PARTS OF THE MOTHERBOARD

MOTHERBOARD

A motherboard is the central printed circuit board (PCB) in some complex electronic systems, such as modern personal computers. The motherboard is sometimes alternatively known as the mainboard, system board, or, on Apple computers, the logic board. It is also sometimes casually shortened to mobo.

ZIF

ZIF is an acronym for zero insertion force, a concept used in the design of IC sockets, invented to avoid problems caused by applying force upon insertion and extraction.

A normal integrated circuit (IC) socket requires the IC to be pushed into sprung contacts which then grip by friction. For an IC with hundreds of pins, the total insertion force can be very large (tens of newtons), leading to a danger of damage to the device or the PCB. Also even with relatively small pin counts each extraction is fairly awkward and carries a significant risk of bending pins (particularly if the person performing the extraction hasn't had much practice or the board is crowded), as can be seen with the unpopular front-loading mechanism of the Nintendo Entertainment System. Low insertion force (LIF) sockets reduce the issues of insertion and extraction but the lower the insertion force of a conventional socket, the less reliable the connection is likely to be.

With a ZIF socket, before the IC is inserted, a lever or slider on the side of the socket is moved, pushing all the sprung contacts apart so that the IC can be inserted with very little force (generally the weight of the IC itself is sufficient with no external downward force required). The lever is then moved back, allowing the contacts to close and grip the pins of the IC. ZIF sockets are much more expensive than standard IC sockets and also tend to take up a larger board area. Such a technique has disadvantages that the connector will occupy a large volume since it adds the space of the drawbars and the slidable space thereof. Therefore, the technique is not useful in the future development of the chips with a high density and large number of pins. Further, the connecting construction of the patent is not good enough to provide a close engagement between the pins and the drawbars. There are only two engagement points between the pins and the drawbars which will probably result in a poor connection in a short time. Also they are known to bend the IC pins at times. Therefore they are only used when there is a good reason to do so.

Large ZIF sockets are commonly mounted on PC motherboards (from about the mid 1990s forward). These CPU sockets are designed to support a particular range of CPUs, allowing computer retailers and consumers to assemble motherboard/CPU combinations based on individual budget and requirements. CPUs may also be upgraded or replaced during the lifetime of the motherboard socket. Personal computers are among the few applications expensive enough to justify elaborate socket systems. Smaller ZIF sockets are also commonly used in chip-testing and programming equipment.

INTERNAL PARTS OF SYSTEM UNIT

IDE CABLE

It is a standard type of connection for storage devices in a PC. Generally, it refers to the types of cables and ports used to connect some hard drives and optical drives to each other and to the motherboard.

COOLING UNIT

Computer cooling is the process of removing heat from computer components.

A computer system's components produce large amounts of heat during operation, including integrated circuits such as CPUs, chipset and graphics cards, along with hard drives. This heat must be dissipated in order to keep these components within their safe operating temperatures, and both manufacturing methods and additional parts are used to keep the heat at a safe level. This is done mainly using heat sinks to increase the surface area which dissipates heat, fans to speed up the exchange of air heated by the computer parts for cooler ambient air, and in some cases softcooling, the throttling of computer parts in order to decrease heat generation.

Overheated parts generally exhibit a shorter maximum life-span and may give sporadic problems resulting in system freezes or crashes.

CMOS BATTERY

All computers that have an 80286 processor or later require a small battery on the system board that provides power to the Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) chip, even while the computer is turned off. This chip contains information about the system configuration (e.g., hard disk type, floppy drive types, date and time, and the order in which the computer will look for bootable disks).

MOTHERBOARD

A motherboard is the central printed circuit board (PCB) in some complex electronic systems, such as modern personal computers. The motherboard is sometimes alternatively known as the mainboard, system board, or, on Apple computers, the logic board. It is also sometimes casually shortened to mobo.

LAN CARD

A Network card, Network Adapter, LAN Adapter or NIC (network interface card) is a piece of computer hardware designed to allow computers to communicate over a computer network. It is both an OSI layer 1 (physical layer) and layer 2 (data link layer) device, as it provides physical access to a networking medium and provides a low-level addressing system through the use of MAC addresses. It allows users to connect to each other either by using cables or wirelessly.

HARD DISK

A hard disk drive (HDD), commonly referred to as a hard drive, hard disk, or fixed disk drive, is a non-volatile storage device which stores digitally encoded data on rapidly rotating platters with magnetic surfaces. Strictly speaking, "drive" refers to a device distinct from its medium, such as a tape drive and its tape, or a floppy disk drive and its floppy disk. Early HDDs had removable media; however, an HDD today is typically a sealed unit (except for a filtered vent hole to equalize air pressure) with fixed media.

POWER SUPPLY UNIT

A power supply unit (PSU) is the component that supplies power to a computer. More specifically, a power supply is typically designed to convert 100-120 V