MOTHERBOARD

Motherboard, sometimes called a system board, is the main circuit board of the system unit.
Many electronic components attach to the motherboard; others are built into it

A daughterboard (or daughter board , daughter card , or daughtercard , Piggyback Board ) is a

circuit board that plugs into and extends the circuitry of another circuit board.

Components of the motherboard

 A CPU socket - the actual CPU is directly soldered onto the socket. Since high speed
CPUs generate a lot of heat, there are heat sinks and mounting points for fans right next
to the CPU socket.
 A power connector to distribute power to the CPU and other components.
 Slots for the system's main memory, typically in the form of DRAM chips.
 A chip forms an interface between the CPU, the main memory and other components. On
many types of motherboards, this is referred to as the Northbridge. This chip also
contains a large heat sink.
 A second chip controls the input and output (I/O) functions. It is not connected directly to
the CPU but to the Northbridge. This I/O controller is referred to as the Southbridge. The
Northbridge and Southbridge combined are referred to as the chipset.
 Several connectors, which provide the physical interface between input and output
devices and the motherboard. The Southbridge handles these connections.
 Slots for one or more hard drives to store files. The most common types of connections
are Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) and Serial Advanced Technology Attachment
(SATA).
 A read-only memory (ROM) chip, which contains the firmware, or startup instructions
for the computer system. This is also called the BIOS.
 A slot for a video or graphics card. There are a number of different types of slots,
including the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) and Peripheral Component Interconnect
Express (PCIe).
 Additional slots to connect hardware in the form of Peripheral Component Interconnect
(PCI) slots.

Motherboard Components

The motherboard consists of various components which have their own role to play in the
functioning of a computer. Let us discuss various motherboard components and know their
definition and role.

Expansion Slots

ISA slots. These were the oldest expansion slots in the history of motherboards. They were found
in AT boards and are identified by black color. Conventional display cards or sound cards were
installed in these slots. The full form of ISA is Industry Standard Architecture and is a 16- bit
bus.
PCI Slots. The full form of PCI is Peripheral Component Interconnect. The PCI slot is one of the
important motherboard components today and is vastly used to install add-on cards on the
motherboard. The PCI supports 64-bit high-speed bus.

PCI express. Also known as PCIe, these are the latest and the fastest component of the
motherboard to support add-on cards. It supports full duplex serial bus.

AGP slot. Accelerated graphics port(AGP) is specifically used to install a latest graphics card.
AGP runs on a 32-bit bus and both PCIe and AGP can be used to install high-end gaming display
cards.

RAM(memory) slots

SIMM slots. The full form is a single in-line memory module. These slots were found in older
motherboards, up to 486-boards. The SIMM supports 32-bit bus.

DIMM slots. The full form of DIMM is a Double inline memory module. These are the latest
RAM slots which run on a faster 64-bit bus. The DIMM used on Laptop boards are called SO-
DIMM.

CPU Socket

Another vital motherboard component is the CPU socket which is used to install the processor on
the motherboard. Some important sockets are explained below.

Socket7. It is a 321 pin socket that supported older processors like Intel Pentium 1/2/MMX,
AMD k5/K6, and Cyrix M2.

Socket370. It is a 370 pin socket that supports Celeron processors and Pentium-3 processors.

Socket 775. It is a 775-pin socket that supports Inter dual core, C2D, P-4 and Xeon processors.

Socket 1156. Found on latest types of motherboards, it is an 1156-pin socket that supports latest
Intel i-3, i-5 and i-7 processors.

Socket 1366. The socket is of 1366 pins and supports latest i-7 900 processors.

BIOS

The full form of BIOS is Basic Input Output System. It is a motherboard component in the form
of a Integrated chip. This chip contains all the information and settings of the motherboard which
you can modify by entering the BIOS mode from your computer.

CMOS Battery

The battery or a cell is a 3.0 Volts lithium type cell. The cell is responsible for storing the
information in BIOS and the full form is Complementary Metal Oxide Semi-Conductor.

Power Connectors

In order to receive power from SMPS, there are connectors mounted on the motherboards.
AT connector. It consists of 2 number of 6 pin male connectors and is found on old types of
motherboards.

ATX connector. The latest in the series of power connectors, they are either 20 or 24 pin female
connectors. Found in all the latest types of motherboards.

IDE connector

The Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE) connectors are used to interface disk drives. The 40-pin
male connector is used to connect IDE hard disk drives and the 34-pin male connector connects
to Floppy Disk Drive.

SATA connector

Latest in the series, the connectors, Serial Advance Technology Attachment(SATA) are 7-pin
connectors to interface latest SATA hard disks or optical drives. They are much faster than IDE
interface.

Co-Processor

The co-processor is one of the important motherboard components and helps the main processor
in mathematical calculations and computer graphics.

I/O interface connectors

AT Motherboard:

These Motherboards are the oldest of its kind. AT means the board consists of Advanced
Technology (AT) power connectors. The AT Motherboards are used in mid-80's. The
dimensions (13.8 x 12 inch) of this Motherboard make it difficult for new drives to get installed.
These Motherboards are used in earlier 286/236 and 436 Computers.
Fig. AT Motherboard

ATX Motherboard:

ATX means Advanced Technology eXtended is the motherboard configuration specification

developed in mid-90's and still available. The ATX Motherboard is an improvement from the
previously working Motherboard such as AT. ATX is the most common motherboard design
which is used in smaller boards (including micro-ATX, FlexATX, nano-ITX, mini-ITX).
Dimensions of a full-size standard ATX board are 12 x 9.6 inch. The ATX Motherboard have
gone through lots of upgrades in recent times.
ATX Motherboard of p2

The modern ATX Motherboard has many advantages over its predecessors. Some of the features
and uses of modern ATX Motherboard are as follows

 More power phases for cleaner and more stable power.

 More clearance around CPU socket to accommodate those huge after-market heatsinks.
 Wider gaps between expansion slots for better graphics cards cooling.

All the above factors add up to superior overclocking results. And let's not forget the spacious
ATX mid-tower and full-tower cases with enough room for half a dozen case fans, water cooling
setups, tall (CPU and RAM) heat sinks and all that other cool stuff.
Modern ATX Motherboard

Micro-ATX Motherboard:

It is smaller than the typical ATX Motherboards with the dimension of 9.6 x 9.6 inch. Some
manufacture has the dimension of 9.6 x 8.1 inch. Most modern ATX motherboards have a
maximum of seven PCI or PCI-Express expansion slots, while microATX boards only have a
maximum of four.

Micro-ATX motherboard has many advantages over ATX Motherboard and they are given
below

 It is compact and smaller than ATX motherboard which sports more ports and slots than
ATX.
 Budget Motherboard compared to other ATX or ITX motherboard

The Typical Micro-ATX Motherboard is given below

Mini ITX Motherboard:

Mini ITX is 6.7 x 6.7 inch in dimension which is smaller than any other conventional
Motherboard. Some of the features and advantages of Mini ITX Motherboard are following
bellow

 The smaller size and fan-less cooling which enables it to low power consumption.
 Mini ITX board can be used in any cases which are designed for ATX, Micro-ATX and
other ATX variants if desired.

The Typical Mini ITX Motherboard is given below have a look

E-ATX Motherboard:

E-ATX is extended ATX Motherboard and its size is huge compared to ATX Motherboard but it
doesn’t matter with the size it has many features and uses which other typical motherboard
lagging. The E-ATX is mainly used for gaming. This motherboard can be extended to have huge
memory and more CPU cores.

The features and advantages of E-ATX Motherboard are given below

 It has a lot of PCI slots and DIMM slots

 These boards have inbuilt wifi, sound cards, onboard troubleshooting features and
powerful VRM
 Maximum of 128 GB ram can be installed in this motherboard
Computer system buses

Inside computers, there are many internal components. In order for these components to
communicate with each other they make use of wires that are known as a ‘bus’ .
A bus is a common pathway through which information flows from one computer component
to another. This pathway is used for communication purpose and it is established between two or
more computer components. We are going to check different computer bus architectures that
are found in computers.

The internal bus carries data within the motherboard.

External buses carry data to peripherals and other devices attached to the motherboard.

Different Types of Computer Buses

The Computer Buses | Source

Functions of Buses in Computers

Summary of functions of buses in computers
1. Data sharing - All types of buses found in a computer transfer data between the computer
peripherals connected to it.
The buses transfer or send data in either serial or parallel method of data transfer. This allows for
the exchange of 1, 2, 4 or even 8 bytes of data at a time. (A byte is a group of 8 bits). Buses are
classified depending on how many bits they can move at the same time, which means that we
have 8-bit, 16-bit, 32-bit or even 64-bit buses.
2. Addressing - A bus has address lines, which match those of the processor. This allows data to
be sent to or from specific memory locations.
3. Power - A bus supplies power to various peripherals connected to it.
4. Timing - The bus provides a system clock signal to synchronize the peripherals attached to it
with the rest of the system.
The expansion bus facilitates easy connection of more or additional components and devices on a
computer such as a TV card or sound card.
Bus Terminologies
Computers have two major types of buses:
1. System bus:- This is the bus that connects the CPU to main memory on the motherboard. The
system bus is also called the front-side bus, memory bus, local bus, or host bus.
2. A number of I/O Buses, (I/O is an acronym for input / output), connecting various peripheral
devices to the CPU. These devices connect to the system bus via a ‘bridge’ implemented in the
processors chipset. Other names for the I/O bus include “expansion bus", "external bus” or “host
bus”.

Expansion Bus Types

These are some of the common expansion bus types that have ever been used in computers:
 ISA - Industry Standard Architecture
 EISA - Extended Industry Standard Architecture
 MCA - Micro Channel Architecture
 VESA - Video Electronics Standards Association
 PCI - Peripheral Component Interconnect
 PCMCIA - Personal Computer Memory Card Industry Association (Also called PC bus)
 AGP - Accelerated Graphics Port
 SCSI - Small Computer Systems Interface.

The 8 Bit and 16 Bit ISA Buses

8 Bit and 16 Bit ISA Buses | Source

ISA Bus
This is the most common type of early expansion bus, which was designed for use in the original
IBM PC. The IBM PC-XT used an 8-bit bus design. This means that the data transfers take place
in 8 bit chunks (i.e. one byte at a time) across the bus. The ISA bus ran at a clock speed of 4.77
MHz.
For the 80286-based IBM PC-AT, an improved bus design, which could transfer 16-bits of data
at a time, was announced. The 16-bit version of the ISA bus is sometimes known as the AT bus.
(AT-Advanced Technology)
The improved AT bus also provided a total of 24 address lines, which allowed 16MB of memory
to be addressed. The AT bus was backward compatible with its 8-bit predecessor and allowed 8-
bit cards be used in 16-bit expansion slots.
When it first appeared the 8-bit ISA bus ran at a speed of 4.77MHZ – the same speed as the
processor. Improvements done over the years eventually made the AT bus ran at a clock speed of
8MHz.

Comparison Between 8 and 16 Bit ISA Bus

8-Bit ISA card (XT-Bus) 16-Bit ISA (AT –Bus card)

8-bit data interface 16-bit data interface

4.77 MHZ bus 8-MHZ bus

62-pin connector 62-pin connector

36-pin AT extension connection

Comparison of 8-bit, & 16-bit ISA Bus as Used in Early Computers.

MCA (Micro Channel Architecture)

IBM developed this bus as a replacement for ISA when they designed the PS/2 PC launched in
1987.
The bus offered a number of technical improvements over the ISA bus. For instance, the MCA
ran at a faster speed of 10MHz and supported either 16-bit or 32-bit data. It also supported bus
mastering - a technology that placed a mini-processor on each expansion card. These mini-
processors controlled much of the data transfer allowing the CPU to do other tasks.
One advantage of MCA was that the plug-in cards were software configurable; this means that
they required minimal intervention by the user when configuring.
The MCA expansion bus did not support ISA cards and IBM decided to charge other
manufacturers royalties for use of the technology. This made it unpopular and it is now an
obsolete technology.

The EISA Bus

The EISA Bus Slots (on the left) Where EISA Cards Were Connected | Source

EISA (Extended Industry Standard Architecture)

EISA (Extended Industry Standard Architecture)
This is a bus technology developed by a group of manufactures as an alternative to MCA. The
bus architecture was designed to use a 32-bit data path and provided 32 address lines giving
access to 4GB of memory.
Like the MCA, EISA offered a disk-based setup for the cards, but it still ran at 8MHz in order for
it to be compatible with ISA.
The EISA expansion slots are twice as deep as an ISA slot. If an ISA card is placed in an EISA
slot it will use only the top row of connectors, however, a full EISA card uses both rows. It
offered bus mastering.
EISA cards were relatively expensive and were normally found on high-end workstations and
network servers.

VESA Bus
It was also known as the Local bus or the VESA-Local bus. VESA (Video Electronics
Standards Association) was invented to help standardize PCs video specifications, thus solving
the problem of proprietary technology where different manufacturers were attempting to develop
their own buses.
The VL Bus provided 32-bit data path and ran at 25 or 33 MHZ. It ran at the same clock
frequency as the host CPU. But this became a problem as processor speeds increased because,
the faster the peripherals are required to run, the more expensive they are to manufacture.
It was difficult to implement the VL-Bus on newer chips such as the 486s and the new Pentiums
and so eventually the VL-Bus was superseded by PCI.

VESA slots had extra set of connectors and thus the cards were larger. The VESA design was
backward compatible with the older ISA cards.

Features of the VESA local bus card:-

 32-bit interface
 62/36-pin connector
 90+20 pin VESA local bus extension
Peripheral Component Interconnect
Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) is one of the latest developments in bus
architecture and is the current standard for PC expansion cards. Intel developed and launched it
as the expansion bus for the Pentium processor in 1993. It is a local bus like VESA, that is, it
connects the CPU, memory and peripherals to wider, faster data pathway.
PCI supports both 32-bit and 64-bit data width; it is compatible with 486s and Pentiums. The bus
data width is equal to the processor, such as, a 32 bit processor would have a 32 bit PCI bus, and
operates at 33MHz.
PCI was used in developing Plug and Play (PnP) and all PCI cards support PnP. This means a
user can plug a new card into the computer, power it on and it will “self-identify” and “self-
specify” and start working without manual configuration using jumpers.
Unlike VESA, PCI supports bus mastering that is, the bus has some processing capability and
thus the CPU spends less time processing data. Most PCI cards are designed for 5v, but there are
also 3v and dual-voltage cards. Keying slots used help to differentiate 3v and 5v cards and also
to make sure that a 3v card is not slotted into a 5v socket and vice versa.

The PCI Slots

The PCI Bus Architecture | Source

More on computer hardware can be found in the following links:-

The Motherboard Components
The main printed circuit board in a computer is known as the Motherboard. It is also known
as System Board, Main Board or Printed Wired Board (PWB).
 Computer Parts Explained
In this hub, computer parts explained, we are going to have a look at some of the parts that
 make up a computer. Computers are very useful electronic devices that we use in modern
world.

Accelerated Graphics Port

The need for high quality and very fast performance of video on computers led to development
of the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP). The AGP Port connects to the CPU and operates at
the speed of the processor bus. This means that video information is sent more quickly to the
card for processing.
The AGP uses the main PC memory to hold 3D images. In effect, this gives the AGP video card
an unlimited amount of video memory. To speed up the data transfer, Intel designed the port as a
direct path to the PC’s main memory.
Data transfer rate ranges from 264 Mbps to 528mbps, 800 Mbps up to 1.5 Gbps. AGP connector
is identified by its brown colour.

Personal Computer Memory Card Industry Association (PC Card)

The Personal Computer Memory Card Industry Association was founded to give a standard bus
for laptop computers. So it is basically used in the small computers.

Small Computer System Interface

Short for Small Computer System Interface, a parallel interface standard used by Apple
Macintosh computers, PC's and Unix systems for attaching peripheral devices to a computer.

The SCSI Port

Mac LC SCSI Port | Source

Universal Serial Bus (USB)

This is an external bus standard that supports data transfer rates of 12 Mbps. A single USB port
connects up to 127 peripheral devices, such as mice, modems, and keyboards. The USB also
supports hot plugging or insertion (ability to connect a device without turning the PC of) and
plug and play (You connect a device and start using it without configuration).
We have two versions of USB:-

USB 1x
First released in 1996, the original USB 1.0 standard offered data rates of 1.5 Mbps. The USB
1.1 standard followed with two data rates: 12 Mbps for devices such as disk drives that need
high-speed throughput and 1.5 Mbps for devices such as joysticks that need much less
bandwidth.

USB 2x
In 2002 a newer specification USB 2.0, also called Hi-Speed USB 2.0, was introduced. It
increased the data transfer rate for PC to USB device to 480 Mbps, which is 40 times faster than
the USB 1.1 specification. With the increased bandwidth, high throughput peripherals such as
digital cameras, CD burners and video equipment could now be connected with USB.

IEEE 1394
The IEEE 1394 is a very fast external serial bus interface standard that supports data transfer
rates of up to 400Mbps (in 1394a) and 800Mbps (in 1394b). This makes it ideal for devices that
need to transfer high levels of data in real-time, such as video devices. It was developed by apple
with the name firewire.
A single 1394 port can connect up 63 external devices.
 It supports Plug and play
 Supports hot plugging, and
 Provides power to peripheral devices.

The IEEE 1394 Expansion Card