Sci-Tech Today | Inside the Motherboard: Your System's Support Structure

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Inside the Motherboard: Your System's Support Structure

November 27, 2009 6:46AM

If you face random shutdowns and hangs while doing everyday tasks such as e-mailing and Web surfing, check if your CPU or motherboard chipset has overheated. A simple finger test of touching the heatsink is enough to determine this, or you can download and run applications that specialize in monitoring temperature readings.

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[Let's] check out motherboards, the support structure for your system

. Today's motherboards come Gigabit LAN, an onboard 7.1 sound chip, graphics chip and even rudimentary RAID for your hard drives.

Additional features include BIOS overclocking options, which should interest those who want to overclock their CPU. But BIOS features that concern everyday users are the power saving features called Speedstep for Intel and Cool 'N Quiet for AMD . With these enabled, your operating system can use speed and voltage throttling so the CPU does not run at full speed all day long. And this offers huge savings in terms of power consumption because a standard dual- core CPU consumes about 65 watts of power while higher-end quad- cores take 100W to 165W.

On all motherboards, you should find four to six Serial ATA ports for your hard drives and DVD writers, a PCI-E X16 slot for your graphics card and PCI-E X1 for additional sound, LAN or TV Tuner cards. For legacy support, you can still find the PCI slot and IDE port for that old hard drive or DVD writer.

You may wonder why there are still serial and parallel ports. Well, these are for programmers who want to program code into microprocessors.

Since the motherboard is the support structure of the PC, it is usually the first to go bust -- due to age, power surges through the power or phone line, overheating or short circuits. Motherboards are not built to last, and capacitors -- those cylinder things you see on the motherboard -- are the first to go, with a life expectancy of about two to three years. Manufacturers consider that long enough as you would have upgraded your PC by then. Nevertheless, all motherboards have a one-year warranty.

Capacitors do not only burst due to old age, but also heat or power surges. Fortunately, this is an easy fix -- you can buy capacitors and solder them on if you are handy with a soldering iron.

Unfortunately, capacitors are not the only ones to go when your PC get a zapping. Mosfets and chipsets on the motherboard are likely to bite the dust, too. And these are not fixable, but can be substituted depending on which chipset is dead. (continued...)

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