Identifying Components of Motherboards
- Motherboard - the spine of the computer
- a.k.a. system board or planar board
- Connects together all the other components of a PC
- Two major types of system boards
- Nonintegrated - all the major assemblies are installed as expansion cards
- These are difficult to find nowadays.
- Integrated - most of the components that were previously installed as expansion cards are now integrated into the circuitry of the motherboard.
- Integrated motherboards are cheaper to produce but expensive to repair as the whole motherboard must be replaced when one component breaks.
System Board Form Factors
- ATX - Advanced Profile Extended
- The processor and memory are at right angles to the expansion cards and are in line with the fan, allowing the processor to run cooler.
- This is the primary motherboard in use today.
- microATX
- Uses the same component placement design as ATX motherboards but has a smaller footprint.
- Has fewer memory modules, headers, expansion slots, integrated components, and chassis bays.
- Was designed for lower wattage power supplies.
- LPXe
- Lack formal standardization and its riser card interfaces varied from vendor to vendor.
- Was popular in the 1990s until the advent of the Pentium II processor and the Accelerated Graphics Port (AGP).
- Was inadequate at cooling and accommodating high pin counts.
- NLX - New Low-Profile Extended
- Uses riser cards to place the expansion slots sideways on the motherboard so that the reduced vertical space of the low-profile case is used optimally.
- Was designed to replace LPX but never became as widely used as LPX was.
- BTX - Balanced Technology Extended
- Was designed by Intel.
- Was met with resistance by customers who foresaw ever rising prices and manufacturers who was increased research and development expenses and greater potential profit loss.
- Lined up the components that produced the most heat between air intake vents and the power supply's exhaust fan and used a passive heat sink to cool the CPU and other components.
