Add on cards

• Also known as Expansion card or interface adapter.

• It can be inserted into an expansion slot of a motherboard to add functionality to a computer system via the expansion bus.

• One edge of the expansion card holds the contacts (the edge connector) that fit exactly into the slot.

• They establish the electrical contact between the electronics (mostly integrated circuits) on the card and on the motherboard.

• Based on the form factor of the motherboard the number of expansion slots varies.

Video card• Also called graphics card.• It is a card used for generating and displaying

images.• A graphics card has its own

RAM(VRAM),Processor(GPU) and video BIOS specifically for processing video images, and thus offloads this work from the CPU and system RAM.

• GPU is a dedicated processor optimized for accelerating graphics.

• Video BIOS controls the card’s operations and provides the instructions that allows the computer and software to interact with the card.

• The memory capacity of most modern video cards ranges from 128 MB to 8 GB.

• Nvdia(GeForce) and AMD(Radeon) are main manufactures of graphics card.

• It is usually inserted in AGP slot.

Sound card• Also called audio card.• It provides a computer with the ability to produce

sounds.• Most of the motherboards have an integrated

audio.• Sound cards usually feature a digital-to-analog

converter(DAC), which converts recorded or generated digital data into an analog format.

• Main manufactures are creative technologies, ASUS etc.

Network Card

• Also called Network Interface Card(NIC).

• It is a computer hardware component that connects a computer to a computer network.

• Every Ethernet network controller has a unique 48-bit serial number called a MAC address.

Modem

• It is a device that modulates and demodulate signals.

• External modems can be connected though serial port.

TV tuner card

• It is a device that allows television signals to be received by a computer.

• It is usually fixed in PCI slot.