The Motherboard

The motherboard or main board is easily the most important component in a computer system.

On a single board, it contains the CPU (the slot or socket for different types of CPUs), the bus ( the connections between the different parts of a computer system ), the quartz which provide the clock for the system ( the timing in which all the instructions are executed ), the expansion slots ( where all the interface cards are inserted ),the memory Ram slots, the BIOS chip ( where the Basic Input Output System operations are stored ), the CMOS chip ( where information like the date and time are stored and the physical configuration of the system, such as type of hard drive and type of monitor for example ) and also where the Power supply of the system distribute the power to the various cards and chips.

There are different types of main boards, depending on the type of CPU used and the type of power supply. At the moment we use either ATX motherboards (where the keyboard plug is around 8 mm in diameter (purple color) or use USB keyboards. The power supply plug are also different , AT has one row of connections, the ATX type has 2 rows of connections.

Also in the ATX motherboards is common to have built-in components like serial ports, printer (parallel) ports, USB ports, modem, sound card and so on, which makes the motherboard less dependant on the expansion slots as the cards are already built in the motherboard, reducing costs, increasing speed , but removing some customization and increasing the chances of a motherboard failure as so many components are part of it.

The older motherboards had many expansion slots 8 and 16 bits ( called ISA slots, normally of colour black ), the newest have maybe one of it ( for compatibility with older cards ) and few slots for new bus technology like PCI (white connectors) and AGP (normally only one brown connector), both of them are 32 bits connectors. Nowadays the slot is for the PCI-E (Express) cards, normally for the high performance graphic card.

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