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What's Inside My Computer? (2)
Motherboard
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The motherboard is the bit of hardware that ties everything together in a computer, the picture on the left is a typical motherboard without the RAM (memory), heatsink & processor, graphics card etc fitted.
The motherboard contains the connectors for attaching additional boards. Typically, the motherboard contains the CPU, BIOS, memory, mass storage interfaces, serial and parallel ports, expansion slots, and all the controllers required to control standard peripheral devices, such as the display screen, keyboard, and disk drive. Collectively, all these chips that reside on the motherboard are known as the motherboard's chipset. On most PCs, it is possible to add memory chips directly to the motherboard. You may also be able to upgrade to a faster PC by replacing the CPU chip. To add additional core features, you may need to replace the motherboard entirely. Motherboard is sometimes abbreviated as MOBO. |
Graphics Card
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The Graphics Card, or GPU (acronym for Graphic Processor Unit) is shown here. Used primarily for 3-D applications, a graphics processing unit is a single-chip processor that creates lighting effects and transforms objects every time a 3D scene is redrawn. These are mathematically-intensive tasks, which otherwise, would put quite a strain on the processor. Lifting this burden from the processor frees up cycles that can be used for other jobs.
The first company to develop the GPU is NVIDIA Inc. Its GeForce 256 GPU is capable of billions of calculations per second, can process a minimum of 10 million polygons per second, and has over 22 million transistors, compared to the 9 million found on the Pentium III processor. Its workstation version called the Quadro, designed for CAD applications, can process over 200 billion operations a second and deliver up to 17 million triangles per second. The GeForce NVIDIA GPU card is compatible with the following graphics APIs : OpenGL and Microsoft's DirectX, Intel's Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP) technology and AMD 's 3DNow! The Quadro is an OpenGL specific card with driver support for both Pentium and AMD processors. |
Hard Drives
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The hard-drive is the mechanism that reads and writes data on a hard disk. Hard disk drives (HDDs) for PCs generally have seek times of about 12 milliseconds or less. Many disk drives improve their performance through a technique called caching. There are several interface standards for passing data between a hard disk and a computer. The most common are IDE and SCSI.
Hard disk drives are sometimes called Winchester drives, Winchester being the name of one of the first popular hard disk drive technologies developed by IBM in 1973. |
Ports
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Finally, here is a side-on view of the available ports on most modern computers. Each one has been labelled for ease of identification.
On very new computers, dial-up modems are no longer included as standard, as manufacturers think that most users have broadband connection. In addition, the game port (for the joystick) has also been dropped as again manufacturers think that most users have a USB connection for the joystick. In both cases, I think they are wrong. By way of compensation, additional USB ports are usually found, four is common, sometimes up to six. The colour coding is now standard on all PC's, with the mouse port being green, the keyboard being purple, blue for graphics, and so on as you can see here. The only additional item fitted into your computer and not shown on these pages is the RAM or memory. This subject is dealt with seperately on another page, which you can view by clicking here. |