Hardware Bible

By rigidly defining every dimension and contacts, expansion board standards allow you to plug almost any expansion board into almost any computer. But standardization is not a single issue. Expansion boards must be physically, electrically, and logic...

The PCI specification defines several variations on the basic expansion board. The standard defines two official sizes of board, each with three connector arrangements (5 volt, 3.3 volt, and dual voltage). The dimensions of the two board sizes may se...

Boards of the accelerated graphics port (AGP) design follow a physical standard derived from that of PCI, much as the AGP electrical interface is an offshoot of PCI. The AGP design assumes that the 3D accelerator chip and frame buffer will have a hom...

A riser board looks like an expansion board and works like an expansion board. Using the quack-standard—if it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck—a riser board is an expansion board. But really it's not, at least according to the people who have...

Notebook computers use PCMCIA cards of two types for expansion: 18-bit PC Cards based on the ISA bus and 32-bit CardBus cards based on the PCI bus. No matter which standard a given card follows, however, it must follow exactly the same physical speci...