Northbridge.

• Southbridge – Allows the CPU to communicate with slower speed devices including hard drives, Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports, and expansion slots