Motherboards

Question 1

Flat piece of circuit board that resides inside your computer case and had a number of connectors on it

Answer 1

Motherboard

Question 2

Small electrical connections embedded in a circuit board

Answer 2

Traces

Question 3

Popular motherboard form factor that generally replaced the AT form factor

Answer 3

ATX (Advanced Technology Extended)

Question 4

Variation of the ATX form factor, which uses the ATX power supply. Generally smaller than ATX but retain all the same functionality

Answer 4

MicroATX

Question 5

A family of motherboard form factors

Answer 5

ITX

Question 6

Largest and the most popular of the ITX form factor but is still quite small

Answer 6

Mini-ITX

Question 7

Special adapter card, usually inserted into a special slot on a motherboard, that changes the orientation of the expansion cards relative to the motherboard. Used extensively in slimline computers to keep total depth and height of the system to a minimum

Answer 7

Riser cards or daughter boards

Question 8

Method for creating a fault-tolerant storage system. Uses multiple hard drives in various configurations to offer differing levels of speed/data redundancy

Answer 8

RAID (Redundant Array of Independent/Inexpensive Disks)

Question 9

Set of wires going to the CPU, governed by the expansion bus crystal, directly connected to expansion slots of varying types (PCI, AGO, PCIe, etc.)

Answer 9

Expansion bus

Question 10

Connectors on a motherboard that enable users to add optional components to a system

Answer 10

Expansion slots

Question 11

Controls the speed of the expansion bus

Answer 11

Expansion bus crystal

Question 12

Design architecture for the expansion bus on the computer motherboard that enabled system components to be added to the computer. Used parallel communication. Local bus standard, meaning that devices added to a computer through this port used the motherboard’s full speed (up to 33 MHz) rather than at the slower 8-MHz speed of the regular bus. Moved data 32 or 64 bits at a time rather than 8 or 16 bits the older ISA buses supported

Answer 12

PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect)

Question 13

Specialized form of PCI designed for laptops

Answer 13

Mini-PCI

Question 14

Serialized successor to PCI and AGP that uses the concept of individual data paths called lanes. May use any number of lanes, although a single line (x1) and 16 lanes (x16) are the most common on motherboards

Answer 14

PCI Express (PCIe)

Question 15

The number of operations happening per second

Answer 15

Transfer rate

Question 16

The way the data is broken down and reassembled

Answer 16

Encoding scheme

Question 17

Specialized form of PCIe designed for laptops

Answer 17

Mini-PCIe