Front end bus
The front-side bus is a set of transmission lines that transmit information from one or more source components to one or more destination components. Generally speaking, it is a common connection between multiple components, which is used to transfer information between components. People often use MHz to describe the bus frequency. 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 a bus connecting CPU and Northbridge chip. The front-end bus frequency of computer is determined by 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 of development, the interface methods adopted by CPU are pin, card, contact and pin. At present, the interfaces of CPU are all pin interfaces, and the corresponding motherboards have corresponding slot types. Different types of CPU have different CPU slots, so you must choose the motherboard with the corresponding slot type when choosing CPU. The number, volume and shape of sockets vary with different types of CPU slots on the motherboard, so they cannot be plugged into each other. Socket 775 Socket 754 Socket 939 Socket 940 Socket 603 Socket 604 Socket 478 Socket A Socket 423 Socket 370 Socket 1 Socket 2 Socket A Socket 7
Support CPU type
Refers to the type of CPU 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 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 and Pentium III. Today's Pentium 4, Duron, Athlon XP, Xeon, Athlon 64. Each type of CPU is different in pin, main frequency, working voltage, interface type and package, especially in speed performance. Only by purchasing the same type of CPU supported by the motherboard can they work together.
Hypertransmission bus technology
HyperTransport bidirectional transmission bus technology, compared with the previous PCI bus design, Hyper Transport technology has a fundamental and significant improvement. From a simple data comparison, Hyper Transport has achieved an amazing data transmission rate of 12.8 GB/s, which is much higher than the initial theoretical transmission rate of Intel's latest 3GIO technology (the bandwidth of early 3GIO products was designed to be 2.5GB/s, and the long-term plan was 10 GB/s). Compared with the current PCI bus, HyperTransport's data transmission rate is more than 96 times higher.
Southbridge
South bridge chip is an important part of motherboard chipset, which is generally located under CPU slot and near PCI slot on motherboard. This layout is based on the fact that there are many I/O buses connected to it, and being far away from the processor is beneficial to wiring. Compared with the north bridge chip, its data processing ability is not great, so the south bridge chip generally does not cover the heat sink. The south bridge chip is not directly connected to the processor, but connected to the north bridge chip in a certain way (chipsets of different manufacturers are different, such as Intel Hub architecture of Intel and multi-threading "fun" of SIS). The South Bridge chip is responsible for the communication among I/O buses such as PCI bus, USB, LAN, ATA, SATA, audio controller, keyboard controller, real-time clock controller and advanced power management. These technologies are generally 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 the early Intel chipset Socket 7, the 430TX and Slot 1 440LX, and the southbridge chip were all 823 17AB. In recent years, the chipset 845E/845G/845GE/845PE were all configured with ICH4 southbridge chips, but they can also be matched with ICH2 southbridge chips. What's more, a few products produced by some motherboard manufacturers use products from different chipset companies, such as the previously upgraded KG7-RAID motherboard, AMD 760 for the North Bridge and VIA 686B for the South Bridge. The development direction of Southbridge 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 south bridge chip of the motherboard.
North bridge chip
It is the chip closest to the CPU on the motherboard, which is responsible for contacting the CPU and controlling the memory, and is used to establish the communication interface 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.
onboard sound card
The audio output chip attached to the motherboard supports independent audio output, such as ALC650 and CMI9761A.
Onboard 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. On-board RTL8 100B network card chip, because there were few broadband Internet access at that time, most of them were dial-up Internet access. Network card is not an essential accessory of computer, and there are few motherboards with network card chips on board. If you want to use a network card, you can only use an expansion card. Nowadays, with the popularity of broadband Internet access, network cards have gradually become one of the basic accessories of computers, and more and more motherboards are equipped with network card chips. In the case of using the same network card chip, there is no difference in performance between the onboard network card and the independent network card, and compared with the independent network card, the 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 costs 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 the problem that the independent network card is incompatible with the motherboard or conflicts with other equipment resources. On-board network card chips can be divided into 10/ 100Mbps adaptive network card and gigabit network card according to the speed, ordinary network card and wireless network card according to the network connection, and network card chips built in the chipset (South Bridge chips of some chipsets, such as SIS963) and independent network card chips attached to the motherboard (such as Realtek 8 139 series) according to the 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, SIS and so on.
Hard disk interface
Hard disk interface is the connection part between hard disk and host system, which is used to transfer data between hard disk cache and host memory. Different hard disk interfaces determine the connection speed between the hard disk and the computer. In the whole system, the quality of hard disk interface directly affects the running speed of the program and the performance of the system. Generally speaking, hard disk interfaces are divided into IDE, SATA, SCSI and Fibre Channel. Hard disks with IDE interface are mostly used for household products, and some are also used for servers. Hard disks with SCSI interfaces 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. Because it is in the stage of market popularization, it has broad prospects in the domestic market. Under the categories of IDE and SCSI, there are many specific interface types, and each interface has different technical specifications and different transmission speeds, such as ATA 100 and SATA. Ultra 160 SCSI and Ultra320 SCSI both represent a specific hard disk interface, and their respective speeds are quite different.
Graphics card slot standard
That is, the graphics card interface standard, the common ones are AGP 2X/4X/8X, and the latest one is PCI-Express X 16 interface.
Interconnection standard between computer and its peripheral equipment
(Peripheral Component Interconnection) A decompression card and corresponding decompression slot in a PC.
Disk array type
1)IDE disk array (according to the hard disk used, it can be divided into ATA and S-ATA). 2)SCSI-to-SCSI, low-end market positioning, rich SCSI disk array product line can meet different needs. 3) From optical fiber to optical fiber, high-end products, all advanced technologies are embodied in FC disk array system-perfect hardware redundancy, cableless modular design, turbine cooling system, LES monitoring module, GUI management software and so on. Among them, all-fiber products use FC hard disk internally, and the bandwidth of external host channel and internal disk channel is 2 GB/s. There are also semi-fiber products in the market, that is, SATA or SCSI hard disk is used internally, and the external host channel is 2G fiber. For storage systems with server expansion, DAS, SAN and NAS can be used.
Disk array mode
Disk array, simply put, is to use multiple hard disks to work at the same time to ensure data security and access speed. It * * * has nine modes, named by numbers, namely RAID 0, RAID 1 to RAID 7, RAID 0+ 1. At present, the most common modes are RAID 0, RAID 1, RAID 5, RAID 0+ 1.
power circuit
The power supply circuit is an important part of the motherboard, and its function is to convert the current transmitted by the host power supply into voltage, convert the voltage into a core voltage value acceptable to the CPU, and make the CPU work normally, and shape and filter the current transmitted by the host power supply to filter out all kinds of clutter and interference signals, so as to ensure the stable work of the computer. The main part of the power supply 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 cell on the motherboard is mainly responsible for recording CMOS setting information on the motherboard.
Basic Input/Output System
Computer users will come into contact with BIOS in the process of using computers, and BIOS 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 and output system) is ROM-BIOS, which is the abbreviation of read-only memory basic input and output system. It is actually a set of programs solidified into the computer, which provides the lowest and most direct hardware control for the computer. It is the hub connecting software programs and hardware devices. Generally speaking, BIOS is the "converter" or interface between hardware and software programs (although it is only a program itself), which is responsible for solving the immediate needs of hardware and executing it according to the running needs of software for hardware. The BIOS chip is a rectangular or square chip on the motherboard. BIOS mainly stores: self-diagnosis program: identifying hardware configuration by reading the contents of CMOS RAM, self-checking and initializing; CMOS setup program: in the boot process, start with a special hotkey, set it up and store it in CMOS RAM; System bootstrap loader: after the self-check is successful, load the boot program on the disk corresponding to channel 0 and sector 0 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 types of BIOS. With the development of hardware technology, different versions of the same BIOS appear one after another, and the new BIOS is more powerful than the old one. The function of BIOS The difference between CMOS and BIOS upgrades the function of BIOS.
Maximum memory capacity supported
The maximum memory capacity supported by the motherboard refers to the maximum capacity of the memory chip that the motherboard can insert. The motherboard will not support the memory module that exceeds the capacity even if it is inserted into the motherboard. 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 motherboards for design and cost reasons. At this time, even if the chipset supports large memory capacity, there are not enough memory slots on the motherboard to reach the theoretical maximum. For example, KT600 North Bridge can support up to 4GB of memory, but most motherboard manufacturers only provide two or three DDR DIMM memory slots with 184pin, and the 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 between various devices. The so-called main board structure is a general standard based on the layout, arrangement, size, shape and power specification 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 all variants of ATX, which are more common in foreign brand machines than in China. EATX and WATX are mostly used for server/workstation motherboards; ATX is the most common main board structure in the market at present, with many expansion slots and 4-6 PCI slots. Most motherboards adopt this structure. Miniature ATX, also known as Miniature ATX, is a simplified version of ATX structure and is often called "small board". There are few expansion slots, and the number of PCI slots is three or less, which are mostly used for brand machines with small chassis. BTX is the latest generation of main board structure developed by Intel. ATBaby ATATXMicro ATXBTX
What's the difference between MATX and ATX?
In fact, MATX and ATX motherboards are also suitable for media center computers. Which one to choose depends on two points: function and volume.
Let's talk about the volume first. MATX motherboard is small in size and occupies small internal area of the chassis; On the contrary, the ATX motherboard must be installed in a larger chassis, and the audio-visual equipment cabinet in the living room of the user's home may not be installed.
The second is functionality. As long as users buy a multifunctional MATX motherboard, most of the functions required by the media center computer have been integrated on the motherboard. At this time, if you don't count the video card, you need to buy a sound card and a TV card. Of course, it should be noted that many MATX motherboards with PCI-E display interface are designed to reduce the size. Only two PCI slots are designed on the motherboard, which can just install the above two expansion device cards-TV card and sound card. But if the user wants to add a video clip card or a high-definition TV receiving card in the future, it will not work.