MOTHERBOARD PARTS AND FUNCTIONS

CPU

Just as important as your graphics card in gaming is your computer’s processor or CPU. This typically handles much of the actual game play when you are playing games, such as taking input instructions from your mouse and keyboard, actually running the game, loading maps and backgrounds, and processing events which occur inside the game. Once calculated, these items which have been handled by the CPU are passed on to the graphics card for final rendering/display and output to your display monitor.

Graphics Card

Your graphics card is arguably the most important part of a gaming computer build. Anything displayed on your computer monitor has come directly from your graphics card (or on-board graphics processor if you don’t have a dedicated graphics card). It directly handles the processing and rendering of images which are received from your central processing unit (CPU) so that they can be displayed on your screen. Many graphics cards have in-built features to handle specific graphical aspects of game play such as image rotation/fine textures/anti-aliasing, so that your CPU doesn’t have to handle these particular operations and is free for other processing activities.

Video Card Slot

This is the type of slot that doesn’t need an explanation, as its name doesn’t leave much room for interpretation as to what its role is. Coming in the form of a PCI-Express slot on newer motherboards or AGP on older ones, the video card slot is situated right below the processor.It is not uncommon for older motherboards, especially those that target the office segment, to lack this slot, meaning that you won’t be able to install a discrete video card, thus having to rely on the integrated one. At the opposite pole, high-end gaming motherboards come with multiple video card slots, allowing the installation of multiple video cards in a SLI or CrossFire configuration.

Memory Slot

Located in the upper-right part of the motherboard, the memory slots are used to house the computer’s memory modules. The number of slots can vary, depending on motherboard, from 2, in low-end motherboards, all the way up to 8 memory slots, on high-end and gaming motherboards.

It is important to pay close attention to the type of memory a motherboard supports, in order to buy the appropriate memory modules. Newer motherboards support DDR3 memory, the current industry standard memory architecture, but motherboards with DDR2 memory slots and even DDR1 memory slots are still present on the market. An interesting aspect is that there are some older motherboard models that supported different types of memory, and usually come with two DDR1 memory slots and DDR2 memory slots, or two DDR2 slots and two DDR3 slots. These motherboards were great options for people that wanted to upgrade a motherboard without having to upgrade all the other components as well.

The number of memory slots should be an important criterion to take into account when choosing a motherboard, as it will determine the maximum amount of memory you can install.

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