Chipset is the soul and core of the motherboard, and the performance of chipset determines the performance and level of the motherboard. It is divided into South-North Bridge chip collocation scheme and two-in-one single chipset scheme.

North bridge chip is also called host bridge. Northbridge chip is responsible for contacting CPU, controlling the transmission of memory and AGP data in Northbridge, and providing support for CPU type and main frequency, system front-end bus frequency and memory type (SDRAM, DDR SDRAM and DDR2, etc.). ) and maximum capacity, AGP slot, PCI-E x 16, ECC error correction, and AGP/PCI-E x 16 graphics card.

South bridge chip mainly controls the communication between some interfaces and I/O bus. Such as hard disk IDE, SATA interface, USB interface, etc. Of course, PCI and PCI-E buses are also controlled by South Bridge, such as PCI, USB, LAN, ATA, SATA, audio controller, keyboard controller, real-time clock controller and advanced power management.

In the chipset, the south bridge is removed, while in the north bridge, functions such as gigabit network and serial hard disk control previously controlled by the south bridge chip are added. This is the so-called single-chip chipset structure. With the development of north-south bridge connection technology, the low-delay advantage brought by single-chip scheme is becoming less and less obvious and unnecessary. After losing these advantages, the single chip will naturally lose its fundamental existence value, and its disadvantages will gradually emerge. The first is the high heat value of a single chip. Another very obvious feature is that the electrical performance of a single chip is slightly reduced, which affects the overclocking performance of the product.

Judging from the current trend, dual-chip technology should still be the general trend, while single-chip technology has become a burden because it has failed to show its performance advantages.