Information of Motherboard and Expansion Cards

 Motherboard  

Motherboard is a Printed Circuit Board which contains all the internal components of a computer. Motherboard contains various ICs soldered to it and has a lot of slots to connect various internal devices like the RAM , Graphics card, Processor . The motherboard contains the North Bridge and the South Bridge. The North Bridge and South Bridge together are called chipset. We classify the motherboard based on the chipset number. The latest chipset launched by INTEL is Intel Q45 express Chipset which has support for all the latest technology. The two common motherboard manufacturers are INTEL and AMD.

Expansion Cards

On early PCs expansion cards were used to add some of the basic functions of the system including memory, hard disk and floppy disk controllers, video controllers, Serial and parallel ports, modems and even the clock and calendar functions of the PC. Today's PCs still add some of these functions through expansion cards. But many of these capabilities are now built into the motherboard. On modern PCs expansion cards are used to improve or add to the capabilities of the system to add controllers and adapters for special purpose hardware and to connet to a network. Expansion cards now allow a PC to have video capture, sounds, fax, scanner and network capabilities.