The Motherboard The motherboard allows the different pieces of the computer to talk to one another. This is done through a bus. A bus allows information to travel from one piece of hardware to another. Devices also have internal buses so that their different pieces can talk to one another. The "wider" the bus is the more information that can travel through it allowing the information to travel more quickly. The motherboard also holds many of the pieces upon it. Motherboards often have different types of slots. Some of these slots are: ISA-the black slot at the bottom of the motherboard pictured. This slot is usually used by older hardware PCI-the 5 short white slots above the black slot. AGP-the shorter brown slow right above the white slots. This slot is mainly used for graphics cards. ISA and PCI slots are used to put things like modems, Ethernet cards, and sound cards (just to name a few). The white square to the upper middle of the board is where the processor is placed. The three black slots directly to the right of the white square are where the memory is placed.