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Mother Boards

Today when you talk of a PC, you think of the motherboard, You are careful to choose the PC with a reputed motherboard. This is so since motherboard constitutes a very central and crucial part of computers.The motherboard has been an integral part of most personal computers for more than 20 years. Think of a motherboard as a scale model of a futuristic city with many modular plug-in buildings, each using power from a common electrical system. Multiple-lane highways of various widths transport data between the buildings.

The motherboard is the data and power infrastructure for the entire computer. Motherboards are actually a carryover from architecture used for years in mainframe computers. Various circuit cards performing various functions all plug into many similar sockets on a common circuit board. Each circuit card performs a unique function in the computer and gets its power from the socket. Due to improvements in circuitry and packaging, motherboards have essentially stayed the same size or shrunk while their functionality has skyrocketed. The original IBM PC contained the original PC motherboard.

In this design, which premiered in 1982, the motherboard itself was a large printed circuit card that contained the 8088 microprocessor, the BIOS, sockets for the CPU's RAM and a collection of slots that auxiliary cards could plug into. If you wanted to add a floppy disk drive or a parallel port or a joystick, you bought a separate card and plugged it into one of the slots. This approach was pioneered in the mass market by the Apple II machine. By making it easy to add cards, Apple and IBM accomplished two huge things,namely they made it easy to add new features to the machine over time and they opened the computer to creative opportunities for third-party vendors. Different motherboards of different vintages typically have different form factors. The form factor is essentially the size, shape and design of the actual motherboard. There are more than a half-dozen form factors for motherboards. The motherboard, by enabling pluggable components, allows users to personalize a computer system depending on their applications and needs.

Today several established mother boards are available on demand. ASUS, Intel, Mercury and VIA are some of the motherboards with good market shares. Motherboards today come with built in graphic cards. These are called onboard graphic cards. But one has the option to choose an indepndent high end graphics card. Motherboards come in an fully assembled manner and also in the chipset form. In the fully assembled form, you need only to plug in the components, while in the chipset variey one has to assemble the motherboard itself from scratch. Motherboards contain the BIOS or the Basic Input-Output System which runs the POST (power-on system Test) once you switch on the PC. Unless you choose your motherboard with care, since it is the very foundation of your PC, the system may not perform upto the expected level.Once you have chosen a good motherboard, the task of assembling a PC is half done.

Pkp Iyer, Senior Editor, Excellone Technologies. Excellone Technologies Are Quality Webdesign And Website Development Company From India http://www.Excellone.com

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