Chapter 1: Motherboards, Processors, and Memory

Question 1

The ____ motherboard has the processor and memory slots at right angles to the expansion cards. It is the primary PC motherboard form factor in use today.

Answer 1

ATX or Advanced Technology eXtended

Question 2

The ____ line of motherboard from factors was developed as a low power, small form factor (SFF) board for specialty uses, including home-theater systems, compact desktop systems, gaming systems, and embedded components.

Answer 2

ITX or Information Technology eXtended

Question 3

In a PC, data is sent from one component to another via a ____, which is a common collection of signal pathways.

Answer 3

bus

Question 4

A ____ is a collection of chips or circuits that perform interface and peripheral functions for the processor, and it generally dictates how a motherboard will communicate with the installed peripherals.

Answer 4

chipset

Question 5

The ____ subset of a motherboard’s chipset is the set of circuitry or chips that manage high-speed peripheral communications (eg. integrate video using PCIe, for instance) and processor-to-memory communications.

Answer 5

Northbridge

Question 6

The communications between the CPU and memory occur the ____, which is a set of signal pathways connecting the CPU and main memory.

Answer 6

FSB or Front-Side Bus

Question 7

The ____, if present, is a set of signal pathways between the CPU and external cache memory.

Answer 7

BSB or Backside Bus

Question 8

The ____ subset of the chipset is responsible for providing support to the slower onboard peripherals (USB, Serial and Parallel ATA, parallel ports, serial ports, and so on), managing their communications with the rest of the computer and the resources given to them.

Answer 8

Southbridge

Question 9

32-bit ____ slots are around 3 inches long and classically white. The ____ expansion buses operate at 33 MHz and 66 MHz and ____ is a shared-bus topology, so mixing 33 MHz and 66 MHz adapters in a 66 MHz system will slow all the adapters down to 33 MHz.

Answer 9

PCI or Peripheral Component Interconnect

Question 10

The most common expansion slot architecture being used by motherboards is ____, which is a serial technology. It supports seven different link (switched lanes) widths, designated x1, x2, x4, x8, x12, x16, and x32.

Answer 10

PCIe or PCI Express

Question 11

Virtual RAM, the space on the hard drive known as a paging file, is found in what location in modern Microsoft operating systems?

Answer 11

c:\pagefile.sys

Question 12

____, which is small and fast and logically sits between the CPU and RAM, improves system performance by predicting what the CPU will ask for next and prefetching this information before being asked.

Answer 12

Cache memory

Question 13

A ____ arrangement for a CPU socket has holes to receive the pins on the CPU.

Answer 13

PGA or Pin Grid Array

Question 14

A ____ arrangement for a CPU socket has spring-loaded pins in the socket and a grid of lands on the CPU.

Answer 14

LGA or Land Grid Array

Question 15

For CPUs based on the PGA concept, ____ sockets use a plastic or metal lever to lock or release the mechanism that secures the CPU’s pins in the socket.

Answer 15

ZIF or Zero Insertion Force

Question 16

____ interfaces connect ____ hard drives to the motherboard and have one pin in the center missing to act as a key to ensure that the cable gets attached properly. This is legacy technology.

Answer 16

PATA or Parallel ATA

Question 17

____ interfaces connect ____ hard drives to the motherboard and have an L shaped female slot at the end of the data cable. These interfaces do do provide power, requiring a separate power connection in addition to the data cable.

Answer 17

SATA or Serial ATA

Question 18

The ____ expansion motherboard connections is a form factor, not a bus standard, and supports existing SATA, USB, and PCIe buses. It is primarily used for hard drives, but Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, and NFC adapters are built for ____ as well.

Answer 18

M.2

Question 19

Buttons and lights, as well as other external connectors (ex. audio jacks and USB ports), plug into the motherboard through a series of pins known as ____. The purpose of the ____ will be printed on the motherboard.

Answer 19

headers, header

Question 20

____ is the name given to any software that is encoded in hardware, usually a read-only memory (ROM) chip, and it can be run without extra instructions from the operating system.

Answer 20

Firmware

Question 21

The best example of firmware is a computer’s ____, which is burned into a special memory chip and is one of the most important chips on the motherboard. The ____ chip contains the ____ system software that boots the system and allows the operating system to interact with certain hardware in the computer in lieu of requiring a more complex device driver to do so.

Answer 21

BIOS or Basic Input/Output System

Question 22

The successor to the BIOS is the ____. The extensible features of the ____ allow for the support of a vast array of systems and platforms by allowing the ____ access to system resources for storage of additional modules that can be added at any time.

Answer 22

UEFI or Unified Extensible Firmware Interface

Question 23

The ____ is a dedicated security processor, or crypto processor, that works with UEFI and Microsoft’s BitLocker for various functionalities.

Answer 23

TPM or Trusted Platform Module

Question 24

If a motherboard does not come with a TPM chip installed, you can enable the same functionality by using a ____.

Answer 24

HSM or Hardware Security Module

Question 25

UEFI can be setup so that the system firmware checks digital signatures for each boot file it uses to confirm that it is the approved version and has not been tampered with. This technology is known as ____.

Answer 25

Secure Boot

Question 26

____ is a series of system checks performed by the system BIOS/UEFI and other high end components, known collectively as option ROMs. Once ____ has completed successfully, the BIOS/UEFI selects the boot device highest in the configured boot order and executes the master boot record (MBR).

Answer 26

POST or Power-On Self-Test

Question 27

Your PC has to keep certain setting when it’s turned off and its power cord is unplugged. It keeps these settings in a special memory chip called the ____ memory chip.

Answer 27

CMOS or Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor

Question 28

The term ____ refers to processors that are designed to work with 64 bits of data at a time. To go along with it, the operating system must also be designed to work with ____ chips.

Answer 28

x64

Question 29

Processors that can handle only 32 bits of information at once are referred to as ____ processors.

Answer 29

x86

Question 30

The crystal (XTL) known as the ____ keeps the time for the flow of data on the motherboard.

Answer 30

system clock

Question 31

If memory supports ____, check bits are generated and stored with the data. An algorithm is performed on the data and its check bits whenever the memory is accessed. If the result is all zeros, then the data is deemed valid and processing continues. ____ can detect single- and double-bit errors and corrects single-bit errors.

Answer 31

ECC or Error-Correction Code

Question 32

____ is the memory controller’s coordination of two memory banks to work as a synchronized set during communication with the CPU, doubling the specified system bus width (ex. 64 bits x 2) from the memory’s perspective.

Answer 32

Dual-channel memory

Question 33

____ is the memory controller’s coordination of three memory banks to work as a synchronized set during communication with the CPU, tripling the specified system bus width (ex. 64 bits x 3) from the memory’s perspective.

Answer 33

Triple-channel memory

Question 34

____ is the memory controller’s coordination of four memory banks to work as a synchronized set during communication with the CPU, quadrupling the specified system bus width (ex. 64 bits x 4) from the memory’s perspective.

Answer 34

Quad-channel memory

Question 35

____ SDRAM has four operations that occur at each wave crest (eight operations per cycle) of the clock signal for the FSB. This means that a 100 MHz clock signal is multiplied by eight for an effective clock rate of 800 MHz.

Answer 35

DDR3

Question 36

The speed of ____ SDRAM is roughly double that of DDR3 SDRAM.

Answer 36

DDR4

Question 37

The memory module form factor used in desktop computers is ____. They differentiate the functionality of the pins on one side of the module from the corresponding pins on the other side.

Answer 37

DIMM or Dual In-line Memory Module

Question 38

The memory module form factor used in laptops and smaller devices is ____.

Answer 38

SODIMM or Small Outline DIMM

Question 39

What are the two choices one can use to apply between the CPU and its heat sink?

Answer 39

thermal compound/paste or a thermal pad

Question 40

____ is a technology whereby a special water block is used to conduct heat away from the processor (as well as from the chipset). Water is circulated through this block to a radiator, where it is cooled.

Answer 40

Liquid cooling

Question 41

Which type of processor will likely generally be preferred for mobile devices due to generating less heat?

Answer 41

ARM

Question 42

Most motherboards have a ____ or similar momentary closure mechanism that will allow your to clear the CMOS memory of any user settings and cause the BIOS to use factory defaults.

Answer 42

jumper

Question 43

For virtualization to work, both the ____ and ____ need to support it.

Answer 43

CPU, BIOS