Exploring the Motherboard and Buses
NT1110

What are the major components of the motherboard? Provide a brief description of each component. The major components to the motherboard are the power supply, memory slots, expansion board slots, mass storage, I/O ports, and the CPU. The power supply is used to supply all of the computer with the appropriate power. The memory slots are used for inserting Random Access Memory cards into, to allow memory to be temporarily stored only when power is applied. If power is lost, the memory will be lost. Expansion board slot are used to support adapter cards such as PCI express, AGP, or PCI cards. These slots allow for many different additions onto the motherboard, graphics cards, addition USB ports, LAN cards, etc. Mass storage are simply nothing more than the hard drives and optical drives. The I/O ports are ports that come integrated to the motherboard, which means it cannot be removed. But the ports can be anything from mouse/keyboard hook ups, to integrated Ethernet ports. Finally the Central Processor Unit, CPU, the brain of the computer. This is where the calculations are all done and how fast they can be done is determined by the power of the CPU.
Upgrading only the motherboard will give some performance improvement to a computer system. Why would the improvement be limited? The upgrade would be limited because the motherboard is merely nothing more than an information high way but you can direct the motherboard towards a path that best suits you. Such as, going towards a better gaming pc, or a higher CPU performance. This can be limited because not all motherboards fit in just any case, or some motherboards must be compatible with your CPU, and other components.
What is the need for all the different busses found on a motherboard? Why can these busses not be replaced with a single bus? The main busses are power,