Computer Components, What Makes Up a Computer

Your computer is made up of a lot of different components that work together to give you that full computing experience. I'm going to build out a model of a computer and show you how each component works to make the computer function, then I'm going to show you what it actually looks like in real life so we get a visual of how these components look.

Central Processing Unit

Let's kick things off talking about the central processing unit, or CPU. The key to this is the central part of this, because quite honestly there are a lot of things on your computer that do processing, but this is the central processing unit, meaning it does the bulk of the computing that happens on your computer. A lot of the other stuff that does processing is really there to set up information and threads and processes to be processed on the CPU.

Here's what that central processing unit looks like. This is the front side, and on the back side these are all little pins. There are hundreds of these little pins that interface with your computer, and these are the inputs and outputs into this chip. Data will be lined up and threads will be lined up to do the processing on this chip, it will go through its calculations, and then send it back out to be sent back to wherever it needs to go.

So what is your CPU processing? It could be processing a lot of things. There are a lot of inputs into the system. For instance, your keyboard: when you press the keyboard that could be sent to the processor so it can process and calculate things. Your mouse movements could be another input into this that your CPU needs to process. Even storage, there's a lot of information that comes from storage that needs to be processed.

Storage

Storage interacts with the rest of the system. This is a solid state drive, and what will happen is that this is one of the inputs and outputs of the system, so that way it can bring in things like software and data into the system to be processed. There are lots of different types of storage, but this is just one example. This is a solid state drive right here, and you can see the pins, and these are the pins that interact with the computer. So this would be something that would go onto the computer that allows you to store programs or data or whatever it is that you want to store on your computer.

Random Access Memory

Next up we have random access memory, or RAM. This solid state drive is relatively slow. Solid state drives, or SSDs, are actually much faster than the old spindle drives that we used to have; however, this still is a relatively slow technology compared to random access memory. You can think of random access memory as short-term memory, versus this storage right here, which is long-term memory, just like your brain has short-term memory and long-term memory. When we have something that's stored that we want to access, that gets loaded up into RAM so that it can then be processed by the CPU, and this is a much faster back and forth between the RAM and the CPU. Then when you go to save something, it gets stored back on this slower storage, this solid state drive.

This is actually a little bit better model of what RAM actually looks like, because RAM is the staging area for what goes in and out of your CPU. If you have certain inputs into your system, if you've got certain storage that's going in and out of your system, if you've got outputs in your system, they pretty much go through the RAM to access the CPU. It stages it to go into the CPU, and then when it comes out it goes back into the RAM and is sent out to wherever it's going to go.

One of the reasons for this is because any of these technologies here, the input, the output and the storage, could be slow, and so we need a place to store things before we send it off to these slower medias. That's what the RAM is there for, to store it before it goes off to the slower media, as well as things come into it, because the CPU might be processing things, probably is processing things at any given time, and it needs to be staged before it goes into the CPU.

This is also where things get prioritized. Inside of RAM you are storing things so then it can be prioritized to go into the CPU. For instance, let's say you had a mouse as an input into the system and you're moving the mouse around. You want that prioritized above most other things, because you don't really want your mouse to be really jittery and not very responsive. So your mouse movements are one of those things that get prioritized a little higher in the system and get processed, so that there's much more of a smooth experience for the end user.

Here's what that RAM looks like. We see at the bottom here there are all of these little pins that interact with the computer, and then we've got the chips that actually do the storage. One thing to note about RAM is that it's just temporary storage, meaning that you have to have electricity going to this in order to store the data. So as soon as we turn the computer off it loses any memory that's on the RAM. It's just meant for that quick access between the CPU and all of the other components.

The Motherboard

Next up we have the motherboard. You can also call it the system board. The motherboard is the main communication between all of your devices. I like to think of it as the highway: the highway has different lanes, while your motherboard has different lanes, your channels. You have hundreds of pins coming into the CPU, and so where is it coming from? We said that a lot of it's coming from the RAM here, so you've got all of these different lanes of highway going into that CPU. Well, that's got to be stored on something. We're not going to have individual wires for each one of those, so the motherboard is where those conductors actually are. It's this main highway, and it actually serves a lot of other purposes. There are a lot of components there on the motherboard, but that main purpose is really just that communication between all of your different devices.

It also needs to interact with all sorts of inputs, all sorts of outputs, the storage. So what we have on here are these little ports that are on here as well, and into those ports we can plug in this equipment. For instance, a lot of our storage is through SATA ports, and so it would connect into a SATA connection here to communicate and store data to this solid state drive right here.

Here's the motherboard, and we can see a lot of different components on this motherboard. We can see the socket where the CPU goes, where the RAM goes, and we'll take a more in-depth look at that in a second. We see all of the different ports on the side here that interact with the computer. We have some chips that are on here, and we'll talk about some of these chips, but this is the main highway. In fact, if you look in between here there are all these little pathways on here, and those pathways are going between all of the different equipment that goes on here, all the different components that are on here. My kids like to call it, it looks like a little city. And in fact if we look on the back we can see also these traces on the back, and they look different than the front. There are multiple layers here. There are probably five to seven different layers that this motherboard has of all these traces going back and forth between all of this equipment, so it's pretty fascinating to look at.

Now what we have here is the CPU. What we could do is we could slide that CPU onto that socket right there and then lock it down into place, and that's locking all those pins into place so it makes connectivity to the motherboard. We also have our RAM right here, so what I could do is I could take the RAM, and let's see if I've got it right here, and what I'd do is I'd push down on the RAM and it would lock into place and you hear it click, and you can see that these little fins on the end here lock that board into place. And then we talked about the solid state drives. Well, here's the SATA connections that would then go to the solid state drives.

Graphics Processing Unit

Next up we have the graphics processing unit, or GPU. One of the most intense things that can happen on your computer is the processing of graphics. Taking whatever is happening on your computer and then turning it into some sort of graphical representation is actually one of the more complicated things your computer does, and so it requires some special processing to do that. So you have a graphics processing unit. Here we have the GPU on our board that's interacting, and then it sends the data to your screen to be presented to the end user.

Now sometimes this is actually incorporated, in fact many times this is actually incorporated onto your CPU, so you wouldn't necessarily need a separate GPU to make your computer function if it's incorporated onto the CPU and your CPU is capable of handling that. Also, most motherboards have some components that have some internal connectivity so that you can connect your monitor to the motherboard itself, at least to get you up and running, but it requires you to at least have that GPU part incorporated onto your CPU if you're going to do that. Otherwise you need a separate GPU.

Oftentimes even if you had a GPU built into your chip, into your CPU, you may still want a separate GPU. This is especially true for somebody like a gamer, or somebody who's doing some intensive graphics, and so with that then usually you buy a separate graphics processing unit.

This particular motherboard has a GPU built in on this chip, so it could do the graphics processing, and the motherboard also has that capability here where we see an HDMI, a DVI and a VGA port to it. So it's capable of handling multiple monitors, most likely, and capable of multiple types of outputs on here. However, if we wanted to expand the capabilities of the GPU on here, there are these PCI slots right here, and I can actually slip a card in here to give it more processing power. Here's an example of a GPU, and this has that PCI port on here that can slide into the motherboard to give that board more functionality. As we can see here, this has a chip underneath here and it's kind of covered up by all of these fans and all of these fins to dissipate the heat, because there's actually a lot of processing power in this GPU. This is a little bit higher end GPU here.

Network Interface Card

Next up we have a network interface card, or a NIC, and what it does is it interfaces with the network. No duh, right, that's in the name there. But essentially what this does is this is what communicates to your home network, to your business network, or really it gets you to the outside world and to the rest of the world.

So this is a NIC right here, and there's a couple of different types. It says card because it used to always be a card that you would slide into your computer to give it additional functionality so it could connect to the network. Nowadays, at least a wired NIC is onboarded onto the motherboard, so you have some sort of input output onto the motherboard here that you can connect up your network, and it's an ethernet connection that connects to the rest of the network.

The other thing is there's two different types, there's a wired and there's a wireless. A lot of your laptops have a wireless that's built into the laptop and sometimes has a wired. A lot of your desktop machines usually have a wired component, and many of them also have the wireless nowadays. So those are the couple of things that you'd look for from a network interface card.

This motherboard is new enough where it doesn't need a separate network interface card slid into one of these slots here to give it the functionality, it's built into the motherboard, but it is old enough where it doesn't have wireless capabilities. So we can see the port that we'd actually connect to. This port is called an RJ45, or Registered Jack 45. So this port is our network interface, and what we do is we'd slide this RJ45 plug here into there and we can hear a click, and now we know it's connected. Then I would connect the other side to the rest of the network so that way I could interface with the network and get my internet and all that fun stuff.

Power and Cooling

Next up we have power, and that's pretty self-explanatory. We need power to operate all of this stuff, and so what happens is we need a power supply to provide the power needed for this all to operate. Here's an example of a power supply. We see the connectivity into the wall here, we also have a power switch, and there's a little bit of a fuse right here that can be flipped. We also have the power that goes to all of the components that this is going to power, and then we have a cooling fan on here. There's a wattage involved with this, and so you do need to make sure that you get the proper power supply that's going to be able to supply enough power for all of the devices you have connected to your computer.

All of this requires some sort of cooling. The thing is, with all of this, all these electrons going back and forth create heat, and if that heat doesn't get dissipated then it could damage some of your equipment. Your CPU actually is one of those things that can generate a lot of heat, so that's one of the most critical things that we need to cool down. Same thing with the GPU: depending on the size of this GPU it could be big enough where it needs separate fans as well. And then your power supply, there's electricity going through there, so it needs some sort of fan. And then usually you have a fan on the case as well, so there's some sort of central fan that's blowing across here so that way it can cool these components.

As I mentioned, the CPU is one of the things that generates the most heat on your computer and it's the most critical for cooling down, which is why it gets its own fan or cooling system. The fan isn't the only way that we can cool this off. We've got this CPU right here and we need to cool it off. The first thing that we have here is this heat sink, but even before the heat sink we've got this heat sink compound, and you can see some of the residue of it right there. What it is is that if I were to just put this metal on metal, if I were just to put it on there, it could have some sort of small air gaps to it, and air gaps act as an insulator, so it wouldn't allow the heat to dissipate as well from the CPU to this heat sink. So we put this heat sink compound on it to make sure that we get full contact between the CPU and that heat sink, and therefore heat will better transfer from the CPU onto the heat sink.

The next thing that we see is that this heat sink has fins on it. There are all these fins, and what that does is it takes the heat and pulls it away from the CPU and kind of disperses it amongst these fins and allows more air contact. So now we have a fan that's blowing across these fins, cooling down those fins, taking away heat from the fins and moving it into the air and getting the air away from the CPU. So that's the whole goal of this, to take heat away from the CPU, pull it up through the heat sink compound into these little fins of the heat sink, and then push it away using the airflow from this fan.

On the motherboard we actually see, as part of the motherboard, mounted on the motherboard, a bracket, so that way this actually gets cinched down on there. It will get really tight on there to make sure it has great contact. So if I were actually installing this, before I use it I'd want to rub off all the old heat sink compound, put a new bit of heat sink compound on there, and then cinch it down onto here to make really great contact, to make sure that it can pull the heat away from that CPU.

Basic Input Output System

A lot of the components that you see here are really controlled by something called an operating system. The operating system gives instructions on how all of this is going to interact and how you are going to interact with your computer. The operating system is stored on some sort of storage, on some sort of hard drive, usually an SSD drive. Now the thing is, how does this computer even know how to load that up into RAM so it can be processed and so that way it can control the rest of the unit? Well, it doesn't really know how to do that. We need instructions just on how to start up the machine, and some basic instructions on how things are going to operate. That's where the BIOS comes into play, the basic input output system.

The BIOS is separate. It's essentially some firmware, some coding that's stored onto your computer, that's some basic instructions on how to get up and running. There are also some BIOS settings in there, and you might have experienced getting into the BIOS before and doing some configuration. There are some settings within the BIOS, and they need to be stored, so there's a battery that actually stores those BIOS settings.

What happens is when you press the power on your computer, there's these initial lines of instructions that start coordinating things, getting things going. Some instructions get loaded onto RAM, so there's a little part of RAM that gets loaded up, and they start giving the CPU instructions on what to do, start telling the motherboard what to do, start telling where to find the operating system, so it even knows where the operating system is located at. Then it'll start loading the operating system onto RAM. It'll section out a piece of RAM and start loading the operating system onto there so that way the operating system can take control after the BIOS is done doing its thing. So the basic input output system has some basic settings to it that we can configure, and some initial lines of instructions that tell this computer how to get going and get started.

On the motherboard, to find the BIOS it's going to be next to the battery, so I'm looking for the battery, which I see one right here. Now that battery is to save the settings for the BIOS, and near here I see a chip, so that's probably the BIOS chip. I'm not sure exactly if that's the BIOS chip, but it's probably somewhere around that area, and that looks like something that could be the BIOS. So there's an example of the BIOS here on the motherboard.

In the end there's a lot more to your computer and how it functions. There's a lot that we didn't talk about, a lot of considerations that go into these different computer components and which ones do you purchase and which ones do you install. There's a lot to talk about; however, this gives you at least a foundational knowledge of the core components of your computer and how it works.