What is motherboard
The Motherboard is a main printed board that is made of sillicon. Its purpose is to connect all components and peripheral devices together, so that they can exchange data. There are several components that can be connected to the motherboard: cpu, video card, sound card, mouse, keyboard. These components are either connected directly, which means they are fitted in one of the slots on the motherboard or they are connected indirectly via some cable – USB cable, HDMI cable etc.
Chipset
Important part of every motherboard is Northbridge chip and Southbridge chip.
NorthBridge chip lies between a CPU and RAM. Its function is to mediate communication between a CPU, a video card and memory modules. Northbridge also determines what type of CPU a user can use and what type of RAM the user can put in. Northbridge also communicates with a slower SouthBridge chip.
SouthBridge is also known as an Input Output Controller Hub. SouthBridge is further from the CPU and RAM and therefore it manages slower parts on the motherboard: USB, SATA, Ethernet.
BIOS
Another chip we can find on the motherboard is ROM, which stands for Read-only memory , it runs BIOS ( Basic input ouput system) BIOS is a very basic system and its main function is to load an operating system from a hard drive.
Little lines that we can see on the motherboard are used for carrying data between components – we called them data buses. If these lines are shared by components in order to talk to each other it is called BUS.
On a motherboard we can find –
Random access memory slots – this is where Random access memory cards go.
PCI or Peripheral component interconnect slots– this is where sound cards and network cards are fitted .
PCI Express –this where video cards are fitted
AGP or accelerated graphics port – this is also for video cards, however accelerated graphics port are slower than PCI express and therefore it is not being used anymore.
CPU socket – this