Motherboard

The Memory Slots

Yes, the motherboard is the mother of all boards on your computer. The motherboard may have a form factor of AT or ATX. We recommend you use ATX motherboards with ATX cases since this is the newer alternative and most modern microprocessors run on ATX motherboards. The motherboard holds the microprocessor, the memory, and several card slots. The memory may be SIMM sockets or DIMM sockets. The current standard is DIMM socketed memory. This is usually 168 pin 3 volt unbuffered synchronous DRAM memory. PC100 or PC133 memory is the current memory of choice. Most boards have 3 or 4 memory slots, which may, depending on the size of DIMM used, allow up or beyond 1 Gb total system memory. Most boards commonly allow 384 to 512 Mb of system RAM.

The expansion bus

The card slots are used to put additional cards such as video cards, sound cards, internal modems, or network cards into. Some motherboards today include video and sound without the addition of a extra card. These cards slots today are mostly PCI type card slots. When talking about cards that are plugged into a PC you are talking about the expansion bus. The expansion bus is a means of a microprocessor extending its communication ability further into the outside world. It is a data exchange means between add on cards and the microprocessor and the motherboard. There have been several types of expansion buses.

ISA - Industry Standard Architecture. Used when the original 8088 8bit microprocessor based personal computers were produced.
EISA - Extended ISA used when the 80286 through 80486 series microprocessors were being produced. This bus is still used but is being phased out and is almost gone today.
MCI - Microchannel architecture by IBM and used mainly on IBM brand computers.
PCI - Peripheral Component Interconnect. The popular expansion bus of choice. It is significantly faster than EISA.
AGP - Accelerated Graphics Port. This bus is developed for fast video cards. It is currently up to 4X mode speed.
The current popular expansion bus is the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) bus for all cards except the graphics cards. For graphics cards, the bus of choice is AGP. Most motherboards today have one AGP slot and several PCI slots. Your expansion cards will plug into these card slots. Be sure you get cards that match the available type of slots on your motherboard.