Annotated images of ATX Socket A and Socket 939 motherboards

An annotated image of a Socket A (aka Socket 462) motherboard for an AMD Athlon XP processor

Socket A motherboards (superseded technology) are no longer being used for the latest AMD processors, but most of the features are still found on the latest Socket AM2 motherboards that can run them. The one ISA slot shown in the annotated image of a Socket A motherboard below do not appear on the latest motherboards, because they are used for superseded video cards and sound cards. The next image of a Socket 939 motherboard, which can still be bought at the time of writing (June 2006), has no ISA slot. The Socket 939 motherboard has both IDE and SATA connectors for hard disk and CD/DVD drives. (In June 2006, there were very few SATA CD/DVD drives.) The SATA standard was not available when Socket A motherboards were the current type being used for AMD's processors.

A standard ATX Socket A motherboard for AMD Athlon processors - the first socketed Athlons, not Athlon XP processors

The RAID connectors

Click here! to visit information on Hard Disk Drive page of this site on RAID.

The RAID controller is on the motherboard, so you cannot use a RAID array of HDDs unless the motherboard has such a controller.

The built-in ports in the top left-hand corner of the board (the three blocks viewed from above with the white processor socket behind them) are shown in (front view) detail under the main image. The BIOS battery is the circular object on the bottom right-hand side of the motherboard.

Note that motherboards are coming out now that use their own colour schemes for the slots instead of the standard black (ISA), white (PCI), and brown (AGP/PCI Express) colours. The slots can be in any colour that the manufacturer sees fit to use.

The PCI Express (PCI-E or PCIe) standard

The motherboard shown below has a single PCI Express slot for a video card. Click here! to go to information on the new standard on this site.

Click here! to view a large image of an Albatron PX925XE Pro-R motherboard (and others of the same kind) on the Tom's Hardware Guide site. It shows the large x16 PCI Express slot, and two of the smaller x4 PCI Express slots.

Annotated images of a Socket 939 motherboard for an AMD Athlon 64 and 64 FX processor

June 2006. - AMD is currently migrating all of its processors to Socket AM2 motherboards, but Socket 939 Athlon 64 processors are still available.

Annotated image of an MSI RS480M2-IL Socket 939 motherboard for AMD Athlon 64 and 64 FX processors

The Socket 939 motherboard shown above is the MSI RS480M2-IL, which has onboard video, sound, and networking chips and the corresponding ports on the ports panel, an image of which appears below.

You can download the user manual in the PDF format from http://www.msi.com.tw/.

There is only one x16 PCI Express slot for a PCI-E video card, but other PCI Express motherboards can have short x1 and x2 PCI Express slots for devices other than a video card. At the time of writing (July 2005), alternative PCI-E devices that don't exist yet. The four SATA ATA headers are for four SATA ATA hard disk drives. The BIOS battery is in the bottom middle of the board next to the middle PCI slot. The board runs AMD Athlon 64 and Athlon 64 FX processors which have an onboard memory controller instead of making use of a memory controller built into the motherboard itself. To run the RAM memory in dual-channel mode, two modules have to be installed in either the blue or black DIMM slots. This motherboard has an inbuilt PCI Express video/graphics chip - the ATI Radeon XPRESS 200. Unusually, its chipset is also made by ATI. Unusual because the company doesn't usually produce motherboard chipsets.

The IEEE 1394 Port is a FireWire 400 port. The VGA Port is for a CRT or LCD monitor. The RJ-45 LAN Port can be used to cable the computer with this motherboard to a network, or it can be used for a broadband modem. The S-Video Port and Composite Out ports are used to connect the computer to devices such as a VCR video recorder. The four bottom ports, including the coaxial S/PDIF Port, are for sound, which are dealt with on the Sound page on this site.