Chapter 1: Motherboards, Processors, and Memory
1. A. The spine of the computer is the system board, otherwise known as the motherboard. On the motherboard you will find the CPU, underlying circuitry, expansion slots, video components, RAM slots, and various other chips.
2. C. DDR SDRAM is manufactured on a 184-pin DIMM. DIMMs with 168 pins were used for SDR SDRAM. The SIMM is the predecessor to the DIMM, on which SDRAM was never deployed. RIMM is the Rambus proprietary competitor for the DIMM that carries DRDRAM instead of SDRAM.
3. B. Remember the 8:1 rule. Modules greater than but not including SDR SDRAM are named with a number eight times larger than the number used to name the chips on the module. The initials PC are used to describe the module, the initials DDR are used for the chips, and a single-digit number after PC and DDR is used to represent the level of DDR. The lack of a single-digit number represents DDR as long as the number that is present is greater than 133 (such as PC1600). Otherwise, you’re dealing with SDR (such as PC133). This means that PC3-16000 modules are DDR3 modules and are populated with chips named DDR3 and a number that is one-eighth of the module’s numeric code: 2000.
4. D. The ITX motherboard family consists of smaller boards that fit in standard or miniature cases and use less power than their larger counterparts.
5. A. The lower-end Core i7 desktop (nonmobile) processors call for the LGA 1156 socket, but the 9xx series requires the LGA 1366 socket.
6. B. ZIF sockets are designed with a locking mechanism that, when released, alleviates the resistance of the socket to receiving the pins of the chip being inserted. Make sure you know your socket types so that the appearance of a specific model, such as Socket 479, in a question like this does not distract you from the correct answer. Only LGA would be another acceptable answer to this question because with a lack of pin receptacles, there is no insertion resistance. However, no other pin-layout format, such as SPGA, addresses issues with inserting chips. LPGA might have evoked an image of LGA, leading you to that answer, but that term means nothing outside of the golfing community.
7. B. The Northbridge is in control of the local-bus components that share the clock of the frontside bus. SATA and all other drive interfaces do not share this clock and are controlled by the Southbridge.
8. A. A hard drive stores data on a magnetic medium, which does not lose its information after the power is removed and can be repeatedly written to and erased.
9. C. This processor requires an AM3 socket. The only other version of Phenom II was for the AM2+ and is not compatible with DDR3 RAM.
10. B. Soft power is the feature whereby the front power button acts as a relay to initiate various system power changes, depending on the duration that the button is held.
11. A, C, G. DIMMs used in desktop-motherboard applications have one of three possible pin counts. SDR SDRAM is implemented on 168-pin modules. DDR SDRAM and 16-bit RIMMs are implemented on 184-pin modules. DDR2 and DDR3 are implemented on 240-pin modules with different keying. Dual-channel RIMM modules have 232 pins. Modules with 200 and 204 pins are used in the SODIMM line, and there are no modules with 180 pins.
12. C, D. Both the CPU and BIOS have to be designed to support virtualization in hardware.
13. D. Most motherboards have a jumper or similar momentary closure mechanism that will allow you to clear the CMOS memory of any user settings and cause the BIOS to use factory defaults, including no user or supervisor passwords.
14. A. The easiest solution that works to cool your CPU is to connect the four-pin connector into the three-pin header. The missing pin allows you to control the speed of the fan. Without it, the fan will run at top speed, which is fine, albeit a little noisier. The heat sink alone should not be relied upon for proper cooling of modern CPUs.
15. D. The PCIe 1.1 specification provided 250MBps of throughput per lane per direction. With the 2.x versions of PCIe, this rate was doubled to 500MBps. As a result, each v2.0 lane is capable of a combined 1GBps. A x16 slot consists of 16 lanes, for a total bidirectional throughput of 16GBps.
16. C. The reset button causes the computer to return to nearly the same point it is in when you power it on, but without the need for power cycling. Using Restart in the Start menu does not reboot as deeply as the reset button. Hibernation is a power state that completely removes power after saving the contents of RAM to the hard drive; pressing the power button is required to resume the session in the same manner as starting the computer after a complete shutdown. The power button cannot be used as a method of restarting the system.
17. B. None of the options are required, but a UPS is by far the most helpful among the answers in that loss of power during this procedure can range from annoying to devastating.
18. A. These CPUs integrate the graphics processing unit. The Core i7 before them integrated the memory controller, eliminating the FSB. Math coprocessors have been integrated since the 80486DX.
19. D. Pentium 4 processors are always mated with memory mounted on DIMMs.
20. B. Although technically all slots listed could be used for video adapters, PCIe excels when compared to the other options and offers technologies such as SLI, which only make PCIe’s advantage more noticeable.