MEPX
Chapter 6 of 10All chapters
  1. 1The parts
  2. 2The processor
  3. 3Memory
  4. 4Storage
  5. 5Graphics and parallel work
  6. 6Motherboard and buses
  7. 7Power and cooling
  8. 8Finding the bottleneck
  9. 9Laptops and phones
  10. 10Choosing hardware

Chapter 6 of 10

Motherboard and buses

How the parts talk.

The connections

The motherboard carries the sockets and the buses between them. PCIe lanes connect graphics cards and fast drives, and their number and generation set the available bandwidth.

  • The socket decides which processors fit; the chipset decides which features work.
  • Memory must match the supported type and speed, and slots must be filled in pairs to run dual channel.

Firmware

The BIOS or UEFI starts the machine before any operating system exists. It also holds settings for boot order, virtualisation and memory speed profiles.