One of the main and one of the most
important components you'll find on the motherboard is the chipset Older motherboards were designed with a
lot of different chips scattered all over the motherboard There were chips for different things,
like chips for bus controllers, memory controllers, keyboard controllers, and so
on so they had a lot of different chips
controlling different functions on the motherboard. So as technology progressed,
computer engineers decided to reduce the number of chips and have them more in a
centralized location So instead of having these different
chips scattered all over the motherboard, controlling different functions, they
reduced the number of chips to do the same job and condense them to only a few
chips, or what's now called a chipset and that's what a chipset is, a chipset
is a smaller set of chips that has replaced a larger amount of chips and the chipset's job is to control data
flow between the CPU, the peripherals, bus slots, and memory So all of the different parts of the
computer communicate with the CPU through the chipset The chipset basically consists of two
chips one is called the northbridge and the
other is called the southbridge The northbridge is located in the upper
or northern part of the motherboard, providing you're looking at the
motherboard in the upright position It's located near the CPU and is
directly connected to the CPU It's also directly connected to the
memory and the AGP and PCI-Express slots So in order for the CPU to communicate
with the memory and the AGP or PCI-Express bus, it has to go through the northbridge
first So the northbridge acts like a
communication middleman between the CPU, AGP or PCI-Express, and memory The other chip is called the south
bridge and the southbridge is located at the
bottom or southern portion of the motherboard, near the PCI bus slots The southbridge connects to the PCI bus
slots, SATA, and IDE connectors, and USB ports. So the southbridge is responsible for
the lower portion of the motherboard While the northbridge is responsible
for the upper portion There is no direct connection between
the CPU and the lower portion of the motherboard So if the PCI, USB, IDE, or SATA ports
needed to communicate with the CPU, the information has to go through the south
bridge and then up through the northbridge and then to the CPU The northbridge is faster than the
southbridge, and that's because the CPU, the PCI-E, AGP, and memory are the most
used and most important components of the motherboard. So they need to operate
at the highest speeds possible The slower southbridge communicates with
the PCI bus, SATA, and IDE connectors, and USB ports and they don't need to be as fast as the
other components So basically the higher speed components
are connected to the northbridge and the slower components are connected
to the southbridge Now both the north and southbridge make these
connections to various parts of the motherboard using pathways called a bus and a bus is simply a set of pathways
that allows data and signals to travel between components on the motherboard the motherboard contains several kinds
of buses that vary in speed and bandwidth. so for example if a bus speed is set to
operate at 66 MHz then that means that, that particular bus
can send data at 66 million cycles per second. the higher the bus speed, the faster the
computer can send data which improves the performance of the computer A motherboard's bus speed generally refers
to the speed of the front side bus The front side bus is the connection
between the CPU and the northbridge chipset.
