The motherboard’s printed circuit board connects the different components of the computer into two chipsets or the main regions of the board.
The first region of the motherboard is referred to as the Northbridge. The Northbridge is known as the memory controller hub because it transfers high speed communication between the central processing unit (CPU) to other performance sensitive components like the system memory and graphics cards. It connects to the CPU through the Front-Side Bus which is one of the largest and fastest bus on the motherboard, the memory bank slots through the memory bus, and the graphics adapter slot (PCI express) through the high-speed graphics bus. The Northbridge also connects to the Southbridge via the internal bus. You can normally point out where the Northbridge is by locating the passive heat sink located near the CPU and where the Southbridge is by locating the passive heat sink located near the BIOS.
The second region of the motherboard is referred to as the Southbridge. The Southbridge is known as the I/O controller bus because it acts as the communications hub for less performance sensitive components like the many inputs and outputs of the computer. The Southbridge does this by connecting the BIOS via the low pin count bus to the various peripheral slots and connectors on the motherboard via the PCI bus. The first of which is the PCI slots. PCI stands for the peripheral component interconnect and it connects various devices like network cards, sound cards, modems, extra ports such as USB or serial, TV tuner cards and disk controllers. The Southbridge also connects to the onboard graphics controller which operates the integrated graphics your chipset platform may support, the SATA ports for storage and optical components, and the Super I/O which is supports the legacy interface connectors like serial, parallel, floppy drive, PS/2 keyboard and mouse ports.
There are many different chipset platforms that supports different CPU compatibility, features, and generations of connectors. For example, the latest Intel x99 chipset is designed to work with core i7 5xxx series 6 core and 8 core CPUs in the LGA 2011 v3 socket which requires DDR4 memory and are compatitble with PCIe 3.0 graphics cards and other expansion cards. Now the difference between this chipset platforms and others is that the memory and PCIe support which used to be the Northbridge’s job and is now built into this platform’s CPU. So, the advancements in chipset platforms continuously evolves the typical motherboard chipset functionality to feature new and exciting ways to perform the same jobs a typical motherboard performs but better and more efficiently. There are many more different chipset platforms with support of different CPUs, features and generations of connectors that evolve the efficiency of our computers which is one reason why motherboards are an under-hyped component of the everyday computer.
The next motherboard centered article apart of the more broad Comptia A+ series of articles will cover the various types of CPU sockets.
