Motherboard Flashcards
What does a chipset do
In a nutshell, a chipset acts like the motherboard’s communications center and traffic controller, and it ultimately determines what components are compatible with the motherboard—including the CPU, RAM, hard drives, and graphics cards. It also dictates your future expansion options, and to what extent, if any, your system can be overclocked.
What happens on system start up
PSU checks itself, sends power to “power good” wire and turns on cpu, cpu activates Bios on system ROM, bios uses bootloader to find an OS to launch using your boot priorities, system loads drivers into RAM, OS launches
What does CMOS RAM do
Holds BIOS and clock settings, can be cleared with a Cmos clear jumper or button.
What is firmware
tldr; it’s specialised software for hardware on the mobo
Firmware is software that’s embedded in a piece of hardware. You can think of it simply as “software for hardware.” However, software is different from firmware, so the two are not interchangeable terms.
Devices that you might think of as strictly hardware such as an optical drive, network card, TV remote, router, media player, camera, or scanner all have software that’s programmed into a special memory contained in the hardware itself.
What is firmware
tldr; it’s specialised software for hardware on the mobo
Firmware is software that’s embedded in a piece of hardware. You can think of it simply as “software for hardware.” However, software is different from firmware, so the two are not interchangeable terms.
Devices that you might think of as strictly hardware such as an optical drive, network card, TV remote, router, media player, camera, or scanner all have software that’s programmed into a special memory contained in the hardware itself.
