Motherboard Expansion Slots - CompTIA A+ 220-1201 - 3.5

If you were to look at a motherboard, it almost seems like a small city that's seen from the air. There are a lot of different areas of the motherboard and it seems like there is some type of connectivity between all of these different components. That connectivity is what we refer to as a computer bus.

This bus is a pathway that connects the different components of your motherboard to each other. For example, there's a bus between your memory slots and your CPU. There's also a bus that connects all of your expansion slots. These different buses allow us to connect all of these very diverse components on the motherboard to each other so that they

work as one single unit. These buses also allow us to increase the functionality of our motherboard. For example, the buses that connect all of the different expansion slots together allow us to put additional cards onto our motherboard, thereby increasing the functionality of that system. If you were to look closely at your motherboard, you can see the individual

buses or pathways that are used to move information from one part of the motherboard to another. And if you're curious, you could trace one end of a bus connection all the way around the motherboard to where it connects on the other side. On older motherboards, you may find that one of the buses available is

a PCI bus. This stands for peripheral component interconnect. This is one that was created in 1994 and has two different sizes, a 32-bit bus and a 64-bit PCI bus. This older style bus sends data over a parallel communication. You may find that your newer motherboard no longer has a PCI bus and instead uses PCI Express, which