What are the South Bridge and the North Bridge I often talk about?

Below the heat sink is the North-South Bridge chip. The North-South Bridge is also very hot, and it needs fins.

The core of the motherboard is the motherboard chipset, which determines the specifications, performance and general functions of the motherboard. We usually say "865PE motherboard", and 865PE refers to the motherboard chipset. Motherboard chipsets usually include South Bridge chips and North Bridge chips, but some motherboards also include one or three chips.

Northbridge chip mainly determines the specifications, hardware support and system performance of the motherboard. It is connected with CPU, memory and AGP bus. What CPU the motherboard supports, how many speed graphics cards AGP supports, and what frequency memory it supports are all determined by the North Bridge chip. Northbridge chips often work at a high frequency, so the heat generation is quite high. On the motherboard, we can find a radiator near the CPU slot, and below it is the North Bridge chip. Compared with the motherboard of Northbridge chip, the performance difference is very small.

The south bridge chip mainly determines the function of the motherboard. Various interfaces on the motherboard (such as serial port, USB), PCI bus (connecting TV card, internal cat, sound card, etc. ), IDE (connecting hard disk and optical drive) and other chips on the motherboard (such as integrated sound card, integrated RAID card, integrated network card, etc.). ) are all controlled by the South Bridge chip. South bridge chip is usually exposed next to PCI slot, and its block head is relatively large.

At any time, the data transmission between the North and South Bridges needs a channel, which is the bus of the North and South Bridges. The wider the north-south bridge bus, the more convenient the data transmission. In the motherboard chipsets of various manufacturers, the North-South Bridge bus has been named by itself. For example, Hub Link of Intel, V-Link of Via, MuTIOL of SIS, etc.