CompTIA A_ Certification All-In-One Exam Guide, Seventh Edition - Michael Meyers [132]
There are a limited number of chipset makers. The dominant chipset vendors today are Intel and NVIDIA, although several other companies continue to produce chipsets, such as AMD through its ATI brand. Motherboard manufacturers incorporate the chipsets into motherboards that match the feature set of the chipset. Chipset companies rise and fall every few years, with one company seeming to hold the hot position for a while until another company comes along to unseat them.
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NOTE In an average year, chipset makers collectively produce around one hundred new chipset models for the PC market.
Figure 9-15 Driver disc for ASUS motherboard
Chipset makers don’t always use the terms Northbridge and Southbridge. Chipsets for AMD-based motherboards tend to use the terms, but Intel-based motherboards prefer to say Memory Controller Hub (MCH) for the Northbridge and I/O Controller Hub (ICH) for the Southbridge. With the launch of the X58 Express Chipset, Intel has further refined their terminology, calling the Northbridge simply the I/O Hub (IOH) since the memory controller is located on the CPU. Sometimes Intel refers to the Southbridge as the Legacy I/O Controller Hub. Regardless of the official name, Northbridge and Southbridge are the commonly used terms. Figure 9-16 shows a schematic with typical chipset chores for a VIA K8T900 chipset.
It would be impossible to provide an inclusive chipset chart here that wouldn’t be obsolete by the time you pick this book up off the shelf at your local tech pub (doesn’t everybody have one of those?), but Table 9-1 gives you an idea of what to look for as you research motherboards for recommendations and purchases.
So why do good techs need to know the hot chipsets in detail? The chipset defines almost every motherboard feature short of the CPU itself. Techs love to discuss chipsets and expect a fellow tech to know the differences between one chipset and another. You also need to be able to recommend a motherboard that suits a client’s needs.
Motherboard Components
The connections and capabilities of a motherboard sometimes differ from those of the chipset the motherboard uses. This disparity happens for a couple of reasons. First, a particular chipset may support eight USB ports, but to keep costs down, the manufacturer might include only four ports. Second, a motherboard maker may choose to install extra features—ones not supported by the chipset—by adding additional chips. A common example is a motherboard that supports FireWire. Other technologies you might find are built-in sound, hard drive RAID controllers, and AMR or CNR slots for modems, network cards, and more.
Figure 9-16 Schematic of a modern chipset (image courtesy of VIA Technologies)
USB/Fire Wire
Most chipsets support USB, and most motherboards come with FireWire as well, but it seems no two motherboards offer the same port arrangement. My motherboard supports eight USB ports and two FireWire ports, for example, but if you look on the back of the motherboard, you’ll only see four USB ports and one FireWire port. So, where are the other ports? Well, this motherboard has special connectors for the other ports, and the motherboard comes with the dongles you need to connect them (Figure 9-17). These dongles typically use an extra slot on the back of the case.
Table 9-1 Chipset Comparison Chart
Figure 9-17 USB/FireWire dongle
These dongle connectors are standardized, so many cases have built-in front USB/FireWire ports that have dongles attached. This is