Computer hardware is made up of all physical components that make up any given computer system (motherboard, CPU, RAM memory devices, expansion slots, etc).

Motherboards are the main printed circuit boards that let all the parts communicate. CPUs direct your computer as it crunches data (the same way that your brain directs your body), and each processing speed is measured in gigahertz (GHz).

Motherboard

Here’s where things get exciting: motherboards connect every piece of hardware in your computer, just as your heart connects every part of your body. Think of leukemia spreading from cells to cells via nerves. Or, don’t: think of motherboards instead. Motherboards carry voltage throughout every machine in their circuits.

Motherboards are printed circuit boards (PCBs) containing a combination of copper connecting traces and one or more expansion slots to plug memory, hard drives or other devices into a computer system. This component contains its own Basic Input/Output System (BIOS) instructions embedded in firmware – the BIOS could also be found on a separate chip of its own, but both the firmware approach and using multiple chips were superseded by the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI) approach. The purpose of this firmware is to initialize your hardware and boot an operating system. Motherboards come in multiple sizes but are specific to a certain model computer (as well as processor or memory addressing requirements).

CPU

Central Processing Units (today, CPUs are sophisticated electronics that execute program instructions by performing operations on digital data, stored within the CPU) have instructions that instruct other components through buses that interface.

The control unit of the CPU, which is largely composed of circuitry, is the part that tells memory, arithmetic or logic units, and input and output devices how to respond to commands from the high-level computer. The arithmetic or logic unit of the CPU performs all arithmetic and logic operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and comparisons.

The arithmetic/logic unit sends words of data to the fetch and decode sections of a CPU for action, and can write the result to an internal register, or pass it on to main memory; while the architecture of a computer might channel some results back to internal circuitry of the processor for further processing before passing on as output devices.

RAM

RAM (or RAM Memory) is like the device’s short-term memory, housing information that is used by programs or applications for the time they need it, until all this information has been used up, where it is then transferred over to long-term storage, such as hard drives or other nonvolatile media for long-term storage.

RAM data will be lost if the computer shuts down. If you have not saved the file before you turn the computer off, you will lose it.

When one is thinking of getting computer information for building, maintaining and making a repair of his /her computer, it may appear and seem to be a toughie to understand, especially the hardware components of computers. Hence, when one is provided learning resources, I believe it would make it easier for students to learn by making them understand the motherboard, the central processing unit (CPU), the RAM memory modules, hard drives and many more.

Graphics Card

When it comes to purchasing gaming computer hardware, one of the most crucial components of a gaming PC is the graphics card (also called video card). A graphics card allows a computer to off load the graphics processing work load of an application on to it, thereby simplifying the visual production of the application and also increasing its speed of the production.

During this process, the GPUs record information about the locations of pixels and their colours in the system’s video random-access memory (VRAM), which is separate from the main system RAM. VRAM also holds the frame buffer (the storage area containing completed images right up until they are displayed on the screen).

In addition, recent graphics cards also take load off the CPU by decoding HD video through the use of APIs such as DxVA for Microsoft Windows operating systems, or VDPAU, VAAPI, XvMC, or Xvid for Linux or UNIX-like operating systems.

Sound Card

The sound card employs fields of specialisation: provided with a digital bitmapped representation, it puts it back onto the wave train, so that you can actually hear what’s being said when Edward Woodward plays long-distance chess, or that eerie howl that gets closer and closer to you at the end of John Carpenter’s The Fog (1980). Without a sound card, without such a circuit, a PC would be unable to perform this magical feat: to recreate sounds. The signal might get far as ‘See Spot jump’, and might even get flagged as to do with audio, but it certainly wouldn’t sound anything like it. Pip and Jane and Droog had worked their metallic butts off to create an image, but weren’t specia- lised to do the rest. The signal made it as far as the fundamental Hall of Specialities, but not further. But computers gradually came to be built with a circuit specially designed to turn digital images into audible speech, and when they rushed our way, off they went – into the Hall of Talk and the Hall of Howls.

A stock sound card comes equipped with three ports – microphone (pink; words ‘microphone’ or ‘mic’), line out (green; arrows toward waves) and usually a 15 pin yellow MIDI connector, by which it can communicate with an external keyboard or joystick, and also has onboard digital-to-analog conversion of the output signal, performed by an onboard chip.

A piece of software controls the sound card by using a low-level system call to send data to it and, based on it, tell the hardware to do whatever it wants. Except for older Unix systems, pretty much any operating system comes with drivers for sound cards. Others need to be associated with the hardware first-hand from the manufacturer.