Tech Lover 9

⦁    A motherboard is a large piece of printed circuit board (PCB) that attaches to the inside of your system’s case. Motherboards feature attachments for different computer devices   processors, hard drives, CD and DVD drives, add-on cards, and USB ports. All of these devices connect to the motherboard directly, as in the case of video cards, or indirectly via cables, as in the case of hard drives and optical drives.

⦁    You can think of the motherboard as a hub, a central station through which all information must pass. The front-side bus (FSB) speed of your motherboard measures how quickly it can pass information along to different PC devices. Faster FSB speeds mean increased system performance.

⦁    When a feature is advertised as “onboard,” this means it is integrated directly onto the motherboard. For example, “onboard sound” means that the motherboard has a chip on it which produces sound. The same holds true for onboard graphics and Ethernet. Users concerned with high performance may want to reduce the number of onboard feature to their system by adding cards for certain applications.

⦁    Motherboards are custom-built to support a certain range of processors. You cannot, for example, place an AMD Athlon processor on a motherboard designed to support an Intel Pentium 4 processor. Additionally, a motherboard will only support certain types of processors.

⦁    The processor, also called the Central Processing Unit (CPU), is the brain of your system. The processor executes instructions, transforming computer code into real-time action. The processor is an important factor in determining the speed of a system.

⦁    The faster the processor the faster it can handle information and the faster the system will run overall.

⦁    In recent years, CPU makers Intel and AMD have introduced many new features to their processor lines. Read on for some definitions of terms related to processors.