Basic motherboard help!

[Unrealmaster287]

Hey,
I am looking into building my own system but one of the areas that frustrates me is motherboards as there are no “up to date” guides for how they work or what are their components (chocks, PCIE, VRM or something like that)
What is a north and a south bridge! (And why does the asus TUF motherboard says they replaced the Northbridge)
Would anyone kindly explain motherboards for me i.e what are, chokes misfits and What is a PCIE and the difference between PCIE 16 and 8 as well as the ram slots, etc

If you could tell me the awnser or simply direct me to a decent guide that will be great

Please note that I only have a top layer understanding of hardware so keep it simple please.
Thank you sooooooooooooooooo much in advance!!!!

 

[4745454b]

Try reading the wiki's on these terms. Ask any questions you don't understand.

 

[alvine]

hello

north bridge is responsible for the cpu, pcie or agp slots, and ram

south bridge is responsible for pci slots, system clock, usb slots (the little pins you connect your USB headers to)


as to why asus would replace northbridge i dont really know...maybe a better heatsink to dissipate the heat better. Your have to increase your northbridge voltages when you are overclocking to keep the system stable

pcie 16 and 8 refers to how many lanes each slot have. single pcie slot motherboards have 16 lane pcie slot. each lane has 2.5gbps transfer rates if i remember correctly...when you get into dual pcie motherboard the cheaper ones will run at 16x on one slot and 4x on the other one. that means the cheaper motherboard will not run your second graphic card at the full speed. better motherboards will have 8x 8x or 16x 16x...there are even motherboard with 3 pcie slots but thats extreme...components are not created equaly


hope this helps

 

[4745454b]

SB usually handles PCIe 1x slots. 4x slots as well, not sure about the 8x. The NB has been moved onto the CPU in many cases so thats probably what they are talking about. I think Intel's term for the remaining chip is "MCH" or Media Controlling Hub. It's basically the SB of old.

Again, we could write pages about this stuff, but its already down on the wiki pages.