LGA systems have lots of little pins in the motherboard, or in a socket on the board, to provide power and communications to the processor. The letters, LGA, stand for Land Grid Array, a common type of packaging technology for CPUs and other integrated circuits. This is the name used by Intel to describe the socket used to hold many of their CPUs. The diagram has a structure labelled LGA1150. That's better, but there is still a lot of sockets and connectors to talk about! Let's start near the top, with the most important one of all. Let's strip it all away and look at a simplified diagram to begin with (below). well, used) is that there are a lot of visible components, making it trickier to spot everything clearly. The only problem with the picture (other than the motherboard being quite. The image below corresponds to an Asus Z97-Pro Gamer and its appearance, features, and functions can be found in dozens more like it. We'll begin our breakdown by using a typical ATX motherboard. The performance would be terrible, though, as the signals would interfere with one another, and there would be notable power losses by using this method, too. Theoretically, the board isn't needed: you could connect everything together by using a huge mass of wires. You can see a far more comprehensive list on Wikipedia but we'll just stick to standard ATX for simplicity, because the differences generally lie in the number of sockets available to be powered and connected a bigger motherboard permits more sockets.Ī motherboard is simply a big electronic printed circuit board, with lots of connectors to plug things into and hundreds, if not thousands, of feet of electrical traces that run between the various sockets. The main sizes you're likely to come across are: Standard motherboards initially differ in terms of their size, and there are industry-wide standards that manufacturers tend to adhere to (and plenty of others that don't).
Nearly every motherboard used in a standard desktop PC today will have sockets for the central processing unit (CPU), memory modules(nearly always a type of DRAM), add-in expansion cards (such a graphics card), storage, input/ouputs, and a means to communicate with other computers and systems. holds the components in place, or provides feedback as to how well everything is functioning) but the aforementioned aspects are critical to how a PC operates, that almost every other part that makes up the motherboard, is related to these two things. There are other things a motherboard does (e.g.
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