Northbridge, Southbridge, what is it?

[DTox]

I've been reading posts on mobos, because I'm going to be builing a system in a few months, probably with 1.4ghz Athlon.

What are Northbridge and Southbridge, what do I need to look out for, and how come they aren't mentioned when talking about Pentium cpus? (At least not that I've seen..could be mistaken)
Thanks!

 

[Athlon4all]

Allright, each mobo has a chipset, that basically links everything in the computer together (RAM, CPU, PCI and AGP slots for example). There are numerous chipsets out there that each support different types of RAM, CPU's, etc, and the chipset is comprised of 2 chips, traditionally called the North and South Bridge (Intel's newer chipsets call the North Bridge, the Memory Controller Hub (MCH), and South I/O Controller Hub (ICH), and nVidia's nForce calls the North a IGP, and South a MCP), and the North Bridge usually houses the CPU bus, AGP Controller and Memory Controller, then in older chipsets the 2 bridges are connected by the PCI bus, but newer ones (VIA KT266, Appolo Pro 266, Intel 810,815,820,840,845,850, nVidia nForce) use a dedicated bus, VIA's is called vLink, nForce uses HyperTransport, Intel's uses something I can't remember it's name. Finally the South Bridge houses the PCI Bus, ISA Bus (If any), Hard Drive Controller, and any other misc. controllers. You might want to read ExtremeTech's recent article on South Bridge Arcitechure, they explain things like Hyper Transport, IGP's, vLink etc. I thought they did a good job. Get it here. And the reason they aren't talked about with PIII's and Cely's is because Intel long ago abandoned the North+South combo in favor of the MCH and ICH.