Unit 2 P1

Unit 2 P1

Internal system unit components:

• Processor- Processor is something like a brain, it processes all the data and interprets all the functions of the computer.

• Motherboard- Motherboard is a board that connects all the parts of computer together. Video card, sound card, memory, CPU, hard drives, optical drives and other accessories like keyboard, mouse and speakers. All of the parts can be connected directly to the motherboard or via cables.

• BIOS- BIOS is a set of computer instructions which controls the operations of a computer, and makes sure that ports, hard drives, CPU and all the other chips function together.

• Power supply- Power Supply converts the alternating current line from home to the direct current needed by the computer. The typical voltages supplied are 3.3 volts, 5 volts and 12 volts.The 3.3 and 5 volts and used by digital circuit, where as 12 volts are used to run motors in fans and disk drives.

• Fan and heatsink or cooling- Heatsink keeps the CPU (Central Processing Unit) cool and preventing computer from overheating. With only heatsink as the only resource of cooling the computer, this might just not be enough, that’s why it is always good to have fan and heatsink together. It takes pretty much the same space as only heatsink, and it helps a lot. There are different methods of cooling the computer such as water cooling or wire cooling, but this is more advanced and it takes a lot of space.

• Hard drive configuration and controllers SATA or IDE or EIDE-  SATA stands for Serial Advanced Technology Attachment. They are used for connecting host bus adapter, for example the computer to mass storage devices such as hard drives. SATA cables are thin, long and they are now being used on most new computers.

• Ports USB and/or parallel and/or serial- USB drive is the most widely used attaching hardware, which is inserted in the USB  port. Usually there are more than two USB ports in laptop and four in desktop computer.

• Internal memory RAM, ROM and cache- There are different types of Internal memory, RAM (Random Access Memory) is one of the types, which is responsible for the speed of your computer and how many programs you can have opened at once. ROM (Read-only Memory) is another type of memory, which computer can only read, but not modify. Cache memory is very fast memory, but also very expensive. There are three levels of cache memory.  Level 1 cache, which is extremely fast but relatively small, is located close to the processor. Level 2 cache is located halfway between the process and the system bus; it is fairly fast and medium-sized. Level 3 cache is relatively large and close to RAM.

• Specialized cards network and/or graphic cards- Network cards are the part of a computer that allows you to use internet. You can also use USB wireless adapter which is pretty much the same thing, but you just connect it to USB port instead of plugging it into Motherboard. Graphic card is responsible for generating outputs of the image on monitor. Graphic card is also one of the most important parts if you are a gamer. If the Graphic card gets damaged, different parts of the computer might get damaged too as the image on the monitor starts to change constantly, which turns of the computer itself or the monitor might even go “blue screen” which resets the computer.

Peripherals:

• Printer- Printer is a device that accept text and graphic from a computer, and transfer the information to paper. Most interested qualities of the printer are colour, speed, resolution and memory. There are two different types of ink, black n white and colour. Black and white ink is much cheaper and it is used most of a time at school/work as there is no need to print the work in colour. The work can be printed just like you want, but most of the settings are set on the computer such as sheet size, colour and the size of image/text.

• Scanner- Scanner is very similar to the printer, but it is just opposite. Instead of sending the information from computer to the paper, the scanner converts the information from paper to digital data.

• Twisted pair cabling- Twisted pair cabling is a cable that consists of two independently insulated wires twisted around one another. The use of two wires twisted together helps to reduce the risk of damaging the machine as there are less wires, so it helps to stop the electromagnetic induction.

Backing Storage:

• Pen drive- Pen drives are one of the best and  main backup resources you can use in your computer. A pen drive allows you to store anything, but of course they do have limit. Nowadays there are pen drives that can storage even up to 512GB if not more. They are very small so you can take it anywhere. If that’s not enough space for all the documents, it is better to use bigger device like hard drive.

• Hard drive- Hard drive capacity starts from 20GB and there are hard drives that have 2TB Capacity. They are a bit bigger than pen drives, but they have much bigger capacity.

Communication between components

The computer system board is made up of many unified buses which is basically controlled by two bridges called as north bridge and south bridge. In computer architecture, a bus is a subsystem that transfers data between computer components inside a computer or between computers. The north bridge contains RAM, CPU and Graphics whereas south bridge contains everything else via system buses.

Unlike a point-to-point connection, a bus can logically connect several peripherals over the same set of wires.