BUTTONS
MOTHERBOARDS
A novice computer person may ask, what in the world is a motherboard? The motherboard is the main circuit board of a
computer which links all of the components of the computer together. It houses the CPU socket, RAM slots, IDE controllers,
North and South bridges, AGP slot, PCI slots, and video and sound on some models. Here are locations on the motherboard, for
some computer components, in the picture above.
The green fan seen in the top right hand corner is where the processor is located. Under the fan is a metal heatsink which
is connected to the processor so it will not overheat. The white circle represents a PCI slot, which is where a person connects
components to their computer such as sound cards and USB ports. To the right of the circle is a card with blue lining; this is
a video card connected to an AGP slot. An AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot, as the name denotes, is only used for video
cards.
Below the video card, a person will notice the entanglement of multicolored wires. These are the power cables which connect
to each drive and come from the power supply. Along with the multicolored wires, large grey flat cables are seen. These are
IDE cables which send data to and from the motherboard to a device such as a hard drive or CDROM drive.