Motherboards

Question 1

What is a motherboard?

Answer 1

It is a form of systemboard. It is the backbone of a computer. All other components are attached to the motherboard.

Question 2

How are different componenets attached to a motherboard?

Answer 2

They are either soldered directly to the motherboard or added using sockets, expansion slots and ports.

Question 3

What are the numerous important motherboard components?

Answer 3

The CPU.
The RAM/Memory.
Expansion slots.
Chipset.
BIOS and UEFI chip.
Additional connectors.

Question 4

What is the purpose of the chipset?

Answer 4

These are integrated circuits on the motherboard. They control how system hardware interacts with the CPU and Motherboard.
They also control how much memory can be added and the type of connectors.

Question 5

What do BIOS and UEFI mean?

Answer 5

Basic Input/Output System and Unified Extensible Firmware Interface.

Question 6

What does the BIOS manage?

Answer 6

It boots the computer and manages the flow of data between the hard drive, video card, keyboard, mouse and more.

Question 7

What does the UEFI manage?

Answer 7

UEFI specifies a different software interface for boot and runtime services but still relies on the traditional BIOS for system configuration, power-on self -test (POST), and setup.

Question 8

What are the three forms of motherboard connections? What do they allow the user to connect to?

Answer 8

SATA. Used for optical drives, hard drives and solid state drives.
IDE. An older standard interface used for disk drives.
Internal USB. 19 pin connector for USB 3 on the case.

Question 9

What does the northbridge do?

Answer 9

Controls high speed access to the RAM and video card. It also controls the speed at which the CPU communicates with all of the other components in the computer. Video capability is sometimes integrated into the Northbridge.

Question 10

What does the southbridge do?

Answer 10

Allows the CPU to communicate with slower speed devices including hard drives, Universal Serial Bus (USB) ports, and expansion slots

Question 11

What are the four main motherboard factors?

Answer 11

ATX.
Micro-ATX.
Mini-ITX.
ITX.

Question 12

What are the properties of ATX? Of Micro-ATX?

of ITX?

Answer 12

Advanced Technology eXtended is the most popular form factor.
12 x 9.6 inches.
Mirco.
Popular in desktop and small form factor computers.
9.6 x 9.6 inches.
ITX.
Popular in places where it would be inconvenient for a large noisy computer.
8.6 x 7.5 inches.