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Expansion Cards and Their Slots

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43 views4 pages

Expansion Cards and Their Slots

Uploaded by

phronesisquansah3
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Expansion Cards and their Slots on Motherboard

Expansion Cards
The expansion cards are the different types of cards or adapters which are used in computer to
improve the performance and compatibility of any system. This means that they are used to
expand the working performance of the system. These cards can be available in modular form so
that we can attach or remove them from the slots or they are integrated on the motherboard and
are fixed. There are many types of expansion cards used in the computer system and I will talk
about the four basic types of these which are:

Expansion Cards
The expansion cards are the different types of cards or adapters which are used in computer to
improve the performance and compatibility of any system. This means that they are used to
expand the working performance of the system. These cards can be available in modular form so
that we can attach or remove them from the slots or they are integrated on the motherboard and
are fixed. There are many types of expansion cards used in the computer system and I will talk
about the four basic types of these which are:
 Network Card
 Video Card
 Modem
 Audio Card

Network Card
Network card is used to connect our computer system to the computer networks over the Internet
OR it is used for communication between our system and the other computer networks. Network
card is also known as the Network adapter or Network interface card (NIC). NIC card has the pins
at the bottom so that it can be fixed in the expansion slot on the motherboard. Similarly, it has Rj-
45 port at the back of the card which is used to connect to the LAN network. There are further two
types of NIC cards, one is for wired network and the other is for wireless network. Wired network
card has the port at the back while a wireless network card has an antenna attached to it.
Network Card

Video Card

This card is used to provide the graphical interface like images, videos etc. to the user. It requires
a high processing power to convert the instructions to their graphics. It is also called the Graphic
Card or Display Card. Video card has its own processor which provide the interface between the
Operating System and the Monitor to display. It is attached to the motherboard through its pins at
the bottom and it has also different kinds of ports which are used to connect different kinds of the
output display devices like monitor, projector etc. It is connected to the high data slots like PCIe
slot or AGP slot on the motherboard. The following figure shows the video expansion card with
its different parts.

Video Card
Modem
Modem is same like the network card but it is an older technology as compared to the NIC card. It
is used to connect the computer system to the Internet through the telephone line. Typically it has
two ports for RJ-11 connectors, one is used to connect the telephone line while the other is used to
connect the telephone. It converts the digital signals of our system to analogue signals of the
telephone line and vice versa. The following figure shows the Modem with two RJ-11 jacks.

Modem
Audio Card

Audio card is used to convert the electrical signals to the audio signals or sound which we can
hear. The audio cards has different kinds of ports or jacks attached to it and these ports are used to
connect the headphone, Microphone, speakers and other digital audio devices. The following
figure shows the Audio card and its different ports.

Audio Card
Expansion Slots on the motherboard
Motherboard has different kinds of expansion slots available which are used to expand the
compatibility of our system. The slots provide connection to the system bus. There are different
kinds of slots available, one is PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) which is a general
expansion slot used in the old time. The other modern expansion slots like PCIe (PCI
Express) are used to provide different pathways to the system bus.
The below figure shows different kinds of expansion slots and their sizes and names.

PCIe family have further different kinds of slots like x1,x4,x8 and x16 which shows that how
many lanes/pathways are available for communication with the system bus. PCIe x1 slot provides
less data paths and are used for cards like NIC while PCIe x16 has largest data paths and therefore
it provides high data rates. PCIe x16 is mainly used for the video cards nowadays because they
need high data rates.
The following figure shows the different PCIe slots and notice the difference in their sizes.

Figure: PCI express slots family

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