thinQmaster Virtual testing partner Adaptive practice exams that find your weak spots and drill them. Every answer explained. From $69
Enroll

thinQmaster

Find your exam

Five questions free, before you decide.

Step 1 · choose a vendor

In one of our camps? Your practice exams come with the tuition — they are on your study page already.

IT Support & Hardware · Intermediate

Northbridge and Southbridge

Legacy two-chip chipset design where the northbridge handled fast components and the southbridge handled slower I/O.

Definition

In older PCs, the northbridge connected the CPU to RAM and the graphics slot, and the southbridge managed storage, USB, audio, and legacy buses. Modern CPUs integrate the memory controller and graphics lanes, leaving a single chipset (PCH) for I/O. The terms still appear in exam objectives and older documentation.

Example

On a Core 2-era motherboard, the northbridge sat close to the CPU under a heat sink.

Exam tip

If asked which chip controlled memory on older boards, the answer is the northbridge.

Related terms