Expansion Cards and their Slots on Motherboard
In this blog I will explain about the different Expansion cards and their usage as well as the different expansion slots available on the motherboard.
Expansion Cards
The expansion cards are the different types of cards or adapters which are used in computer to improve the performance and compatibility of any system. This means that they are used to expand the working performance of the system. These cards can be available in modular form so that we can attach or remove them from the slots or they are integrated on the motherboard and are fixed. There are many types of expansion cards used in the computer system and I will talk about the four basic types of these which are:
- Network Card
- Video Card
- Modem
- Audio Card
Network Card
Network card is used to connect our computer system to the computer networks over the Internet OR it is used for communication between our system and the other computer networks. Network card is also known as the Network adapter or Network interface card (NIC). NIC card has the pins at the bottom so that it can be fixed in the expansion slot on the motherboard. Similarly, it has Rj-45 port at the back of the card which is used to connect to the LAN network. There are further two types of NIC cards, one is for wired network and the other is for wireless network. Wired network card has the port at the back while a wireless network card has an antenna attached to it.
Video Card
This card is used to provide the graphical interface like images, videos etc. to the user. It requires a high processing power to convert the instructions to their graphics. It is also called the Graphic Card or Display Card. Video card has its own processor which provide the interface between the Operating System and the Monitor to display. It is attached to the motherboard through its pins at the bottom and it has also different kinds of ports which are used to connect different kinds of the output display devices like monitor, projector etc. It is connected to the high data slots like PCIe slot or AGP slot on the motherboard. The following figure shows the video expansion card with its different parts.
Modem
Modem is same like the network card but it is an older technology as compared to the NIC card. It is used to connect the computer system to the Internet through the telephone line. Typically it has two ports for RJ-11 connectors, one is used to connect the telephone line while the other is used to connect the telephone. It converts the digital signals of our system to analogue signals of the telephone line and vice versa. The following figure shows the Modem with two RJ-11 jacks.
Audio Card
Audio card is used to convert the electrical signals to the audio signals or sound which we can hear. The audio cards has different kinds of ports or jacks attached to it and these ports are used to connect the headphone, Microphone, speakers and other digital audio devices. The following figure shows the Audio card and its different ports.
Expansion Slots on the motherboard
Motherboard has different kinds of expansion slots available which are used to expand the compatibility of our system. The slots provide connection to the system bus. There are different kinds of slots available, one is PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) which is a general expansion slot used in the old time. The other modern expansion slots like PCIe (PCI Express) are used to provide different pathways to the system bus.
The below figure shows different kinds of expansion slots and their sizes and names.
PCIe family have further different kinds of slots like x1,x4,x8 and x16 which shows that how many lanes/pathways are available for communication with the system bus. PCIe x1 slot provides less data paths and are used for cards like NIC while PCIe x16 has largest data paths and therefore it provides high data rates. PCIe x16 is mainly used for the video cards nowadays because they need high data rates.
The following figure shows the different PCIe slots and notice the difference in their sizes.
This was all about the Expansion cards and the expansion slots which are used to enhance the performance of the the computer system.
Thanks for Reading…!!!
