CompTIA A+® Certification All-In-One For Dummies®, 2nd Edition

1.5. Getting an A+

This chapter introduces you to a number of key components of the motherboard and different motherboard form factors. The following is a list of the key points to remember when dealing with motherboards:

• The motherboard (or system board) is the computer component that interconnects all other components.

• Serial (COM) ports come in two flavors: DB9-male and DB25-male. Parallel ports come in only a DB25-female port.

• The two main types of cache memory are L1 and L2 cache. L1 cache memory is integrated into the processor, and L2 cache is contained outside the processor but in the processor casing or on the motherboard.

• IDE supports two devices in the IDE chain, whereas EIDE has two channels with two devices in each channel (a total of four devices).

• A number of major motherboard form factors are available: Full AT, Baby AT, NLX, and ATX, to name a few. Motherboard form factors differ in the size of the board and the layout of the components stored on the board.

• You may add components, such as a sound card or network card, to the computer by inserting an expansion card into one of the expansion slots in the system.

• ISA was the popular bus architecture for years, but because of its limitations (16-bit architecture and a speed of 8 MHz), it has been replaced by the PCI bus architecture. PCI is a 32-bit/64-bit architecture with a speed of 33 MHz.

• AGP and PCI Express are the common bus architectures used to insert a video card in today's systems.

• You may increase the performance ...