PC Motherboard Evolution

[Music] welcome to another video from explaining computers comm this time I'm going to discuss how we've progressed from desktop PC motherboards that looked like this to those that look like this now I want to stress from a start I'm not going to attempt to cover absolutely every technology that ever been associated with a desktop PC motherboard this video is not a definitive history rather what I am going to do here is to use older desktop PC motherboard I've got in my possession to demonstrate on motherboards and a desktop computing more generally have evolved over the past few decades right here's the first motherboard were going to look at this is a three eight-six motherboard for about 1990 1991 I actually showed you this motherboard in my PCIe video about of four or five weeks back and at the time I thought it was from 1989 but someone said in the comment no that's 1991 so since I've checked on all the different parts on the board there's no model number but this chip here this system controller chip he's definitely from October 1990 so this board is either late 1990 or early 1991 and as you can see it definitely looks like a a PC motherboard it's very different to the ones we know today it's a dominated by it too is a slots these are the slots were put the expansion cards in we've got six of these which are 16-bit - which are 8-bit and it's also fairly dominated by these at the top these are it's sim slots for putting in memory sim standing for single inline memory module today we have memory in dims dual inline memory modules but then we had Sims and these are a 30 pin Sims and if we look at these on the back of the board we can maybe a take one out I'm fairly certain these are one megabyte modules this board could take up to 60 megabytes of RAM so we just have to flip little clips they're slightly more careful we do today and they stick forward that way and come out like that you had to put the memory in on these boards in the right order you had to put it to the stack II top but there we are that's what 28 year older memory looks like so we can put it back in hopefully we can under oh yes we can we can clip it back into place now if we turn to the top shot one of the things that really stands out on this motherboard compared to modern motherboards is how inconspicuous the processor is and the processor here isn't one of the larger ships that will of these control chips the processor is actually this chip here which has got Intel acknowledged you may be able to see doesn't that like with any other writing there at all if I photograph it from just the right angle you can see that is writing on it and it tells us into the intel 80386 sx20 and this is a processor it came out in 1988 it's a cut-down version of the original eight oh three eight six chipper camera five and as the name implies it runs at 20 megahertz yes this is a 20 megahertz microprocessor unbelievably slow compared to modern ships and one of the things that's very very obvious here compared to a modern motherboards of course there's no cooling on this chip there's no heatsink on the processor but there's no fans on this or anywhere else on the board they just aren't needed it just didn't get that warm going longer to 20 megahertz you might have noticed there is a socket here on the board you might have thought initially this walter processor socket mr. president was missing it's not this is actually a math coprocessor socket so if you wanted to help out your processor with the hard sums you could plug in a Moscow processor on this board now in addition to having a small uncalled processor the other thing it's very different to a modern motherboard here comes with if we look at the back of the board and if we do so you'll see well this basically there's nothing here we would expect on the modern motherboard have lots of connectors here to plug plug things into monitor and sound and USB ports all that sort of thing here I've only got one port which is here and this port is a 5-pin din connector also known as an IBM 80 keyboard connector in computing circles or you plugged in your keyboard and I probably should say about looking at a close-up of this that this motherboard is non-functional this motherboard came into my possession many many years ago to be used for photographic purposes they wanted to photograph old motherboards so it was never intended to be working it's not being kept in the best of circumstances for many years you can see it is slightly corroded that's why this board is in that shape anyway coming back to the top of the board because we don't have any interfaces on the back here to connected peripherals we don't even have an interface on this board to connect in a drive for example all of the interfaces on a computer like this had to be plugged in as expansion cards so not only did you have to plug in things like this which is a very old VGA card you can probably see the port on the end nervous has lost a few of its chips to various things over time but that was a VGA card at one point in time you also had to plug in cards like this one and this is a car that gave you lots of different interfaces so it gave you interfaces to connect in your floppy disk drive you can see their floppy disk interfaces here and below that we've got an ID II interface an integrated Drive electronics interface which the main method we used to connect drives to most pcs before we had a SATA connectors so those are on this card we've also got up here got connectors for serial ports and parallel port and we've also got a some connected already on the end of the board this is is a game connector for some reason on this PC back in the 1991 so there we are and just to point out that using these interfaces you have to be a little bit careful putting things together I've got the cable here this is a floppy drive cable which would connect on there you'll see on this the way these works you could have two drives on one cable and this was this was connecting the five and a quarter inch floppy drivers connectedness with a half inch floppy drive and on the other end this is the bit it goes onto the board and you might be able to see heavy just pull it round like that there's perfectly easy to put this on either way around it doesn't mind which way you plug it in but of course only one of them works so I happen to know it plugs in this way around like this is how it went onto this card but you could put it in the wrong way around and then of course things wouldn't work computing you have to be a little bit more care of her to check things and double-check things as you put things together compare today we're not often you've got you know you can't really put things in wrong unless you really really force to win and clearly it shouldn't go in that way anyway there's lots of bits from a 386 PC and I found this when I was searching around a bit earlier on this is a another 386 motherboard you can see the 3x6 chip down here and this is obviously assembled in a rather dusty state this is a PC I didn't know I had and you're gonna go Chris how can you have a PC around like this you don't even know you have it was at a bag oh of course you wouldn't never go in the bag then Chris I thought it was actually a 486 BC I was going to show you in that segment but it wasn't so I'm not gonna be showing you or Hawaii sex PC in the next segment anyway I thought I'd show you this instead I was rather surprised to find it and you can see this is pretty much like the book we just looked at it's clearly a bigger board and it's got three cards plugged in it's got the card for interfaces it's got a graphics card with a network card plugged in if you won't have a network connection on a PC you had to plug it in again through an i/o sake slot anyway I thought you might like to see that just another piece either in my collection but now I think we'll move on to look at another generation of motherboard well here I am back again with another motherboard this is a gigabyte ga6 be a from 1999 so we've moved from the early 90s to the late 1990s and I think that was a period of time we saw the most fundamental change with PC motherboard clearly motherboards have changed a lot since 1999 but the really big changes in parent technology for me what we're sitting in that nap 90s period anyway we look at this board compared to the last one so we've still got some is a slot 16-bit is a slots for the expansion cards but we've also got some PCI slots now and an AGP port an accelerated graphics port for connecting a a graphics card and you see the memory is a lot more familiar to us today we've now got dims dual inline memory module C's 168 pin for the modules rather than Simms on the last board and they've got more tradition little connectors to click things in place these are not the same memory connectors we have today but they're far more similar to the ones you'd seen a model motherboard now if we look at the back of this board once again you'll see it only got one connector that a DIN connector for the classic IBM PC keyboard but what we do have on this board is lots of connectors on the ball itself so we've got pretty much all of you interfaces on board with the exception of sound and the video we still have to add cars for sound and a video output but we have here three storage connectors a floppy drive connector two IDE connectors for connecting either hard drives or optical drives CD drives and these as you can see have little notches in them now so with the right connector you can't put things in the wrong way round into it into these particular sockets on the other side of the board we find onboard connectors for serial and parallel connectors which you connect things like printer and we've also got a socket here for a ps2 mouse connector all of those are smaller connectors where you see on the back and many rows of words connecting your mouse it wasn't directly on the board here but there was a connector for it and then the most interesting thing for me is over here we have a USB connector this is connected to USB port not in the same type of stock equip seated a little little bit different and this is a USB explained over this is USB one or USB 1.1 it certainly isn't USB to the manual is talk for this ball about USB 2 it might even be USB 1.0 but this is the very start of seeing USB connectors on a motherboard now if we come back to the top shot you might again be thinking where is the processor on this motherboard is it under this heat sink here well it isn't this is a not the processor the processor on this motherboard wasn't fitted in a socket it was fitted in a slot and you're thinking no cuz we could never done that but we did this is a processor slot this is called slot one from Intel and this was a rather strange venture in the desktop PC motherboard evolution but it happened for a little while because the pentium ii processor this is a pentium ii motherboard and the some pentium 3 processors fitted into slot one so if i show you here some older processors here we've got a a 486 processor which is clearly not an intel chipper to clone and this on the back of it though has pins to drop into a socket is as you would expect and this is a later pentium 3 processor which also has that pins to drop into a socket as you expect on the back and this is a pentium 4 processor and this also has a pins on the back to drop into a socket and these days they still is pretty much the case many intel the processors now have a pins inside the socket rather on the chip itself at this basic principle having pins that drop into a socket or socket to drop into pins if you'd like is what we still see on microprocessors today but the pentium ii processor we can see here is very different this is a very bulky item this is an Intel Pentium 2 SL 2 QC 2 300 megahertz processor and integrated into what we see here is also a heatsink we've got a fan the back as well a wire with a fan you can see the the slot in the bottom where we could connect into the motherboard this is really a processor module and it even came with a little to the hologram on the top for reasons I suppose it was marketing like like that it looks looked rather good didn't it and let's try to fit this in our motherboard and here we go at the slots in like this there we are we fitted to processor we can fit the fan as well put the wyman over there so we got that in place too and there we are a pretty quick fitting of a processor now the final thing I want to point out using this board is that before this century when you put pcs together you had to configure the board to work with its components like the processor everything wasn't sorted out automatically when you plug things in and to work make out the sort of thing I'm talking about here it's worth pointing out that motherboards and processors have for many many years run at different speeds so there is a clock speed for the motherboard what's called the frontside bus speed so for example this motherboard can run it either 66 or 100 megahertz and then was a a speed for the processor this is a 300 megahertz processor so you have to set a clock multiplier to get the processor to run faster than the motherboard and on the board like this and boards were thought he had to do that yourself and the way you did it there's lots of jumpers on this board all that was aboard was little sets of pins and jumpers you can set was about 13 of them if you encounter all over the place and you have to set these in the right places to make everything work so you can see here in the middle of the board we have the jumper where you can set the clock speed and then we also have to set over here there is what's called a dip switch and if you look at that you can see this is a set of little switches you can set it with your fingers or with a pen nib or something like that and this has to correspond to the right data for the process who you've got so we look in the middle on motherboard there is a little table here it shows you how things should be set and you can see we have to set certain positions so we'll have a motherboard clock multiplier of three for this particular board so it got over 100 megahertz board with a clock multiplier of three which would run our 300 megahertz processor so that sort of thing today we just don't have to worry about it we have it very easy today when putting motherboards together but that wasn't the case not that long ago so here is our third motherboard and this is a gigabyte ga8 IPE 1000 Pro G what a name for a motherboard and this hails from 2004 and you might have noticed this is a very large board motherboards come in all sorts of sizes this is a full sized ATX board which means it's 12 inches by nine point six inches boards come with all sorts of different sizes doesn't matter how big your motherboard is providing it fits in your case and this board from what five years after the board we were just looking at you can see very much looks like a modern ball for start it's dominated by the cooling system heat seeking the fan on the processor which is a here covering a Pentium 4 3 gigahertz chip and we've still got a PCI slots we've got an AGP port for our graphics card and a look around the back here our RAM is inner DIMM slots as it was on the last board I'll say no more about ramp here cuz gonna make a whole video about Graham in the history of ramp coming up so I live a ramp for now and we've also on this board still got a couple of IDE ports for connecting in drives and also still a floppy disk connector however we move across you can see things have moved on a mass storage front because we now have two serial ata or SATA connectors for connecting drives as we use still to this day and we've also here in terms of a interfaces on the board now got some very familiar-looking USB 2 motherboard headers far more significantly on the other side of the board we've got all of these this isn't just a board which has got onboard interfaces it's got the connectors for the interfaces as we've come to expect today so we don't just have a keyboard connector here on the this side of the board and this keyboard connector is now actually a ps/2 connector rather the bigger fight finding connector and we've got Mouse and the same format can plug in there but we've also got the USB 2 connectors and we've got parallel port and serial ports and we've also got two Ethernet on the board and we've got audio on this board so this is much more like a motherboard we see today we don't have any onboard video on this board on both video did start to arrive in in the mid nineties but at least this board is out looking much more complete this much more on the board itself so let's now jump forward in time once again to 2010 and to this gigabyte GA 31m ESL to motherboard in a micro ATX form factor and this is getting is really very close to modern board we're in our current decade and you can see again it's dominated by the the cooling system is not a stock Intel cooler this is a Zalman cooler I used to love Zalman coolers you can't get many more but they were they were really nice and this board is a 2.4 gigahertz core 2 quad system so we've moved to the multiple core processors by this point in time and you can also see we've got some very modern technologies here we've got a PCIe x 16 slot for our graphics card another PCIe slot here as well as a couple of PCI slots and we've still got a floppy drive connector still hanging on just in here and down the front we've got one IDE connector because on this board we've got four SATA connectors so clearly we're seeing a shift in storage from an IDE to setup if we look at the back of the board you'll see what amongst all the connectors here we've now got a VGA port so this board has got integrated graphics you don't have to write a graphics card to get something onto a monitor from this board and indeed by 2010 virtually all motherboards being sold had got all the major interfaces integrated onto the board spanning the entirety of the 90s and the naughties we've now looked at four different motherboard which I think have shown us a great deal about PC motherboard evolution and we're finishing up with this board which is a gigabyte H 170 d3h and on this very modern-looking board you can see there is no floppy disk connector here no IDE connectors here all of a storage connectivity is via SATA or via PCIe Vyra and m dot 2 connector on the board here we could put in an nvme SSD in there we've still got some PCI slots here but ER we've also got a clearly a PCI e on a modern board and we look at the back panel connector we've now got USB 3 ports here we've got a VGA port but also a DVI socket and an HDMI socket lots of leads of connecting the display to this ball so there we are that is the end of our journey this is where at least for now we've ended up in terms of PC motherboard evolution as we've seen in this video over the past few decades desktop PC motherboards have changed very significantly and we should expect this level of change to continue into the future indeed I'm already working on a video called the future of a desktop PC in which I've got to try and predict where that technology will take us in the next 10 years but now that's it for this time we've enjoyed this video please press that like button if you haven't subscribed please subscribe and I hope to talk to you again very soon [Music] you

Channel: ExplainingComputers

Views: 353,977

Keywords: PC motherboards, PC motherboard history, motherboard, motherboards, motherboard history, retro computing, retro, computing, retro motherboards, 386, 80386, Pentium II, Slot 1, Intel Slot 1, Christopher Barnatt, Barnatt, PC history, classic computing, classic, computing history, old computers, old, ISA slots, IDE, SATA, PCI, PCIe

Id: sewt2pqc3us

Length: 19min 29sec (1169 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 14 2018