Do you ever just look at this and think to yourself, how the hell does this work?

Do you ever just look at this and think to yourself, how the hell does this work?

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No, because I know how it works

Lol no you don't

yeah. I don't actually know anything about electrical engineering, or how electricity works really.

Intel is willing to pay my employer $3,000 a day for me to explain how our software works, so I'm not particularly compelled to figure out how a mobo works, no. I'm more worried about reliability, performance, and price.

Yeah but don't you ever just stare at one and wonder

It's fucking brilliant

And you may ask yourself, well
How did I get here?

ok
project your stupidity onto others if that helps you

like warm apple pie

>how electricity works
Basically there's this thing called electrons, and we defined them as negative.

Then there's this thing called protons, we defined them as positive.

There's also neutrons, but they have 0 charge so we don't care about them too that much.

So then, uh, you know, sometimes things have more electrons and sometimes they have less. When they have fewer electrons we say the thing is negatively charged.

Yadda yadda yadda, electricity flows and it's complicated, yadda yadda positive and negative potential, yadda yadda and that's the basics of how electricity works.

lick a battery

Ok smartass

Explain what the chip highlighted in blue does.
Explain what the capacitor highlighted in red does.
Explain what the little group of things highlighted in green does.

>
>So then, uh, you know, sometimes things have more electrons and sometimes they have less. When they have fewer electrons we say the thing is negatively charged.
negative charge = more electrons, sounds retarded because it is, we just keep saying it that way due to historical accident

Yeah I fucked that part up, you're right

(Overall) fewer electrons = +
(Overall) more electrons = -

youtube.com/watch?v=Aiyo2K7DvfA

love the part when talks about the flip phone

youtu.be/Sf8R5ZlDiJg?t=1m56s

>tfw i used to think that electricity was electrons whizzing through a wire and not a travelling change in electric fields mediated by electrons moving small distances

>the little group of things
>smartass

Not him, but all three allow electricity through the circuit.

Probably some voltage smoothing caps and some opamp IC.

You wasted a post instead of just googling this?
There are a whole bunch of pages that explain the different parts of the motherboard and even recommend ones that are well built. Same bullshit like PSUs

thanks but yeah I learned about that in school a few years back but what I don't understand is how something less than physical matter can travel through a copper cable and then power something.
Its a comprehension problem, not a step by step understanding I'm having trouble with.

they don't compute if anything if that's what you're thinking, dumbass

...

i know basically how it works but it doesnt really register if that makes sense

Then suddenly everyone on Sup Forums is an electrical engineer.

You can know how computation works without knowing the precise layout of some unidentified board.

In fact, if someone knew what those exact components were, it wouldn't even be impressive. They're most likely a manufacturing engineer, the lowest of engineers.

ITT:

>I know how a diode works
>That's basically the same as knowing all the intricacies of a modern x86 cpu

>says he knows how it works
>gets asked to explain how it works
>doesn't know

this thread really makes you think

What is the EXACT purpose of these?

There is basically no one on the planet that understand all of the components in a modern PC at all levels of abstraction. The more confident someone is that they do, the more likely they don't really know shit

Red is a capacitor. It stores energy in the form of an electric field between the plates. Given the large size it's likely a power supply filter/decoupling capacitor.

Green is likely resistors which would be to limit current, or used to pull an input of some active component high or low in the absence of a signal when tied to the respective power rail, or they're used as part of a feedback network. I couldn't tell you exactly what without a schematic or at the very least a better pic of the board though since this is probably at least an eight layer board a pic isn't really enough. They could also be surface mount caps or inductors possibly. More likely caps than inductors though.

Blue is some 8-pin chip. Without a part number I don't know what it does. Could be an op-amp or a comparator. Might be some kind of regulator. Might be something else entirely.

Motherboards aren't hard to understand at all. 90% of it is just data buses, 9.5% is power regulation stuff, and 0.5% is other. All the magic happens on the CPU die itself. That is much more complex. There are some honorable mentions like the Northbridge too (do motherboards still have those?)

no

but I wonder how the things that made it come into existence work

Those are capacitors, meant to regulate voltage on your board. Stores up a charge then rapidly release it. You totally should lick them and try to bit one off the board while it's powered.

No because I have a CE degree

Power smoothing solid state capacitors which is why they're near the vrms. The big cables you plug into your mobo deliver line power which is then tuned to specific components via voltage regulators. Capicitors help tune the power along w/ VRMs to specific components. those are likely for the VRMs for the CPU and RAM modules whereas the ones near the PCI-e lanes are for pcie ... Power comes in at a solid rate and then gets stepped down and down to various components .. imagine a big super highway of power w/ exit ramps leading off into different towns. Power delivery circuitry. You can google these things user. It's not that serious and you're on /g so i'd expect a number of anons to have EE/CE/CS degrees and know exactly what every single thing on there likely is and how its works to a general degree.

Those are the quadratic hyperfluxuators. They compress the input signal to ensure a ideal reduction ratio of 1:30 for the output.

I know they're capacitors brainiac, I'm asking in the context of the mobo

but that is why it is beautiful.
it's not complex but one broken piece can make the whole thing useless.
just like Joe Rogan said, "if i left you on an island how long would it take for you to send me an email"

VRMs are basically buck regulators which provide significantly higher efficiency than linear regulators. Since a buck regulator is a switching regulator the output is not clean DC if you do not include a filter capacitor. Every single VRM will have filter capacitors which is the component you are asking about.

Neat

I'm a different guy, cunt.

Nice, thanks

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Actually there are probably many different parts that can fail and still allow the system to operate. It really depends on the part and exactly how critical it is to system operation. Certain failures might never cause any serious problems, others may only cause intermittent crashes, others my crash the system entirely and prevent it booting until the issue is repair, and others still my cause cascading failures that kill other components (looking at you Diablotek PSUs)

i know what a spark plug is and a piston is but if you told me to create an engine from scratch, i would never be able to do it.

if you told me to fix one, i probably could fix it.

Still you have to wonder how it all works, think of what's going on there on a physical level, it's pretty weird/amazing how it all works together

>mfw I learned something on Sup Forums

Those are houses of different electron nations. E.g. Republic of Gamers here has only 4 houses because gaymers are poorfags as we all know.
When you turn power on, houses send electrons to fight in the cpu which is like deathmatch stadium, which is why it gets so heated sometimes and you have to use cooler.

Not anymore, since I understand a good amount of it.

Radio frequencies and electron theories are still a mystery to me, though,

Sometimes I tell myself, this is not my beautiful stapler!
Sometimes I tell myself, this is not my beautiful chair!

>There are some honorable mentions like the Northbridge too (do motherboards still have those?)
AM3 yes, otherwise north bridge components have mostly been integrated into the CPU now.

Can't really figure it out until you give me the full PCB.

Think of magnets how positive and negative poles attract. Electrons when not paired with protons tend to want to rejoin with them. Giving them a path to go through is a circuit. Controlling the flow of electrons flowing through a circuit on their way back to the protons is the base of electricity. We can make the path tight to produce heat/light. We can add gates to make logic.

Your CPU is a well tuned machine that only likes to have a certain amount of voltage flow through it, say 1.3v. Capacitors help to ensure that the CPU only gets that voltage and no spikes when you turn your computer on or it suddenly turns off.

No, I'm and engineer so the magic is gone.

It's not only the CPU, many components would suffer from voltage spikes caused by high frequency noise. In my experience RAM and VRAM chips are especially touchy about it as are most high frequency MOSFETs and opamps

Yup. Which is why there are capacitors all over the motherboard. The ones he pointed out mostly deal with the CPU.

anyone knows what are those littke fuckers inside the socket in user's pic?

>saying that a car mechanic doesn't know anything about cars because he can't reverse engineer a modern ICE on the spot.

his point is that you may know something or even a lot about computers, but you don't know enough that there is no mystery left. no one does

>Explain what the capacitor highlighted in red does.
Capacitors don't "do" anything. It just goes to show how little you know that you point at random relatively unimportant components. It's like asking a rocket scientist what a funnel does.

Caps regulate flow. They don't "do" any logic.

>Hey smartass, what does this rug on the flow do?
>How the fuck should I know? Maybe it's to keep the janitor from slipping.

Maybe during testing they found that the voltage wasn't stable enough so they slapped a cap there. It's fucking nothing.

OP didn't say anything about logic

>I’m retarded so everyone else is too
No, some of us actually read.

Are you retarded? He gave a really good answer and you’re acting like an autistic fuckwit.

Also capacitors, but non-electrolytic ones. Lower ESR, but also lower capacity.
They're part of the VRM as well.

Sure... when I was 10 years old. Then I learned.

>upgrading and repairing
lol

no you are. capacitors don't count lol

Then maybe don’t ask what fucking capacitors do.
>books that cover every compent on the average board, tell what they do, how they work, and cover the evolution of these compenents from the dawn of commercial computing to the present day from an engineering perspective that answers literally all of OPs questions = lol
Retard confirmed

No, it's not magic. There's really nothing incredible happening there.

Sadly true. It’s nothing special at all, the only amazing thing about it is how small they make everything. Functionally it’s very basic, they just add function after function over the generations, like bloatware but in hardware form

Don't worry OP, I know exactly what you're talking about. It can blow your mind if you let it, the trick is not to.
When I was in uni I had a cool lecturer teaching various managerial skills. One analogy he used was talking about solving a simple problem - getting from A to B in your car in under an hour. He asked what kind of things you would factor in, the route the speed of the car etc. However the more you break down each factor the more ridiculous it gets. His point was that if you break it down too far, you start caring about the way the tread on your tyres affects grip, therefore power to speed ratio and all that. The composition of the road and your tyres interacting with it on a molecular level. In the grand scheme of things it makes no fucking difference, not practically anyway, so you can ignore it.
You can apply the same logic to motherboards - various people understand different layers of how it works, but very few if any will really grasp the full scope of it. Understanding the actual electron flow at the lowest level, the electronics of what each component does and how it works at the next. Then the next level up what these combinations of components actually achieve, why they are necessary for each part of the board, what the board is achieving, what this means for your data etc etc.
If anyone says they understand fully what happens when say you load a webpage, down to an electron flow level, they're a liar pure and simple.
The only reason all this tech works is because of standing on each other's shoulders, the higher levels not needing to understand how the lower levels work to be able to do their job.
tl;dr - you don't need to know how it works, but it's a testament to human teamwork that it exists at all.

youtube.com/watch?v=QdxZNfFBado