Motherboard

The motherboard is the main circuit board in a PC. It contains all the circuits and components that run the PC.

Major Components found on the motherboard are:

• CPU - the Central Processing Unit is often an Intel Pentium or Celeron processor. It is the heart of every PC. All scheduling, computation and control occurs here.
  
  
• BIOS - Basic Input Output System is a non-volatile memory that contains configuration information about the PC. It contains all the code required for the CPU to communicate with the keyboard, mouse video display, disk drives and communications devices.
  
  When a PC is powered on it uses the BIOS 'boot code' to set up many required functions that bring the PC to a point where it is ready to work.
  
  
• RTC - the Real Time Clock chip keeps date, day and time in a 24 hour format just like your watch. The PC uses this clock to 'time stamp' files as they are created and modified. When you print a file it time stamps the pages as they are printed.
  
  
• Chip Set - these are large chip(s) that integrate many functions that used to be found in separate smaller chips on the motherboard. They save space and cost.
  
  The functions performed by these chip sets often broken into two devices with one providing an interface from the CPU to the memory and the other providing controllers for IDE, ISA, PCI and USB devices (see below).