PC101-Personal Computer 101

Tell me about the Motherboard?

Motherboards hold the majority of the electronics in your PC.  Including the CPU and BIOS chips, memory boards and any other circuit boards (e.g. modem, video, sound), clock battery and available ports and other connections.   It actually is the "Mother " of your PC.  Below is an example of a motherboard by American Megatrends, click on it for the larger version with devices labeled.

Click >< here

The board itself can be HW upgraded, although they are expensive, and many components on the board can be either HW and/or SW upgraded, e.g. HW: Memory, Circuit boards, CPU(maybe)  SW: BIOS, most or all Circuit boards.

If you notice your system clock is not keeping correct time after you've already reset it, then the clock battery probably needs to be replaced (lower right hand corner).

Your Hard Disk, CD/DVD and Floppy drives all plug into this board also.  And in most cases, all those cables in the back on your computer case are plugging into your motherboard too.

Got questions you would like answered?  Yes

keoni@isp.com