Pc Anatomy

Hard Disk Drive

Floppy Disk Drive

Chipsets

North Bridge

The North Bridge connects to the faster buses, which are:

The processor bus, otherwise known as the system or front

side bus, connected to the CPU only, via a large square

socket.

The memory bus which connects to main memory. Usually

there are 2 - 4 long black slots with white clips at each end to

connect memory modules to this bus.

The AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) bus. Developed from

the PCI bus described below, this is a high speed bus to connect to one video adapter card only. The one AGP slot is

usually brown.

South Bridge

Linked to the North Bridge by a proprietary bus which we don't need to

consider, the South Bridge connects to the following slower buses, devices

and ports:

The PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus. This is used to connect

other adapter cards to the system. Motherboards usually have 3 - 6 white

slots, parallel to the AGP slot but slightly offset, which allow adapter cards to

connect to the PCI bus.

The IDE (Integrated Drive Electronics) or ATA (AT Attachment - does anyone

remember the IBM AT?) interface. Your hard disk and CR-ROM drives connect

to the South Bridge via broad flat "ribbon" cables plugged into two 40 pin

connectors on the motherboard.

The ISA (Industry Standard Architecture) bus. Being based on the original

IBM AT design, this has long slots usually black in colour adjacent to the PCI

slots. This older technology bus disappeared from most new

motherboards, although a few current Pentium III/Celeron motherboards still

have an ISA bus with one slot for compatibility with some older interface cards.

South bridge

USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports. These sit on the edge of the motherboard so that they can be accessed from the rear of the PC, together with all the other motherboard ports.

Super I/O chip which provides a floppy disk controller, two serial port controllers and one parallel port controller. A single 34 pin connector near the IDE connectors is used to connect to the floppy disk drive.

BIOS ROM (Basic Input Output System - Read Only Memory). The BIOS is very low level software that interfaces between the operating system and the hardware. It also includes the first software the CPU runs when the system is turned on, which loads the operating system from the hard disk into main memory and transfers control to it. For this reason, the BIOS is stored in a ROM chip, which keeps its data intact even when power is turned off.

Diagram for modern

motherboard

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