Integrated components

The motherboard includes some on-board components, meaning that they are integrated into its printed circuitry:

• The chipset, a circuit which controls the majority of resources (including the bus interface with the processor, cache memory and random-access memory, expansion cards, etc.)
• The CMOS clock and battery,
• The BIOS,
• The system bus and the expansion bus.

What's more, recent motherboards generally include a number of onboard multimedia and networking devices which can be disabled:

• integrated network card;
• integrated graphics card;
• integrated sound card;
• upgraded hard drive controllers.