Understanding Your Motherboard
By Stephen Orgill
Internal Connecters and Ports
Understanding your motherboard is about pointing out what the bits of your
motherboard actually do, if you are not used to building or upgrading your own
machine you will want to know the ins and outs of the motherboard. The motherboard
is a very important piece of equipment in your PC as it is connected to everything.
Anything of major importance is plugged straight into the motherboard. Some
things on a motherboard are meant to be changed and altered to suit your own
specifications, other things are strictly to be left alone unless fully qualified.
We will try to give you a brief bit of history if there is any on each of these
parts and some specifications.
We will start with the internal connecters and ports and then move on to the External
ones. You can use the numbers on the image to jump straight to that section.
| 1. | PCI Slot | 7. | Molex Power connector |
| 2. | AGP slot | 8. | IDE Ports |
| 3. | North Bridge | 9. | S-ATA Ports |
| 4. | CPU Socket | 10. | South Bridge |
| 5. | DIMM Slot | 10. | USB 2.0 Header |
| 6. | Battery | 12. | Firewire Header |
1 - PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slot
The PCI bus was developed by Intel, however This local bus is not only for Intel
produced micro processors, you will find it very difficult to find a motherboard
without a PCI slot on it. You will find that you will get a number of PCI slots
from 1 up to about 6.
The PCI bus runs at 33Mhz and normally 32bits. The PCI bus was the first one to
fully support plug and play, where IRQ's and other resources are set up by the
OS and there are no need to alter jumpers etc on the hardware. The PCI bus
supports a wide range of peripherals from sound cards to DVD decoders and
graphics accelerators. PCI is now the standard for internal peripherals except
for graphics cards which have now moved over to the faster AGP port.
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