Instructor: In this lesson, we're going to cover different
motherboard connectors that you're going to come across
and we're going to do this by looking at a typical motherboard.
This particular motherboard has a form factor
that supports an AM4 socket.
This is known as a B550 motherboard
from MSI and it's a gaming motherboard.
Now first let's take a look here
at the socket and I mentioned this is an AM4 socket.
Now you'll notice AM4 is an AMD socket
which means it is a pin grid array
with a PGA or pin grid array,
this means that we are going to take a CPU that has pins
and place it into the holes
that are sitting on this motherboard.
If you're looking at a motherboard that supported
an intel based LGA processor, we would see pins sticking up
from this motherboard socket waiting to connect
to the holes on the bottom of a processor.
But again, because this is a PGA instead of an LGA
this is an AM4 based socket
and we are going to see the pins on the bottom of a processor
and we would connect those into these holes
we see here in the socket.
Now just to the bottom of this socket,
you'll see this little metal bar
and this actually is the lever as part of the ZIF socket
or a zero insertion force.
To be able to insert our processor,
we would lift that little lever up.
You're going to see the holes open up a little bit more
in the socket, we will then place our processor in,
and then we will close that little lever back down
to the board into the lock position as you see it now,
and this would lock that into place.
Next, we're going to move over to the right
and we can see that there are four
memory sockets right here.
These are actually going to allow us to do either single,
dual or quad channel memory with this particular motherboard
and we'll talk more about that when we get to our section
on system memory,
but for now, you should be looking at these and going, oh
those are really big sockets and there's four
of them together or two of them together,
and generally that's going to be the memory sockets
for your particular motherboard.
If we continue to the right,
you'll see there is this large power connector socket
right here and that is actually the main board power
for this motherboard.
This will connect a cable from here
to our power supply and give us all the voltage we need
for all the various components on this motherboard
including the memory
as well as all of our different expansion cards
except for our processor socket.
Now the processor requires a lot of power on its own,
so we're actually going to power that
using this port up here in the upper left corner.
This is an eight pin CPU power socket
and again this will connect directly
to our power supply to provide us the proper voltage
for the socket on this motherboard,
which again is an AM4 socket.
If we move over here towards the right,
you'll see we have these four pin connectors,
and as we go around, there's several of these on the board.
There's this one here, which is for the CPU fan.
This is another case fan.
Over here we have another case fan,
another case fan, down here we have another case fan,
going over here on the bottom we have another case fan,
and another one here on this bottom edge
and there's lots of different case fans
on this particular motherboard.
Why? Because this is a gaming PC's motherboard
and it can actually support up to six different case fans
and each of those is going to get their power
from this motherboard and the motherboard gets it again
from that large 24 pin connector,
that is the main board power supply.
And so these other four pins that you see on the edge
with the system fans,
that's going to take the power from the 24 pin power supply,
provide it through those four pins,
and then directly into the case fans.
Next as we move down,
you can see we have this USB looking style slot,
and this is actually a USB jumper
to be able to connect to either our front
or back panel connectors on our case
that provide USB directly to our end user.
As we move down,
you'll see this black area with this port cluster.
We'll revisit this when I look at the side of the board
but essentially these are the six SATA ports
that will connect our storage devices to this motherboard.
As we continue to move along, we see another small connector
here., this is a power LED connector that will actually
light up green or red when this case is powered on.
And then as we keep moving, we have another header connector
for USB, and you'll see this is a different style.
This one actually has a different pin out
and this goes to a USB port cluster on the front
of the case when you connect this motherboard to it.
As we keep moving, we've got a couple more
of these USB jumpers, we have the system fan over here,
and then we're going to move all the way down here
and we have this 10 pin area that actually has nine pins
'cause one is missing and that is by design
so you know which way to connect the adapter.
This is going to be used for your audio cluster.
If you have an audio jack on the front of your case,
it has to be connected somewhere,
and that's where this connects to.
Then we're going to move up here
and we have a couple of these expansion card slots.
You'll see one right here
which is actually a small PCIe x1 card slot,
and we have another matching one right here.
We're going to talk more about this
as we go into expansion cards, but for right now
the idea is these are places that we could put
additional features or capabilities into the motherboard.
For example, this motherboard actually
on the rear port cluster, which we'll get to in a second
has a network jack associated with it,
but it only works with cat 6 or cat 7 cabling.
If you wanted to connect a fiber cable directly
to this motherboard, you couldn't do it,
so you could put in a fiber network expansion card
into this PCIe x1 slot
and that would allow you to then connect the fiber connector
to this motherboard.
In addition to that, we have two PCIe x16 slots
which are right here is the first one
and the second one is here closer to the processor.
Now you'll notice one is black and one is gray.
What's the difference?
Well, both of these support the same speed of PCIe x16
which is the bus length and the size
of the card that will go in there.
Generally a PCI x16 is going to be used for graphics cards
and the one that is closer to the processor
in this silver color actually provides 75 watts
of power through that.
This is because it is a powered PCIe x16
with additional power, whereas this lower one that is black
this one does provide power
but not nearly as much power as the top one.
The top one is a little bit faster
and it provides more power,
but they are both the same form factor
of being PCIe x16.
We'll dive into that a little bit more
as we start covering PCIe, their speeds,
their power and things like that.
The next thing you're going to see is this small connector
down here.
This is known as an M.2 connector.
Now an M.2 connector is used for storage devices
specifically M.2 based solid state devices.
These are small little cards that look like a memory module
and they'll be inserted in a flat manner into this socket
and then screwed down using this retaining screw right here.
We'll cover that more as we go into the storage section
of this course.
In addition to that, there is another M.2 slot
hidden underneath this heat shield
and this is a higher speed M.2 lightning gen four slot.
It looks the exact same, but it has this heat sink
on the top to remove excess heat from the storage device
to allow for faster transfer speeds.
The final thing I want to show you from this overhead view
is this silver battery right here
and this is called BAT1 on the motherboard
but what it is is a CMOS battery.
As we talked about the BIOS and UEFI later on,
you'll learn we actually have a battery on our computer
to retain our settings
and that's exactly what we're seeing right here.
That silver battery will last about three years
and so if your computer starts losing its date
and time and every time you power off the computer
and you turn it on, it thinks it's a different day,
you need to replace that battery
and that's a good thing to keep in mind
because all motherboards have this battery on them.
Now the final thing I want to do is move over
to some side views so we can see the edges of this board.
As we move over here,
you can see I twisted the board just a little bit
so we can see those six SATA ports here
on the right hand side of the board.
Notice this is a seven pin SATA data cable
and this is an L-shaped connector.
In addition to the seven pin L-shaped data connector,
each SATA device will need to get power and that will be
from a L-shaped connector that looks similar to this
but it's wider because it is 15 pins
and it connects directly to the power supply
not to the motherboard.
As we move on, we're going to go and twist the board again
and look at the left side of the board, and on this left
or rear side of the board, you can see the port cluster.
In addition to seeing it on the board,
I've also taken a closeup directly of it,
so we can go through these ports one more time
as review from the cable section of our course.
Now here on the backside of your computer,
you're going to have this port cluster and on this motherboard,
we have several different components
including this first two here, which are both USB.
Notice these have a USB logo
but they do not say SS or super speed.
This tells me that these are USB 2.0 compliant ports,
and we can also see that because they are black
instead of having a different color like red or blue.
Generally you're going to see that USB 3 or SuperSpeed USB,
is colored as blue and even higher speed ports
will be colored as red.
In addition to that, if we move over to the right,
we are seeing what is called a PS/2 port.
Now PS/2 is a very old standard
and I'm actually kind of surprised to see this
on a modern board like this B550,
because no one really uses PS/2 connectors anymore.
PS/2 connectors were very popular in the 1980s and 1990s
but they fell out of favor in the early 2000s
as USB was introduced and most people moved their mouse
and keyboards connections into a USB slot instead.
I'd be very surprised to find somebody
using these these days,
I was actually quite surprised to see it on this board.
Next we have two graphics ports
and we have integrated HDMI and display port.
Now if you remember, HDMI and display port
are both going to be used for graphics output,
and this is actually an integrated card to this motherboard,
so there is integrated graphics capability.
Now for most gamers, they're not going to be happy using
the integrated graphics card of this motherboard,
and instead they're going to be using that PCIe x16 slot,
especially that silver one closest to the processor
to be able to put in a high quality
and high performance graphics card.
But if you don't have that and you want to save some money,
you can use the ones integrated into this motherboard.
Next we have two super speed USB three ports
and these are type A ports, as you can tell by the rectangle
with that blue plastic piece in there
allowing us only to connect USB in one direction.
As we move over to the right,
you'll see we have a network jack,
and this is called an RJ45 network jack,
or most people just commonly refer to it as ethernet
even though that is technically not accurate.
Ethernet is a type of standard, it is not a type of cable.
Instead this is what we call a UTP
or STP cable or unshielded or shielded twisted pair cable,
and it uses an RJ45 connector to terminate that.
We can note that on this network jack,
it is a 2.5 gigabits per second connection,
because they notated that on the motherboard showing us
that it is a very high speed connection,
and supporting cat 6 and cat 7 cabling.
Next, we have USB type C and they were even nice enough
to write it for us on that jack.
Now on the exam, if you get one of these things
where you have to label parts of a motherboard
or ports on a motherboard,
you are not going to be given the names on these.
They're going to hide those from you,
but in this case we can see this is a super speed USB type C
so it is USB 3,
and you can see the number 10 there written next to the SS,
and this tells us this is a 10 gigabit per second connection
instead of the standard five gigabits per second connection
that USB 3 comes with.
And over to the right we have another USB port.
This one is colored red
to show us that it is a 10 gigabit per second port,
and you also see that noted with the 10
next to the SS symbol.
Again, this is a type A connector being that large rectangle
and shape instead of the type C to the left
which is more of a small oval shape.
Then as we move down, we have these two connectors
that are gold in color.
These are actually connectors for a wifi antenna,
because this particular motherboard has an embedded wifi
chip.
Now, you can't see the antennas on here,
because they haven't connected them yet,
but that's what those are used for.
It's going to use external antennas
which are connected to ports.
Under that, we have our audio cluster
and our audio cluster is made up of two parts.
The first part is what's known as S/PDIF
and it says S/PDIF out, now that stands
for the Sony Phillips Digital Interface Format,
and this is a fiber optic cable connection
that's used for audio output of the highest quality.
Now, if you don't have that for your stereo system,
you can instead use a 5.1 surround sound
using the one eighth inch mini jacks there
labeled RS-out, CS-out, Mic-in, L-out, and L- in
to be able to connect a stereo system or speakers
to this particular motherboard
using its integrated sound card.
So as you can see
this motherboard has a ton of different capabilities
and a lot of external ports that we can connect to.
As you move through this course,
it's important to understand each device,
how it connects to this motherboard and how it gets power
and data to and from these different devices,
and what each device is going to be used for.
In this lesson, I just wanted to show you a quick overview
of the motherboard,
so you can see these different ports and connectors visually
and then identify what they are.
For the exam it is important to understand
these different ports and connectors
and be able to label them on site.
It would be very fair on exam day
for CompTIA to give you a picture like this,
and then several labels like CPU socket, memory socket,
PCIe x1, PCIe x16, CPU power, main board power
and things like that,
and then have you drag them to the right place to label them
on hotspots on a graphic like this.
So keep that in mind as you're studying
and as you're working with these different computers
to be able to identify the different parts and pieces,
and components visually as you're working on a system.