All About Cards

OBJECTIVE When you are finished with this lesson, you will be able to name what a card is for and tell what kind of slot on the motherboard it will fit into.

A Card is a smallish circuit board that connects to the motherboard and adds a function to the computer system. It has a metal plate on the end that shows on the back of the computer. Usually the plate has one or more ports into which a cable can be plugged. On the bottom of the card are teeth that plug into the motherboard so that communication can occur between the computer and the outside world.

We will be using the connectors on the metal plate to identify the cards according to the functions that are shown on the Card Sorting Flow Chart.

Type	Picture	Clue
HD15		three rows of holes
DVI		lots of little square holes
RJ11		like for a phone
RJ45		bigger than an RJ11
Sound Ports		little and round, don't stick out, may be 2, 3, 4, or 5
Antenna Connector		much smaller than a F connector (connector for a cable TV)

There are many many different connectors but these are the ones you will use in pre-build and build.

Exercise 1 Start out by examining several cards in the lesson box and identifying the plate and the connector(s) types on it.

Exercise 2 Next, turn your attention to the teeth or pins on the lower edge of the card. You can determine what type card slot the card needs by identifying the characteristics of the pins themselves.

• AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) card has narrow pins that alternate thick end to thin end, sort of like bricks

• PCIe Video card has very slender pins that have a picket fence appearance

• PCIe regular card has the same very slender teeth that are on the PCIe Video card

• PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) card has wider pins than either the AGP or PCIe that also look like a picket fence

• PCIx has the same pins as the PCI above but has a small group of added pins at the back of the card

• ISA (Industry Standard Archetecture), the oldest slot type, has very wide teeth