Discussion on:

Your motherboard revealed, part 1

Pretty generic and very basic stuff but covered in enough detail to help someone understand the design and operation of the most important part of a computer system. I've found that a good understanding of how and why a piece of hardware works the way it does helps me when it ultimately fails (groan). Whenever I come across a problem I don't seem to be able to resolve, sooner or later I end up back at the very beginning.

Apart from the speeds of the socket 7 chips and the number of dimm slots I found the article useful and worth my reading.

Peace,
Michael

Hey Ken,
Where would I find out information about what all those settings in the bios do? The help option is worthless. I would like a detailed description of each option and when I would most likely use it and under what circumstances

Great question, and the short answer is to check the motherboard documentation. That is the only place you'll find detailed descriptions of the options on that specific board and BIOS.

A future article will discuss common BIOS settings and whichones you will probably want to choose. This will be a fairly generic approach, but should explain the settings that are most likely to be relevant to you. Thanks for the idea!

For 95% of users the BIOS details are so far beyond their understanding they are better off without the data. However, if you just need to understand the memory hole and a gated A20, shadow memory, and such. Try intel, amd, and cyrix home pages. Most have good information available, you just have to pour thru pages of very techy engineering docs.

The book that comes with a new mother board will usually explain these things. If you don't have the book but do have patince and know the brand name, go to their web site. This has helped me a number of times

Nice Article Ken.

I did however find an inaccuracy which I discovered myself recently. The HP Vectral VL 5/75 series 3 PC I bought came with 3 SIMMS totalling 16MB. The first two SIMM slots on the motherboard must be filled with paired SIMMS and then after this they can be inserted in single SIMMS.

However the article was really useful. Thank you Ken

Do you plan on covering other processor motherboards (AMD Athlon, etc) and the associated bus speeds, etc.??

Thx....

What about the bios and hard drives. New hard drives run at DMA/66 won't run on this boards. If you know how to fix that give me a clue.

Two issues here: The IDE Controller and the BIOS capability. If your motherboard doesn't have a DMA/66 IDE Controller, you will need to buy a PCI card with that interface. These are not expensive and will give you more configuration options and higher performance.

With regard to the BIOS, most of them that are over a year old or so won't handle a hard drive over 8 GB. A simple BIOS update should fix that problem, though.

I agree. To leave out the Slot A and Socket A motherboards is to do a dis-service to the AMD family.

Probably not. This series of articles was intended to present an overview of typical motherboard features, as it would not be practical to talk about every motherboard out there.

The documentation that comes with any new motherboard will providea more detailed, specific description of the features, settings, and capabilities of that board. If you have a motherboard without its manual, most are available on the Web at no charge.

Ken,
I agree with Mike. Yes this is general but AMD chips are different that Intel chips. Skipping them for generality can cause confusion. AMD chips have their own slot and socket setups. Just a basic mention like you did with the Intel slots/sockets would be adequate.

Jon

We plan on covering these issues in future articles - in fact, look for an Overclocking 101 article in mid november that covers different processors as well as Ken's next piece on motherboards. Thanks for all the great feedback. If there's anything else about hardware you want covered, please let me know.

Mike Jackman
Editor in Chief
PC Troubleshooter
Windows Desktop

I would like to comments about the compalibility of motherboards & hard drives because as I know there are some hard drives (like WD) which has 80 pin connectors don't run on some new motherboard because they have 40 pin conncetors & the actual speed mentioned in hard drive manual does not gained.

Have you any plan's to discuss such compalibilty of the computer components with motherboards in future articels?

Thanks & Regards / Sulman

There's a little confusion here, related to the signal cables used for the newest hard drives. All cables use 40 pins, but Ultra ATA/66 drives require new cables with 80 conductors to achieve 66.6 MB/s transfer rate.

The new cable provides 40 additional ground lines between the 40-pin IDE signal and the ground lines. If you use a traditional 40-pin, 40-conductor IDE cable, the drive will run in the fastest mode supported by your system.

More detailed information is available on the Western Digital Web site. The following address has answers to some of the most FAQ:
http://www.wdc.com/acrobat/faq66.pdf

The following address discusses potential BIOS/Operating System issues:
http://www.wdc.com/acrobat/uata299.pdf

Hope this help clear up some of the confusion.

i?m interested to know how can i get the best performance of my motherboard, configuring the bios setup....and know each meaning of each selection...........regards.....

Does anyone have a web site or know of a website that shows you how to build your own motherboard from scratch. And also where to purchase the parts for it.

Thank you in advance.
John

Hello John

I would be interested should you find such a site or information as requested - I suspect positive replies will not be forthcoming. TomsHarware.com reviews boards (it used to be really good) but the sort of skills necessary to solder with the precision required makes it seem unlikly that anyone would supply such a small market.
Best wishes
nick

Can you tell me whether the CMOS is located within the BIOS chip or is a separate chip on the motherboard ?.

What is the best motherboard ?