Here are some definitions of terms about the motherboard. Take your time and read them yourself. They may be professional, but I don't quite understand them at the moment, hehe!

front-end bus

a front-end bus is a set of transmission lines that transmit information from one or more source components to one or more destination components. In layman's terms, it is a public connection between multiple components, which is used to transmit information between various components. People often describe the bus frequency in MHz. There are many kinds of buses. The English name of the front-end bus is Front Side Bus, which is usually expressed by FSB. It is the bus that connects the CPU to the North Bridge chip. The front-end bus frequency of a computer is determined by both CPU and Northbridge chip.

CPU slot type

We know that the CPU needs to be connected to the motherboard through an interface to work. After so many years' development, the interface modes adopted by CPU are pin type, card type, contact type and pin type. At present, the interface of CPU is pin interface, and there are corresponding slot types corresponding to the motherboard. Different types of CPU have different CPU slots, so if you choose a CPU, you must choose a motherboard with a corresponding slot type. Motherboard CPU slots are different in type, and the number, volume and shape of sockets are changed, so they cannot be plugged into each other. Socket 775 Socket 754 Socket 939 Socket 94 Socket 63 Socket 64 Socket 478 Socket 423 Socket 37 Slot 1 Slot 2 Slot a Socket 7

Supported CPU types

refers to the CPU types that can be used on this motherboard. The development speed of CPU is quite fast, and the types of CPU are different in different periods, and the motherboard supports this type, which means that most of the CPUs belonging to this type can run on this motherboard (within the CPU frequency limit supported by the motherboard). CPU types have undergone many generations of improvement from the early 386, 486, Pentium, K5, K6, K6-2, Pentium II, Pentium III, etc. to today's Pentium 4, Duron, Athlon XP, XEON and Athlon 64. Each type of CPU is different in pin, main frequency, working voltage, interface type, packaging and so on, especially in speed performance. Only by purchasing a CPU of the same type as that supported by the motherboard can they work together.

HyperTransport bus technology

HyperTransport bidirectional transmission bus technology, compared with the previous PCI bus design, Hyper Transport technology has fundamentally improved significantly. From the simple data comparison, Hyper Transport has achieved an astonishing data transmission rate of 12.8GB/s, which is much higher than the initial theoretical transmission rate of Intel's latest 3GIO technology (the bandwidth of early 3GIO products is designed to be 2.5GB/s, and the long-term plan is 1GB/s). Compared with the current PCI bus, HyperTransport's data transmission rate is more than 96 times higher.

South Bridge chip

Southbridge chip is an important part of the motherboard chipset, which is generally located below the CPU slot and near the PCI slot on the motherboard. This layout is based on the fact that there are more I/O buses connected to it, and being far away from the processor is conducive to wiring. Compared with the north bridge chip, its data processing capacity is not large, so the south bridge chip generally does not cover the heat sink. The South Bridge chip is not directly connected to the processor, but is connected to the North Bridge chip in a certain way (different chipsets from different manufacturers are different, such as Intel Hub Architecture from Intel and Multi-Threaded "Miaoqu" from SIS). The South Bridge chip is responsible for the communication between I/O buses, such as PCI bus, USB, LAN, ATA, SATA, audio controller, keyboard controller, real-time clock controller, advanced power management, etc. These technologies are generally relatively stable, so the South Bridge chip may be the same in different chipsets, but the difference is only the North Bridge chip. Therefore, the number of north bridge chips in the motherboard chipset is far more than that of south bridge chips. For example, in early Intel's chipset Socket 7' s 43TX and Slot 1' s 44LX, the south bridge chips all used 82317AB, while in recent two years, the chipset 845E/845G/845GE/845PE and other configurations all used ICH4 south bridge chips, but they can also be matched with ICH2 south bridge chips. What's more, a few products produced by some motherboard manufacturers use products from different chipset companies, such as KG7－RAID motherboards that were upgraded before, AMD 76 is used in the north bridge, and VIA 686B is used in the south bridge. The development direction of South Bridge chip is mainly to integrate more functions, such as network card, RAID, IEEE 1394 and even WI-FI wireless network. The larger chip in the middle of the motherboard is the southbridge chip

the northbridge chip

, which is the chip closest to the CPU on the motherboard. It is responsible for contacting the CPU and controlling the memory, and its function is to establish communication interfaces between the processor and PCI bus, DRAM, AGP and L2 cache. Northbridge chip provides support for CPU type, main frequency, memory type, maximum memory capacity, PCI/AGP slot and other devices. The function of the North Bridge is very obvious, and it plays a leading role in computers, so people are used to calling it the Host Bridge.

on-board sound card

The sound output chip attached to the motherboard supports independent sound output, commonly ALC65 and CMI9761A.

on-board network card

On-board network card refers to the network card chip integrated by the motherboard with integrated network functions. Correspondingly, there is also a corresponding network card interface (RJ-45) on the backplane of the motherboard, which is generally located near the audio interface or USB interface. The onboard RTL81B network card chip used to be dial-up because there were few broadband Internet access. The network card is not an essential accessory of the computer, and the motherboard of the onboard network card chip is very few. If you want to use the network card, you can only use an expansion card. Now, with the popularity of broadband Internet access, network cards have gradually become one of the basic accessories of computers, and there are more and more motherboards with onboard network card chips. Under the condition of using the same network card chip, there is no difference in performance between onboard network card and independent network card, and compared with independent network card, onboard network card also has unique advantages. The first is to reduce the purchase cost of users. For example, there are more and more motherboards with Gigabit network cards on board, but it takes several hundred yuan to buy an independent Gigabit network card. Secondly, it can save system expansion resources and does not occupy PCI slots or USB interfaces that independent network cards need to occupy; Thirdly, it can achieve good compatibility and stability, and it is not easy to have problems that the independent network card is not compatible with the motherboard or conflicts with other equipment resources. On-board NIC chips can be divided into 1/1Mbps adaptive NIC and Gigabit NIC by speed, ordinary NIC and wireless NIC by network connection, and NIC chips built into chipset (South Bridge chips of some chipsets, such as SIS963) and independent NIC chips attached to motherboard (such as Realtek 8139 series) by chip type. Some high-end home motherboards and server motherboards also provide dual onboard network cards. The main manufacturers of onboard network card chips are Intel, 3Com, Realtek, VIA and SIS, etc.

hard disk interface

the hard disk interface is the connecting part between the hard disk and the host system, and it is used to transfer data between the hard disk cache and the host memory. Different hard disk interfaces determine the connection speed between hard disk and computer. In the whole system, the quality of hard disk interfaces directly affects the running speed of programs and the performance of the system. On the whole, hard disk interfaces are divided into four types: IDE, SATA, SCSI and Fibre Channel. Hard disks with IDE interface are mostly used in household products, and some are also used in servers. Hard disks with SCSI interface are mainly used in the server market, while Fibre Channel is only used in high-end servers, which is expensive. SATA is a new type of hard disk interface, and it has a broad prospect in the home market because of its market popularization stage. Under the broad category of IDE and SCSI, there are many specific interface types, each with different technical specifications and different transmission speeds, such as ATA1 and SATA；. Ultra16 SCSI and Ultra32 SCSI both represent a specific hard disk interface, and their respective speeds are quite different.

graphics card slot standard

is the graphics card interface standard, the common ones are AGP 2X/4X/8X, and the latest one is PCI-Express X16 interface.

PCI

(peripheral component interconnect) is a decompression card and the corresponding decompression slot in PC.

disk array type

1)IDE disk array (can be divided into ATA and S-ATA according to the hard disk used). 2)SCSI-to-SCSI, low-end market positioning, rich SCSI disk array product line can meet different needs. 3) Fiber-to-Fiber, a high-end product, all advanced technologies are embodied in FC disk array system-perfect hardware redundancy, Cableless cable-free modular design, turbine cooling system, LES monitoring module, GUI management software and so on. Among them, all-fiber products use FC hard disks internally, and both external host channels and internal disk channels have a bandwidth of 2 GB/s.. There are also semi-fiber products in the market, that is, SATA or SCSI hard disks are used internally, and the external host channel is 2G Fibre. For the storage system of server expansion, DAS, SAN and NAS can be used.

disk array mode

simply speaking, disk array uses multiple hard disks to work at the same time to ensure data security and access speed. It * * * has nine modes, named after numbers, namely RAID , RAID1 to RAID 7 and RAID +1. At present, the most common modes are RAID , RAID 1, RAID 5 and RAID +1.

power supply circuit

the power supply circuit is an important part of the motherboard, and its function is to convert the voltage of the current sent by the host power supply to the core voltage value acceptable to the CPU, so that the CPU can work normally, and to shape and filter the current sent by the host power supply to filter out all kinds of clutter and interference signals to ensure the stable work of the computer. The main part of the power circuit is generally located near the CPU slot of the motherboard.

COM interface

COM interface refers to the Component Object Mode interface, which is a standard interface defined by Microsoft.

CMOS battery

A button battery that comes with the motherboard is mainly responsible for recording the CMOS setting information on the motherboard.

BIOS

Computer users will come into contact with BIOS in the process of using computers, which plays a very important role in computer systems. The superior performance of a motherboard depends largely on whether the BIOS management function on the motherboard is advanced. The full name of BIOS(Basic Input/Output System) is ROM-BIOS, which is short for the basic input/output system of read-only memory. It is actually a group of programs solidified into a computer to provide the lowest and most direct hardware control for the computer. It is the hub connecting software programs and hardware devices. In layman's terms, BIOS is a "converter" or interface between hardware and software programs (although it is only a program itself), which is responsible for solving the immediate requirements of hardware and implementing it according to the operating requirements of software for hardware. The BIOS chip is a rectangular or square chip on the motherboard. The BIOS mainly stores: self-diagnosis program: identifying the hardware configuration by reading the contents of CMOS RAM, and self-checking and initializing it; CMOS setup program: during the boot process, start with a special hotkey, set it and store it in CMOS RAM; System bootstrap loader: after the self-check is successful, load the boot program on the disk relative to channels and sectors into the memory and let it run to load the DOS system; Drivers and interrupt services of major I/O devices; Because BIOS directly deals with system hardware resources, it is always aimed at a certain type of hardware system, and various hardware systems are different, so there are different kinds of BIOS. With the development of hardware technology, different versions of the same BIOS have appeared one after another, and the new version of BIOS is more powerful than the old version. The function of BIOS: the difference between CMOS and BIOS. The function of upgrading BIOS

Supports the maximum memory capacity

The maximum memory capacity that a motherboard can support refers to the maximum memory bank that can be inserted into the motherboard. Even if the memory bank exceeds the capacity is inserted into the motherboard, the motherboard will support it. The maximum memory capacity supported by the motherboard is theoretically determined by the chipset, and the North Bridge determines the maximum memory capacity supported by the whole chip. However, in practical application, the maximum memory capacity supported by the motherboard is also limited by the number of memory slots on the motherboard. Motherboard manufacturers may use fewer memory slots on the motherboard for the needs of design and cost. At this time, even if the chipset supports a large memory capacity, there are not enough memory slots on the motherboard for application, so the theoretical maximum cannot be reached. For example, KT6 North Bridge can support 4GB of memory at most, but most motherboard manufacturers only provide two or three 184-pin DDR DIMM memory slots, and their maximum memory capacity can only reach 2GB or 3GB.

main board structure

Because the motherboard is the connection carrier of various devices in the computer, and these devices are different, and the motherboard itself also has chipset, various I/O control chips, expansion slots, expansion interfaces, power sockets and other components, it is necessary to formulate a standard to coordinate the relationship of various devices. The so-called main board structure is a general standard based on the layout, arrangement, size, shape and power specifications of all components on the motherboard, which all motherboard manufacturers must follow. Main board structure is divided into AT, Baby-AT, ATX, Micro ATX, LPX, NLX, Flex ATX, EATX, WATX and BTX. Among them, AT and Baby-AT were old main board structure many years ago, and now they have been eliminated; LPX, NLX and Flex ATX are variants of ATX, which are common in.