A Guide To Motherboards Their Features And Functionality Features

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Motherboards are a key component of today’s PCs, they offer a connection between the components of a PC system. The motherboard has the memory, processor and other essential components attached to the motherboard, whilst other components such as video cards, sound cards and hard drives are linked via cables and sockets (slots).

A main component of the board is the chipset. This determines how the motherboard communicates with the processor and the other main components. The chipset determines how many of it’s features operate and the speed at which they are able to do so

On a modern board it is not uncommon to find more than one microprocessor slot such is the demand placed on modern PCs. Additional slots are provided for the connection of other peripherals such as the memory (RAM). The memory can come in a few different types but the main connection is DIMM this has DRAM chips built onto it.

As mentioned earlier the chipset forms an interface between the processor and the other components of the PC. It does this by connecting to the processor’s front side bus, the main memory i. E. RAM and peripheral buses.

When a motherboard first boots up it needs to know how to turn things on, what to communicate with and how to communicate to it, this information is placed on non-volatile memory chips on the board (Non-volatile means that the data is not lost when the power is stopped). The steps that the motherboard takes is set out in the form of a program, this program is called the firmware or BIOS

Another component of the motherboard is the clock generator; it produces a clock signal that continues the count of the system clock whilst the system is off and provides synchronization between peripherals.

Additional slots for expansion cards are placed on the board these support the interface cards that are to be connected to the PC, such as the graphics card and the sound card.

The motherboard offers connections to user devices and storage devices such as mice and pen drives. Common connections include PS/2 and USB while more specialist connections such as Firewire can also be found here.

There is also the potential for a board to have some additional features added directly to the board by this I mean that the graphics unit or sound unit can be built-into the board therefore not requiring additional cards to be purchased.

Motherboards are available for reasonable prices, you can buy one for a mere $40 or if you required a more higher spec board you could spend upwards of $300. Some manufacturers of these boards include ASUS, Gigabyte ECS but others are available.

Andrew Johnson is an expert in computer consumables. If you want more information about varieties of motherboards or are looking for a trusted computer retailer please visit http://www.ebuyer.com

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Topics: Computers and Technology | Comments Off

Tags: computers, Computers and Technology, electroncis, motherboard, motherboards

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MLA Style Citation:
Guest, Guest "A Guide To Motherboards Their Features And Functionality Features." A Guide To Motherboards Their Features And Functionality Features. 19 Dec. 2009. uberarticles.com. 25 May 2012 <http://uberarticles.com/computers-and-technology/a-guide-to-motherboards-their-features-and-functionality-features/>.

APA Style Citation:
Guest, G (2009, December 19). A Guide To Motherboards Their Features And Functionality Features. Retrieved May 25, 2012, from http://uberarticles.com/computers-and-technology/a-guide-to-motherboards-their-features-and-functionality-features/

Chicago Style Citation:
Guest, Guest "A Guide To Motherboards Their Features And Functionality Features" uberarticles.com. http://uberarticles.com/computers-and-technology/a-guide-to-motherboards-their-features-and-functionality-features/

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