Mekelle Institute of

Technology
PC Hardware
Troubleshooting (CSE501)
Department of Computer Science and
Engineering
Lecture – 1
Inside The PC
Mother Board
2
Mother Board
3
Socket 478
Socket 478 Close Up

Socket
Name

Pin 1
Indication

Locking Lever
CPU Heat Sink & Fan

Locking
Levers

Fan

12V
GND
5
System Fan Connector 6
 Mother Board
North Bridge

7
 Mother Board
South Bridge

8
CMOS
Battery

9
CMOS 10
Jumper
Secondary

Primary
11
DDR RAM & SD RAM Slots

266 MHz

133 MHz

12
 AGP Slot

Accelerated Graphics Port

66MHz

13
 PCI Slots

Peripheral Component Interconnect

33MHz

14
 CNR Slot

Communications and Networking Raiser

15
 BIOS

Basic Input Output System

16
 ATX Power Connector

o n n e c t o r
Flop py Drive C

17
 SMPS
Switching Mode Power Supply
SMPS
Fan

230 V AC
Input

18
Red(R) +5V Purple(P) +5V Stand By
Yellow(Y) +12V Blue(Blu) -12V
Orange(O) 3.3V Green(G) Power Supply On
Grey(Gr) Power Good White(W) -5V

ATX Power Connector

O Blu B G B B B W R R
11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
O O B R B R B Gr P Y
19
 12V 5V
GND

Peripheral Power Connector

20
 GND
12V
5V

Floppy Power Connector

21
Ports (Back View)

22
 Ports (Front View)

Ethernet Port

Parallel Port Game Port

Mouse Port

Keyboard Port Serial Port Sound Ports

VGA Port

USB Ports

23
 Cables
Floppy Drive Cable IDE Cables

24
 40 80
Conductor Conductor
Cable Cable
Low Speed High Speed

25
 Socket 478

DDR RAM

SD RAM
Ports

Slots
Slots
Bridge
North
ATX Power
Connector
Floppy Drive
AGP Slot Connector

South Primary
Bridge Secondary
BIO
S

PCI Slots
CMOS Battery

26
Computer Monitors
 Introduction
Now the desktop computers are available with a
variety of displays ranging from technologically
obsolete CRT monitors to latest slim LCD, LED or
OLED monitors.
A computer monitor presents the information from
the CPU on the screen working as an interface
between CPU and the user.
A cable connects the monitor to a video adaptor or
video card which is set up on the motherboard of
the computer.
The CPU sends instruction to the video adaptor
telling what needs to be displayed on the screen.
The video adaptor converts the instructions into a
set of corresponding signals and sends to the
monitor.
Monitor contains a circuitry that generates the
28
 Cont….
The major parameters
that measure the
performance of a
monitor are
 luminance,
 contrast ratio,
 resolution,
 dot pitch, response
time,
 refresh rate and
 power consumption.

The common problem

that arises in
monitors is
 dead pixels,
 blurred screen,
 phosphor-burn, etc. 29
 Display Technologies: CRT
Monitors
These monitors employ the CRT technology
to create a display.
The CRT receives signals through a cable
and the signal is decoded by the display
controller which finally appears on a
phosphor screen.

30
 Cont…
CRTs have a conical shape and there is an electron
gun or cathode ray gun at the back end of the
monitor and a phosphor screen in the front.
The electron gun fires a stream of electrons
towards the display screen through a vacuum tube.
This stream of electrons is also known as cathode
rays.
At the middle of the monitor, there are magnetic
anodes which are magnetized in accordance with
the instruction from the display controller.
When electrons (cathode rays) pass through the
magnetic anodes, they are pushed or pulled in one
direction or other depending on the magnetic field
on the anodes.
This directs the electrons towards the correct part
of phosphor coating inside the display glass.
31
 Cont…
When electrons strike the phosphor coated
screen passing through a mesh (shadow mask or
aperture grill), the phosphor lights up making a
displayable dot on the computer screen.
There are three different colored phosphors (Red,
Green and Blue) for each pixel and the color of
the pixel depends on the phosphor on which the
electrons strike.
This image shows the color combination
schematic for phosphor particles.

32
 Cont…
The monitor that has a single electron gun
has three different phosphors for each pixel.
A cathode ray strikes to one or more of these
phosphors and the corresponding colored
pixel appear on the screen.
However high quality monitors use
individual electron gun for each color which
improves the image quality.
Distance for two same colored phosphors
(for single electron gun monitors) is known
as dot pitch.
Lesser the dot pitch higher is the quality of
monitors.
33
 Cont…
Aperture Grille vs Shadow Mask
 CRTs incorporate a metal sheet behind the display screen which
affects the pixels on the screen as well as brightness on the
screen.
 Shadow mask is an obsolete technology in which there is a
metal sheet with millions of holes to pass electrons in order to
hit the phosphor coating.
 The shadow mask covers the entire screen thereby protecting
the phosphors from stray ions (due to vacuum) and also limits
the strength of the rays reducing the brightness on the monitor.
 Aperture grille is a mesh of wires rather than any metal sheet
with holes in it. Although the grill is fragile, it allows a brighter
display.

34
 Cont…
What is the resolution of the screen?
Resolution of a monitor tells how densely
pixels are arranged on the screen.
A combination of dot pitch and the
viewable image area defines the maximum
resolution of the screen.
For example if a 21” monitor screen with
a viewable area of 401mm x 298mm has a
dot pitch of 0.26 mm, then its resolution is
1843 x 1370 pixels.

Reading Assignment. (How to

calculate resolution from a formula)
35
 Display Technologies: LCD
Monitors
LCD, Liquid Crystal Display/Diode is one of the most
popular display technologies currently.
LCD monitors are lightweight, compact, occupy less
space, consume low power and are available in a
reasonable price.
Currently there are two types of LCD technology in use –
Active matrix LCD technology or TFT and Passive matrix
technology.
 The TFT technology is more reliable with better image quality
while the passive matrix technology has a slower response and
gradually becoming outdated.
Liquid crystals are the key elements of the display
screen.
Liquid crystals can be different organic compounds like
Cyano-bi-phenols. (please read the properties of
these…..)
By manipulating the crystal we can change the way they
interact with the light.
36
 Cont…
There is a display controller in the monitor which
receives the display signals from the video adaptor in
the motherboard.
The display controller controls two things – the
electric signals to the liquid crystals and the back
light. Structure of an LCD is shown in the images
below.
polarizer Cold Cathode
Glass
Electrode
Alignment layer
Liquid
crystal
Liquid Crystal
Diffusing
Material
Alignment layer
Electrode
Glass
polarizer

37 Polarizing filters
 Cont…
The liquid crystals used in the LCD are Twisted
Nemantic (TN), a type of liquid crystals that
are twisted at 90o with the surface.
In this state, crystals allow the light to pass
through the polarizer but on applying a
voltage, they get untwisted and block the light
to passing through the polarizer.
The display controller starts the backlight that
passes through the first piece of the glass.
At the same time the display controller also
send the electrical currents to the liquid
crystal molecules to align and allowing the
varying level of light to pass through the
second piece of glass, forming the desired
picture on the screen.
38
 Cont…
In color monitors, each pixel is made of
three liquid crystal cells fronted with red,
green and blue filters.
The light passing through the filtered screen
forms the color what you see on the monitor.
A wide range of colors are formed by varying
the intensity of colored pixels.
The backlight is made of cathodes.
Resolution - Unlike the CRT monitors there
is no complex equation for the dot pitch and
the resolution. The resolution of a monitor is
simply the number of pixels contained in the
matrix. Typically a 17” monitor has a
resolution of 1280 x 1024 pixels.
39
 Display Technologies: LED
In
Monitors
the previous decade, the display technology
has changed significantly.
LED displays are one of the latest developments
in this field.
LED monitors use light emitting diodes that act
as a performance booster in the monitors.
Basically LED monitors are the LCD monitors
with an LED backlight to power up the LCD
panel.
It means that LEDs are placed behind or around
the LCD panel to enhance the luminosity and
video definition of the monitor screen.
LCD monitors use a cold cathode light as
backlight. In the LED monitors all the concepts
are same except this backlight, which is replaced
by LEDs.
40
 Cont….
There are three different types of LED
monitors available based on the manner how
the diodes are arranged in the monitor.
These are – Direct LEDs, Edge LEDs and RGB LEDs.
Both Edge and Direct LED display monitors use
white diodes that are used to illuminate the LCD
panel to produce the improved picture quality.
The arrangement of LEDs in the monitor is shown in
the below image:

41
 Cont…
In the Direct LEDs display, white diodes are
placed all over the panel to produce higher
quality image while the Edge LEDs display
uses LEDs only on the borders of the LCD
panel.
Direct LEDs are generally used in the
production of high definition TV whereas the
Edge LEDs is mainly used in the production of
computer screens.
RGB LEDs display is better among the three
types of LED monitors as it uses red, green
and blue diodes to produce the lifelike images
with amazing contrast ratio.

42
 LCD vs. LED Monitors
Both types of monitors work on the same technology.
LED monitors are LCD monitors with replaced cold cathode
backlight to LED backlight.
Here are the differences that make the LED displays better than the
LCDs:
 Contrast and Black level of the LED screen is better than the LCD
screens because the liquid crystals cannot stop 100% of the
backlight from cold cathode backlight and hence when the black
screen is to be shown on the monitor, it is not completely black.
But Edge LED screens perfectly show the black screen as there is
no cold cathode backlight at all.
 Color accuracy for direct and edge LED displays and LCD displays
are almost same but the RGB LEDs display has quite better color
accuracy.
 When comparing the LED and LCD monitors with respect to
viewing angle, they are same as backlight has nothing to do with
viewing angles.
 LED displays consume less power.
 LED displays do not use mercury (used in cathode lamps in LCD
backlight) so they are environment friendly.
 The size of Edge and RGB monitors is slightly thinner than the
43
 Plasma Monitors
Plasma technology is another technology used in
display devices.
The basic idea behind the plasma technology is to
illuminate tiny colored fluorescent lights to create
image pixels.
Each pixel is made of three such fluorescent lights –
red, green and blue lights. To create a wide range of
colors, intensity of these lights is varied accordingly.
The heart of plasma displays is plasma which is
basically a gas (generally Xenon and Neon) made up of
free flowing electrons and ions.
When the electrical current flows through the plasma,
negatively charged particles move towards the
positively charged area of the plasma and vice versa.
This makes collisions which resultantly excite the gas
atoms in the plasma and then release the energy as
photons of light.
44
 OLED Monitors
OLED, short for Organic Light Emitting Diode is
the latest technology for display devices.
As the name suggests there are some organic
material (containing carbon, like wood, plastic or
polymers.) that is used to convert the electric
current into light.
With fast response time, wide viewing angles,
outstanding contrast levels and perfect
brightness, OLED displays are surely better than
the existing other display technologies.
The heart of the OLED display is a stack of thin
organic layers which is sandwiched between two
conductors - a transparent anode and a metallic
cathode, which in turn are sandwiched between
two glass.
45
 OLED Monitors
The organic layer consists of a hole-injection layer, a hole-
transport layer, an emissive layer and an electron-
transport layer.
When an appropriate voltage is applied, an electric current
flows from cathode to anode through the organic layers.
The cathode gives electrons to the emissive layer of
organic molecules while the anode takes equivalent
electrons from the conducting layer of organic molecules.
At the boundary of emissive and conductive layers,
electrons and the holes are gathered.
Here electrons are recombined with the holes by releasing
energy in the form of photon of light. And the organic layer
emits the light to produce the display.
The color of the light depends on the type of organic
molecules while the brightness depends on the amount of
the current applied. By maximizing the recombination
process in the emissive layer the output light can be
improved in OLED devices. 46
Bus Structure
 What is BUS ?
A bus connects all the internal computer
components to the CPU and Main memory.
Every bus has a clock speed measured in MHz. A fast
bus allows data to be transferred faster, which
makes applications run faster. On PCs, the old ISA
bus is being replaced by faster buses such as PCI.
I/O BUS
 System Bus: Connecting to CPU, memory and Cache.
 Address Bus
 Data Bus
 Control Bus

 I/O Bus: Connecting to the above three buses is the "good

old" standard I/O bus, used for slower peripherals (mice,
modems, regular sound cards, low-speed networking) and
also for compatibility with older devices. On almost all
modern PCs this is the Industry Standard Architecture (ISA)
bus.

48
 Types of I/O Buses
ISA (8-16-bit)
PCI Local bus (32 or
64-bit)
Micro Channel (MCA)
AGP (32-bit)
EISA (32-bit)
PC-Card (PCMCIA)
VESA Local bus (VL-
bus) USB
Fire Wire (IEEE-1394)

49
 ISA BUS
In 1982 when ISA BUS appeared on the
first PC the 8-bit ISA bus ran at a
modest 4.77 MHZ – the same speed as Intel
8088.
ISA BUS is extremely slow by today's
standards and not suited to the use of a
graphical operating system like Windows.
In 1984 the IBM AT was introduced using
the Intel 80286; at this time the bus was
doubled to 16 bits (the 80286's data bus
width) and increased to 8 MHz (the
maximum speed of the original AT, which
came in 6 MHz and 8 MHz versions and 24
address lines).

50
ISA BUS

8-bit 16-bit 51
 ISA BUS
8-bit ISA BUS 16-bit ISA BUS

Bus width 8 - bit Bus width 16 - bit

Compatible with 8 bit ISA Compatible with 16 bit ISA

Pins 62 Pins 98

Power +5 V, -5 V, +12 V, -12 V Power +5 V, -5 V, +12 V, -12 V

Clock 4.7727266 MHz Clock 8.333333 MHz

is used with sound cards, disk drives or most network

and video cards.

8-bit ISA(XT) CARD 16-bit ISA CARD

52
ISA BUS

ISA Card

53
ISA BUS
In the figure you can see the
pinouts of the ISA BUS. The
BUS is divided into two sides.
The first side pins are named
A1 to A31 and it is the
components side. It consists
of the address and data buses.
The second side pins are
named B1 to B31 and it is the
solder side. This side contents
the power pins and the signals
related to interrupts and DMA
transfers.
54
 ISA BUS
More More
DMA IRQ lines DMA ± 5, ±12V
IRQ
8 - 15 clock lines Power & G
lines lines 2-
7

Extra 8 bits Extra 4 bits 20 bits of Address bus

of I/O bus of Address 8 bits of I/O bus
bus

16 bit Original 8 bit ISA

55
 ISA BUS
A0-A19 (pins A31 to A12): This twenty lines are the address BUS. They can
address 1MB (2^20 bytes).
D0-D7 (pins A9 to A2): The data BUS consist of this eight data lines.
AEN (pin B11): It is used for the DMA controller to take over the data and
address buses in a DMA transfer.
GND (pins B1, B10, B31): Connected to the ground of the computer.
+5V (pins B3, B29): 5V DC output of the power source.
-5V (pin B5): -5V DC output.
-12V (pin B7): -12V DC output.
+12V (pin B9): +12V DC output.
MEMW (pin B11): The µP asserts this signal when doing a write to the
memory.
MEMR (pin B12): The µP asserts this signal when doing a read from the
memory.
IOW (pin B13): The µP asserts this signal when doing a write to a port.
IOR (pin B14): The µP asserts this signal when doing a read from a port.
DACK0-DACK3 (pins B15, B17, B19 and B26): The DMA controller sets this
signals to let a device know that the DMA has the control of the buses.
DRQ1-DRQ3 (pins B6, B16 and B18): Allow the peripheral boards to request
the use of the buses.
+T/C (pin B27): The DMA controller sets this signal to let the peripheral know
that the programmed number of bytes has been sent.
IRQ2-IRQ7 (pins B4, B21, B22, B23, B24 and B25): Interrupt signals. The
peripheral devices sets this signals to request for the attention of the µP.
ALE (pin 28): This signal is used for the µP to lock the 16 lower address BUS
in a latch during a memory (or port) input/output operation.
CLOCK (pin 20): Is the system clock.
Describing the Read operation of the
ISA
CPU sends out a high on
the ALE signal, then
sends out the A0-A19
lines. On the address of
the target port to be read
will be latched. Then the
BUS takes the -IOR
signal to a low level. So
that the addressed device
will take a data byte to
the D0-D7 data bus. The
microprocessor will read
then the data bus and
take the -IOR signal to a
high again.
57
Describing the Read/Write operation
of the ISA

The only difference

between a memory
read/write cycle and a
port read/write cycle is
that in a memory cycle
the -MEMR and -MEMW
signals will be asserted,
working the same way
as -IOR and -IOW do.

58
 ISA BUS

A0 to A31 Memory

Address bus(32 bit)

Keyboard
Intel D0 to D31 I/O
bus Storag
80386DX Data bus (32 bit)
(16 e
CPU Print
RD WR IO/M bit er
data) Video
Control bus
Modem

59
 Bus Structure of Intel 486

CPU

Local bus or CPU bus: fast (33 MHz, 32 bits) [30 nsec./cycle]

Video
Memory Cache Disk
Adapter

Expansion
System
“ISA BRIDGE” Bus
ROM
Controller

ISA bus: slow (8 MHz, 8/16 bits) [125 nsec./cycle]

Serial Parallel Floppy

RTC Keyboard
Port Port Disk

60
 Bus Structure of Intel Pentium
Pentium
CPU

CPU bus: fast (100 MHz, 64 bits) [10 nsec./cycle]

PCI
Cache Memory
Controller
“North Bridge”
PCI bus: fast (33 MHz, 32/64 bits) [30 nsec./cycle]

Video System
Disk
Adapter ROM

Expansion
Bus “South Bridge”
Controller

ISA bus: slow (8 MHz, 8/16 bits) [125 nsec./cycle]

Serial Parallel Floppy

RTC Keyboard
Port Port Disk

61
 End of Lecture 1

Next lecture:
Operating System and
Boot Process

62