Identifying Components of Motherboards

Types of System Boards

There are two major types of system boards: integrated and nonintegrated:

Nonintegrated System Board

Each major assembly is installed in the computer as an expansion
card.
The major assemblies we’re talking about are items like the video circuitry, disk controllers,and accessories.

Nonintegrated system boards can be easily identified because each expansion slot is usually occupied by one of these components.

It is difficult to find nonintegrated motherboards these days.

Many of what would normally be called nonintegrated system boards now incorporate the most commonly used circuitry (such as IDE and floppy controllers, serial controllers, and sound cards) onto the motherboard itself.

In the early 1990s, these components had to be installed externally to the motherboard.

Integrated System Board

Most of the components that would otherwise be installed as expansion cards are integrated into the motherboard circuitry.

Integrated system boards were designed for simplicity. Of course, there’s a drawback to this simplicity:

When one component breaks, you can’t just replace the component that’s broken; the whole motherboard must be replaced.

Although these boards are cheaper to produce, they are more expensive to repair.

With integrated system boards, there is a way around having to replace the whole motherboard
when a single component breaks.

On some motherboards, you can disable the malfunctioning
onboard component (for example, the sound circuitry) and simply add an expansion card to
replace its functions.