Motherboard shopping can be confusing, especially if you only vaguely grasp how all of the million motherboard-related terms and acronyms actually fit together in a real computer. Part I of the Ars Technica Motherboard Guide covers core motherboard fundamentals--the hows, whats, and most importantly the whys of basic PC architecture and motherboard layout.




The memory bus, FSB, and PCI bus each speak a special language called a bus protocol. In fact, each type of bus that we'll meet as we explore the motherboard has a different bus protocol. Because bus protocols are unique to each type of bus, the bridge chips that connect these buses together must not only act as traffic routers, but they must also function as translators, translating information encoded in one bus protocol into another bus protocol for transmission on a different bus.




Part I takes the reader from basic computer architecture concepts all the way to the working of a real-world Pentium-era motherboard. Future installments will build on this conceptual and historical groundwork to explain how current-generation motherboards work.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/arstechnica/BAaf?m=1487